You don’t have PTSD. Nobody in America does.

[Ed note: this contains frank and graphic descriptions and images of violence and trauma.]

I said words to this effect several days ago to a few hundred folks shivering in the near-freezing downpour minutes before Weezer took the stage at Yangapalooza.

Russ speaking at Yangapalooza [Ed note following images will be challenging to see]

As you’d expect, the crowd performed the wave using only their eyebrows from front to back. WTF did that veteran dude just say?! In my defense, a fellow vet and I had been asked to say a quick something only about a minute or two prior to stepping up the stage stairs about why our veterans group, Veterans For Humanity, supports Andrew Yang. It was an impromptu case of shooting from the hip. So naturally, a few days of rumination and hindsight produced in my inner monologue the words I wish I had said and the words I wish I could take back. That’s what this blog seeks to remedy. But as for that controversial realization that there hasn’t been an American case of PTSD in more than a decade … no takebacks.

Yeah, you heard me right. You just don’t have it. Your battle buddy doesn’t. I don’t. Nobody does.

I came to this realization in August of this year after a hard conversation with the bravest man I’ve ever known. We’ll call him Mike. Mike told me in so many words that voting only exists to further the pacifying illusion that we have an actual say in who gets elected. He told me, no offense, your opinion doesn’t matter; no one’s does. Corporate, Main Stream Media, and insider interests will choose the silver-tongued stooge best-suited to keep the gears of corruption and profitable controversy turning – widening the inequality gap while we working class filth brawl over the latest scrap of outrage clickbait. (1)

The man who said this is no coward or tinfoil-hat-wearing fool. Mike is smart, selfless, reliable, and as noted before, holds the honor of bravest man I’ve known. If you saw what I have witnessed in Iraq’s Diyala River Valley, the Triangle of Death, the gravity of that honor should rightfully give you pause. In October of 2006, we deployed with 1-12 CAV, 1st Cavalry Division to Baqubah, about an hour north of Baghdad. The Surge would soon be ordered, pushing Al-Qaeda out of Baghdad headlong into us with Jaish al-Mahdi joining the bloodbath from all other directions. (2) Only hours after officially taking over from the unit we relieved, I found myself in command of a combined tank/infantry platoon, engaged in a vicious firefight.

The events unfolded quickly, surreally. I ran across a muddy field and only realized halfway that although it was raining heavily, the ground was not slick from water. Sheets of crimson splayed from every point of impact. I slid like a baserunner against a small wall for cover and my knee hit a dead Iraqi in the head. It was hard to avoid as the field was littered with a score of dead and dying. His head snapped back from the collision and vacant, open eyes stared skyward. I vividly recall instinctively saying “sorry” the same way you would if you bumped into someone on the street. Bizarre. Screaming civilians. Terrified braying of mortally wounded livestock. The acrid smell of burning village mixed with the metallic tinge of so much iron from so much blood spilled from so many bodies.

I sensed first squad stacking behind me. In my mind a primal, wordless mantra was beating with my pulse as it jackhammered in my ears, best translated as DO NOT FAIL THEM. A supporting tank fired twice into the multi-level house where sniper fire had been coming from. I took the squad up to the door on the side of the house adjacent to the main gun impacts to clear it. Locked. Check for wires. Nod to squad leader. His shotgun inches from the lock. My carbine at high ready, selector lever on semi. Hold your breath. Shotgun boom. Kick the door. Person rushing towards us. Shoot or don’t shoot. Decide. Decide now! No shoot. It’s a woman. White eyes centered in a face black with soot. She stumbles into the squad leader’s arms having survived two tank shells ripping through the house without so much as a scratch. Surreal. Clear what’s left of the village. Stack the bodies. Return to base. Write reports. Clean weapons. Lay on your cot and smoke shitty Royale cigarettes (25₵ a pack) until you can let go of the adrenaline. That was Day 3. We didn’t yet know it but there would be 422 more to go. Stop loss and deployment extensions hooah.

