The Making Of A Soldier & PTSD

by Wayne
(Savannah, Georgia)

I am a veteran. A veteran is a person who has done time in the military and is no longer in the military. The minute one has left the military, one is a vet.

It doesn't mean that a person has seen combat in the traditional sense of the word but to be sure, a veteran has seen and experienced a world where: who you are, what ever you thought you wanted to be, why you wanted to be that way, what you want, when you want it, how you want it or why you want it, doesn't really matter.

It is a world where you begin by swearing an oath to give up everything about yourself for everyone else. Oaths are powerful, obligative, modifiers. It can be amazing to see how a person responds to dealing with guilt at not fulfilling an oath. You are then put through an old and well developed process to strip YOU of YOU and made into a military tool. Deprivation, denial, mental, emotional, and physical "modification" is used to break you down, shake you up, and then "freeze" (a term given to me by a friend who was a basic training instructor) you into a newly formed serviceman. The real key in this training is the modification of not feeling your body or life around you, to instead following the structured modification that becomes everything about and around you. The directive of following an order given by a particular structure of authority permeates everything about the new environment. You are taught to believe that the new "family" cares for you and that you are important. THIS IS THE FIRST REAL TRAUMA when you join the service. YOU are erased and a well molded serviceman is born.

Next, a person is plugged into this great and powerful machine, trained in the function within this machine, where you reenact the war-like environment that you may well directly experience some day. Day after day the focus of war and your part of the war machine is relived over and over again. Due to the nature of war, even the training and daily living environment is not without danger. War is about weapons, killing, and survival in this environment. Explosives, bullets, radiation, gases, fluids, dangerous machines, extreme environments, and grueling physical and mental testing are an intricate part of this surreal lifestyle. All in the name of God and Country, protecting the women and children, all for the greater good. Don't forget the oath. Let's not forget the pressure of the families back home. To quote a well known movie "There has been a member of my family that has been killed in every American War" (Lt. Dan, Forrest Gump). During this phase many are wounded, physically, mentally and emotionally. Many are very young and their lives may be damaged for life. This is the next real series of trauma. Imagine living where you are constantly focused on killing others or others killing you. I don't care what noble cause may have been used to get you to this point.

Then, one day, some person that is supposed to be of sound mind and body along with an entire congress of other people who are supposed to be of sound mind and body decide that there is a need to let this well oiled machine loose. This action is in and of itself, the beginning of great death that will affect generations of our children. Not just our own but those of the targets. This action will permeate the very fabric of millions of psyches so that it can be played out in our lives for eons to come. It is of course for the safety and well being of the country that this action is taken. The lives, time, money, material and resources seem to be of reasonable cost to meet the cause.

Letting this machine loose. Let me share with you some stories of veterans who have been a part of this machine being let loose. A WWII vet was on a ship when a kamikaze went through his ship just thirty feet behind him. It was by God's grace that the 200 infantry who were in that location had just left the ship. There were hundreds of others who did not survive the attack. A Viet Nam vet that wore his best friend back to the base camp. An Iraqi War vet that said "it wasn't the fire fights in Baghdad that he was having trouble with, it was the little girl who was cut in half by automatic fire and the dog eating her arm. A Gulf War vet that was in the largest tank battle in the history of the world. He said that he was amazed that his entire unit took no hits, but he is stuck on one shot where they blew the turret of an enemy tank. The turret came off, then something else came out and a few minutes later a body climbed out and died next to the tank. On inspecting the enemy tank for intelligence they found the turret, the head of the body and then the body lying next to the tank. One of my own traumas was where I was working in the nuclear missile field and we came within three seconds of blowing up the world. Multiply these stories by millions on one side of the equation alone.

Now picture going through these types of events and not being allowed to feel the emotions of these events. Instead, you run around doing as you were modified to do, meanwhile storing the real memories of these events deep inside yourself. Every other member of your group has been taught to do the very same thing. Each of you holding the other one together, supporting the containment of each others intense memories and feelings. Can you see yourself going into this environment for over seven years? The Iraqi vets are doing just this. I know a man that was in WWII, the Korean War, and the Viet Nam "police action".

This is Part One of a two-part story by Wayne. Read the second part here, entitled, "Healing And Dealing With PTSD."