Post traumatic

There I was. A tiny town, a gathering point for those who were summoned. We came, to join our brothers-in-arms, with Syrian artillery raining death and destruction upon them.  As dawn broke the next morning, October 7th, 1973, a small armored personnel carrier brought us back together again, with Syrian artillery raining death and destruction upon all of us.

I had picked up the New York Times from my driveway, years later, decades later.  I found an article that an American soldier had written, a combat veteran who dealt with his demons, who dealt with his personal Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.  His writing spoke to me, as if he was in my kitchen, having a conversation with me, looking straight at me.  We had shared experiences…

I used to get up early before work, really early, at four in the morning, and jog and run (when I could) and walk really fast.  My rhythmic breathing soothed me, however the scent of fireplace smoke emanating from some of the homes along my route, did not.  That scent brought back memories of Syria, and later of the small villages during deployments to the Gaza Strip.  An animal carcass, a squirrel hit by a car, an opossum too slow to avoid the vehicle that took its life.  The smell of death became immediately familiar and transported me back.  Tiny infinitely small moments brought flooding memories that washed over me.

At night the thunderstorm rolled in, and the soothing sounds of the rain were disrupted by the growls of thundering and the flashes of the lightning.  Always a light sleeper since my days as a Golani warrior decades prior, these flashes were the catalysts bringing me back yet again.

My New York Times “friend” had tried self medicating.  He had tried running.  Finally, he had found his way to dealing with his Post Traumatic Stress by writing.  He sat down, and he wrote.  It was when I read those lines in this American warrior’s story that I felt that I had found a possible solution to my own problem.

I had a problem with traffic.  I could not, and can not, be stuck in traffic, although it’s much better nowadays.  I had to stay well behind the vehicle in front of mine, and immediately find ways to extricate myself.  A vehicle backfire would cause me to tense up.

Loud, sudden noise brought me back immediately to what happened after we left that tiny town, that gathering point, for those of us who were about to enter through the gates of hell.  A scene from Saving Private Ryan, when the oncoming Wehrmacht tanks made the ground shake and the movie theater walls vibrate, made me grip my wife’s hand so hard that she finally cried out for me to ease up on her hand.  My refusal to remove the black bracelets that more than fifty years ago still hang on my wrist.

But, it was by writing that I found my way to dealing with my personal Post Traumatic Stress, and my disorder became more manageable with every article that I wrote.  I shared with the anonymous reader.  I shared what I could not with my own family.  I wrote from memory, exorcising those demons and dealing with them by putting them into words.  Dealing with them by sharing them, with you.

Anyone who lives through war, experiences combat, has dug themselves into the earth while artillery shells exploded mere inches from them, would suffer trauma of some kind or another.  Modern science has found that even the more distant shockwaves of exploding ordinance can cause brain damage, however “mild”.  So what about the bits of metal that enter the skin, shrapnel that causes minor damage and allows one to continue moving on, but slices the head off our platoon medic, who just happened to be in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and…just one shift ahead of my own?  That can also cause some serious trauma.

Our 1973 War, the Yom Kippur War, was a relatively short one, with an extended stay in Syria.  In its aftermath, the retraining to become a tank commander, the countless deployments on Israel’s southern border with Egypt and deployments throughout the Gaza Strip would add additional traumas of their own.  There was no help available back then, to help combat warriors deal with what all combat warriors have dealt with since the beginning of time.  Unless you wanted to be “classified”, you just dealt with it.  Some did better, and just kept things together.  Some, like Y., a tank driver in our platoon, re-lived his experiences as a tank driver during the Yom Kippur War.  He was in Sinai, commanded to crush Egyptian soldiers beneath the treads of  his tank, after all of the ammunition had run out.

I am happy that today’s military, especially the IDF, recognizes that Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD, is real.  I am glad to read that our warriors are getting help, and that their families are getting help.  However, I ask if that help is enough?  Will some of today’s warriors, who have lived the horrors of October 7th 2023, ever be able to recover?  Will they turn to self medicating?  Will they run for miles and miles at four o’clock in the morning?  Will a sudden noise bring them back to a hellish memory?  Perhaps they, too, will turn to writing, if only in private journals.

I received two ribbons from the IDF.  One was for having fought during the Yom Kippur War, and the other was for being deployed along the new border with Egypt during the First Lebanon War in 1982.  Two small ribbons, hardly recognizable by most Israelis today.  Hardly anyone in Israel will thank a veteran, because after all, aren’t we all veterans of some sort or another in Israel?  Yet, living here in the US, I make it a personal point of importance to shake the hands of veterans when I recognize them.  They wear a hat.  “Welcome home!” to the Vietnam veteran who is as old as I am. “Can I buy you a coffee?” to the soldier who wears the uniform.  It helps me more than it does them, I promise you. And, we do the same for our warriors in Israel, with packages and food and supplies of a personal nature.  But what do we do to help them share their stories?  How do we help them carry their deeply buried memories?