A short time later, on Thanksgiving Day 2006, an explosively formed projectile punched through the armored window on Mike’s HMMWV (gun truck). It ripped a chunk of his nose and face off. The MEDEVAC report sounded like he wasn’t going to make it. But he did. He was evacuated to Germany and then stateside where multiple surgeries by talented plastic surgeons effectively put him back together. The scars weren’t too bad. Mike could have justly, and very honorably, spent the next few months recovering with hot showers, hot food, a comfortable bed and a TV. Then take his Purple Heart and go get a nice 9 to 5, a cool license plate, and try to forget what it was like to continue driving through the kill zone with molten shards of metal sticking out of where his face used to be.

But that isn’t Mike. The most traumatic, painful thing you can do to a soldier isn’t blowing him up, it’s separating him from his brothers. It’s transplanting him somewhere safe while they are very much not safe. For that reason, Mike metaphorically snuck out the hospital window and got on the first transport to Iraq. Only months later he reported back in to the unit, got right back in the driver’s seat of another gun truck, adjusted his mirrors, lit up a Royale, and drove over the exact spot where he had nearly died in blinded agony. And he didn’t flinch a fucking millimeter.

So we’re on the same page with the bravest man I know accolade right? Good.

Now riddle me this. What in the actual fuck must life do to a man like that to break his spirit? How many times must balls that big be kicked to accept apathy and nihilism, to jettison every semblance of hope for the future of this nation, to extinguish the last ember of faith in humanity? How did it come to this? What disease could so caustically defile the soul of a lion-hearted man I would readily die for?

Then, in a Twilight-Zone moment of horrifying clarity, I realized three things:

1. My memorial tattoo’s inscription was as true as its inverse (we’ll get to that).

2. Whatever disease this was, I had it too. And it had been, on more than a few occasions, nearly terminal.

3. In fact, many, if not most Americans suffered from this thing and it sure as hell wasn’t PTSD.

So finally, the thesis. The reason neither you nor nobody else in America has PTSD is because the P stands for Post, and this penetrating, ubiquitous, relentless Trauma has not yet ended. There can be no post-storm assessment if the hurricane refuses to die. It churns through our communities and our families this very moment, manifesting in myriad ways – a chimeric hell spawn.

The Trauma is thinking home ownership is the American Dream, trusting in that dream, and then realizing multiple generations have been sentenced to poverty as a result of soulless executives gleefully trading human lives for another dollar, and another. Heidi and I bought a small house in 2005 for $118,000 and when we tried to sell in 2010, we couldn’t. We tried again in 2012 and had to accept a loss of $15,000. Our home lost about 10% of its value because of the collapse of the housing market brought about by astonishing greed and corruption. Many thousands of families lost everything. Our small, cheap house was not the $500,000 growing family castle suddenly rendered worth not even half that. Dozens of houses in our neighborhood started posting foreclosure signs in the yard. The parents divorced. The kids acted out. The stress resulted in violence, alcohol, drugs, and discharges – both from the service and from firearms. The devastating fission reaction of splitting and damaging families has only begun; this Trauma is multi-generational.

The Trauma is an opioid epidemic so severe the nation’s average life expectancy has declined for three years straight, the first time in a century that has happened. This is our government’s most impressive achievement in recent history. It takes a special type of skilled sickness to kill that many, that efficiently. And finally, years after generating more prescriptions than there are people, the mass murderers motivated by an unquenchable greed are getting a slap on the wrist when they should be getting orange jumpsuits for the remainder of their natural lives. But the Rust Belt and Appalachian folks who have lost their jobs to automation, plant closures, and outsourcing, who have lost their families to the financial and marital stress, and who have finally lost their hope to opioids – those folks we’ll sure as hell throw in a for-profit private prison if they have a milligram of drugs on them. And those who haven’t been caught yet can’t come to a safe-injection site because they’re taboo, illegal, and non-existent. You can’t pull yourself up by the bootstraps if you had to sell your boots to survive. Sadly, there’s little political appetite for these life-saving centers. It’s just not profitable enough to save a few thousand lives I suppose. And after all, a photograph of two overdosed adults in a car with a terrified and helpless child in the back really gets clicks and sells more ads.

