Opening old wounds.

This Is Gonna Hurt

No matter how hard you tug, it’s not coming off fast. I’ve been picking at these scabs for a long time.

Every now and then, after I get good and drunk, I find myself walking down memory lane with someone. Enthusiastically recalling my glory days. By the end, I’m half, maybe more than half, crying about how I shouldn’t have come home. The civilian across from me probably walks away questioning my sanity. I go to sleep, shove those little demons back into their cages, and rinse and repeat—every few months, sometimes weeks, depending on my drinking cycle.

The first time I reached out for help, I was pushed to do so—after a compensation and pension appointment with Veterans Affairs. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but something like needing mental health support. I ended up waiting hours after my appointment to talk to a kind woman who probably wasn’t prepared for what I had loaded up.

I told her about a man in Ghazaliyah. He crosses my mind more often than I’d like, partly because, as a father now, I understand the calculated risk he took. I wasn’t a leader then—only a fire team leader. So my knowledge is limited, and being blown up a few times doesn’t help the clarity.

He spoke to us once. When we returned, his wife told us he’d been dragged into the street in the middle of the night, doused in gasoline, and set ablaze. Our job was to police the bodies in our sector. We did. When I finished telling this woman my story, looking her in the eye, I saw an expression I can’t describe—disgust? Horror? Whatever it was, it shut me down. That session ended, and it would be over five years before I reached out again.

I’m sure, being a mental health professional at a VA clinic, she’s heard worse. Maybe she’s a vet herself. But I wasn’t ready to pull those wounds open. Saying it out loud, sober, hurt in ways I wasn’t prepared for. I convinced myself she didn’t want to hear it. I wasn’t ready to confront it—I was trying to hold it all together for my young family and use my GI Bill. So I put the lid back on and kept going.

Back then, I thought nothing really bothered me. Hyper-alertness is something I’ll probably never shed. To quote General Mattis: “Be kind, be courteous, but have a plan to kill everyone you meet.” Just in case. Knowing where the exits are is a good idea too—just in case of fire. At that point, I thought I was fine. But underneath were things I hadn’t even named yet.

One of the hardest things I’m trying to put behind me—one of the more irrational wounds—is survivor’s guilt. I was fortunate in my tours. Only one soldier from the two platoons I served with didn’t come home.

He was my team leader before deploying to Afghanistan. He picked me up during a rough patch when I’d just received UCMJ action. He could’ve written me off but didn’t. He dusted me off, along with my platoon sergeant, and taught me to move forward.

When I got in country, I moved to the weapons squad. At the time of the incident, the weapons squad was rotating with the patrol squads.

I’ve sliced this scenario up a million ways in my head—thinking about how it could have been me instead of him. None of those thoughts work. They just eat me up, making me feel like nothing I do will ever justify the life I still have.

That hurt to write.

It’s a Thursday, and Monday will mark four weeks since I quit smoking and switched to vaping. I could use one now. I try to honor him, and the other soldiers we lost along the way. Rational me knows there was nothing I could have done. E—I owe you one. I was where I was told to be.

Sorry to any of my Outlaw brothers reading this—I know we all carry some version of this wound, this scar or scab. Hope I didn’t reopen yours; it wasn’t my intention.

Honestly, when I started writing this, I just wanted to say: When you start to address this stuff, it’s going to hurt. It might feel like it’s getting worse before it gets better, but it has to come up before it can come out. I’m hoping this journey will be worth it—that I’ll learn to control panic attacks and finally let go of this guilt.

They say insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly while expecting different results. Bottling it up only leads to explosions. So, I guess I need to try something new.

Thank you to those who’ve taken the time to read this. I hope your journey finds you well.