The Trauma is watching my dad, a Vietnam vet, my hero, grit his way through arthritis and tread slowly on joints that contain more metal than a Cadillac to keep working because retirement is simply not possible in today’s America. The Trauma is helplessly watching the same fate befall my mom. She worked three jobs and still found time to proctor practice SATs to get a discount for me at the test prep place so that I could have the best chance at my dreams. And now I wait to get a phone call someday informing me that the woman who gave me life has died at her desk. Their situation is depressingly common. At the checkout register or driving a Lyft, America’s grandparents must work till noon on their funeral day.

The Trauma is finding out my sister was trapped in a terrible relationship, without enough money to escape. Had she the Freedom Dividend, her options would not have been so bleak. Now she is safe and free, less than a year away from earning her Nurse Practitioner license, but confronting yet another form of the Trauma: crushing student loan debt. It should not be the case in the wealthiest nation in history that our most proficient healers live in, or hover near poverty.

My wife, Heidi, is a registered nurse and has spent much of the past decade in pediatric oncology. If you wish to know what actual heroism is, she and her colleagues provide a precise definition. She has skillfully cared for hundreds of children battling various types of aggressive cancers, astonishing everyone but herself with her endurance and compassion. She has overheard parents in an unfathomably terrifying situation desperately attempting to figure out what they could sell, where they could move, to afford the gauntlet of treatment. Selling the car might get three months’ worth of drug X. The Trauma is a system that can’t hear the pleas of children over the sound of pharmaceutical stocks booming (ask your doctor if itzaskam is right for you). Her very first patient’s family was left so wiped out that when she attended the child’s funeral she discovered they couldn’t afford a headstone. Confidentially, Heidi remedied that herself, and chose the very best granite available. She is a prefect of mortal angels.

In my case, representative of many veterans, this particular facet of the Trauma is best-described by the inversion of the tattoo on my back. In my unit, 28 men were killed in action. Three times as many seriously wounded. Our battalion received the Valorous Unit Citation for extraordinary heroism. Every single man in my platoon had been hit at least once. A third of my soldiers received the Purple Heart. I had been hit four times by IEDs myself. I had come within an inch of death so many times that it ceased to phase me – not from bravery, but sheer exhaustion. I would sometimes wonder if today’s the day, how long will it take before Heidi finds out she’s a 21-year-old widow?

IED number three nearly killed me and the two other crewmen of our tank that Spring day in 2007. If we had been in anything less than a tank, there would have been nothing left to bury. I was MEDEVACed from that smoking, twisted shell of a tank in a morphine-induced haze. I lay on the stretcher with my pants cut off, embarrassed and ashamed to face my 1SG having lost a precious tank. We had begun with 16 tanks and were now down to our last four. The combat losses were extreme. The casualties were extreme. Once back at the Forward Operating Base (FOB), my gunner and I were lined up on our stretchers next to the incoming, higher priority wounded. The soldier next to me, soaked in blood, lay lucid and still, absorbing the reality that he had been the sole survivor from his truck. It was a really shitty day.

There were many more, really shitty days. I’ve never seen a Hero Flight portrayed in the movies (nor do I wish to), maybe because it isn’t well-known and there are no cameras. When a soldier is killed in action and all the smoke has cleared and the dust settled, the body is brought back to the FOB. There is a large, hard-shelled tent, intentionally obscured behind several barriers to protect morale, and it is marked only with a small sign: Mortuary Affairs. In this tent there are rectangular, steel tubs in which the body is washed after the uniforms have been cut away, later to be burned. The Chaplain will perform any rituals that the religion stamped in the dog tag may direct. And then the soldier is transferred to a body bag. Those familiar in their use know their actual designation is: pouch, human remains. Those who are currently not out on a mission assemble near the helipad in two columns facing each other, creating a lane to the pad. The guidons mark the companies and the battalion colors are posted by the colonel. A field ambulance drives the fallen soldier to the foot of the aisle. The soldiers who knew him best, if they aren’t too badly wounded to lift (and several times even if they are), carry our brother through the center of the formation to the Blackhawk helicopter, rotors already spinning. The Blackhawk rises up slowly, dips its nose, then disappears quickly as our salutes are dropped. The entirety of this is done in silence. No commands, no bugles. There’s no manual for it. It just is what it is.

I decided to remember my brothers carried down that gravel lane with a tattoo when I got back. Dog tags with the names of those I was close to, and a star each for the rest, forming a halo constellation. A scroll reads Abitus Sed Non Oblitus, translated as Gone But Not Forgotten.

The Trauma that has come to pass is that scroll’s inverse. For many veterans, they find themselves Forgotten But Not Yet Gone. The trauma of the war is amplified by the Trauma cascading through the nation. You once led warriors in battle, now after the latest round of layoffs there’s a great opportunity as a night shift security guard. My brother Big H, who I once put on a stretcher and on a helo MEDEVAC after an IED hammered his back, is a black man. The Trauma is a brother who risked his life for me, for his nation, returned to a country in which he must train his son how to minimize the chance of being murdered. The most severe manifestation of the Trauma is what I call gimbal lock.

If you watch the movie Apollo 13 you’ll hear them referring to the dangers of gimbal lock as the spacecraft flailed wildly out of control. There’s no gravity in space (thanks professor). (3) So on that spacecraft, there’s a device with three gimbals at right angles to each other. Changes in inertia change the gimbal angles and that’s how they know which way they’re pointed. However, if uncontrolled forces violently assault the craft, the gimbals can line up, become parallel. When that happens, all is lost. Up is down. You literally can’t tell which way you’re pointed. Several of those standing by me in those formations long ago, tormented by the Trauma and others in the years hence, put a pistol to their temple, ending the directionless, undefinable suffering.

The Trauma has put the very soul of this nation into gimbal lock. Left and right have become meaningless. Forces of greed, gluttony, corruption, apathy, racism, misogyny, xenophobia, hate, and fear have knocked us wildly out of control.

Recovering from gimbal lock is possible. But step one is not to argue about how we got into this tailspin. Step one is not to lament that we are currently precessing about impending disaster.

Step one is to stabilize. Take a breath, fire the jets deliberately, and stop the spin.

Step two is to recalibrate. The astronauts did this by aligning to the stars. We too need to align ourselves properly and set a new calibration. Humanity First is our Polaris.

The final step is to move Forward, now that we finally know which direction that is.

Russ spoke along with fellow Vet and member, Heidi at Yangapalooza on stage and off

Footnotes:

1. Yes, I understand that the title and premise of this blog is exactly that. That’s the point. A kind of homage to A Modest Proposal.

2. For the interested reader, a far more complete account of our unit’s deployment was written by one of our First Sergeants in the book Battle for Baqubah: Killing Our Way Out by Robert Colella, available on Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/Battle-Baqubah-1SG-Robert-Colella/dp/1469791064/).

3. Yes, gravity is everywhere as it is a fundamental force pervading space-time. I’m referring in a lay context specifically to Earth’s gravity as used to orient accelerometers. See YouTube “Gimbal Lock and Apollo 13” on the Vintage Space channel (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmCzZ-D8Wdk). Amy Shira Teitel is an excellent teacher.

If the headline statement of this blog has not been intuited to be intentionally hyperbolic to create a different vantage by which to think about the issues facing our nation, then let me be explicitly clear. Of course PTSD is a true and actual disorder which millions of people do have. It is serious and devastating. I’ve dedicated a substantial part of my life to its research and treatment. For the interested reader, I have a journal paper “An Electroencephalography Connectomic Profile of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder” which will be published in an upcoming issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry. My dissertation focused on this as well (purl.stanford.edu/rs259rw8187).

This blog represents my own personal opinions and should not be construed to imply endorsement by any other person or entity, including employers (specifically DoD) prior and current. If anyone desires to fact check any and all statements, I will be happy to assist and comply with verified journalists so long as they agree to not publicly disclose the actual names of persons referred to, especially those who took their own lives.