Just talked to a guy on the train who was nearly in tears when our eyes met. I asked him if he was ok and he looked back at me and said no.

I told him I would listen to him for the duration of our ride, and that sometimes talking to a stranger helps put things in to perspective.

He is an ex marine who served time in Iraq and came back to the states with PTSD and suicidal tendencies. He kept repeating…”I fucked up my entire life for nothing.” Nightmares invade is sleep, and his mind often repeats a scene from the time his battle buddy got his head blown off sitting right next to him.

“God wont forgive me for carrying out missions to kill.” he said.

His face was worn out. I could see pain slip through the silence between his sentences. He looked at me, and asked If he was a bad guy for doing what he did. I said “of course not.”

All I could do was listen.

Right before he got off the bus, he thanked me for listening, and said his name was Billy. I shook his hand before he got off the bus, but I really wanted to hug him. The bus took off, and as I looked out the window, Billy waved goodbye with a blank look on his face. I watched until he faded into the sidewalk.

There are so many damaged people in the world. I met another one today.

holy crap.  sometimes, loons, you post things that make me laugh or make me go “oh hey thats a fucking great photo” and sometimes, just sometimes, you post something likethis and its so fucked up and true and shitty but beautiful somehow too.  you are a good person for listening to that guy.  you probably did more for him than at least 5 psychologists.  

…

The All-American Hero is s Crock of Shit:  a study of PTSD, the suicide of Ajax, and mortality in warfare

about 2 weeks ago i went to a few lectures at my old stompy grounds - ancient studies at nyu - and one of the lectures was a look at PTSD in days of antiquity, mostly athens.  peter meineck gave the talk.  he’s amazing for so many reasons, but he brought up a few interestings points:

in ancient athens, those showing signs of PTSD were flogged and marked as weak, BUT many of their dramas of tragedy would incorporate the soldier and his grief and inner turmoil from warfare.  

a good example being the suicide of Ajax, which we have  from the works of Sophocles.  Ajax was a comrade to the famous Achilles - trained by the same centaur, and kicked some serious ass in the Trojan War WITHOUT help from any god.  He survived the war and when he gets home he slaughters a whole herd of sheep in a PTSD rage, hallucinating that they are more enemy soldiers, and then wakes up covered in sheep bits and blood, totally ashamed and kills himself.  

oddly enough my friend who fought in Iraq was found in the attic not too long ago with a shotgun in his mouth.  luckily, my buddy who found him up there was able to get it away from him before he did anything with it.

in many greek tragedies, the soldier who comes home is often internally conflicted and generally NOT portrayed as what we see today in our media as ”the all american hero”type of horse shit.  the audience would be stirred by his trauma, feeling the horror that it carries.  this was key i think to the SOCIETY understanding warfare and knowing what its repercussions were.  our media does not extend this tragedy quite so well to the civilian population and as a result, many of our troops feel more like outcasts, leading perhaps to worsening PTSD.  

so, the greeks reprimanded their men for showing any sign of PTSD but often used the theater as an outlet for them.  

BUT back then if you were wounded in any remarkable way, you had a good chance of dying and therefore not coming home all fucked up.  today, roughly 10% of the wounded in our armed forces actually die. 

42% of the battle wounded of the Revolutionary War died
30% from WWII
25% from the Korean War
10% from the Iraq & Afghanistan wars

(read this short post for more on that).  

did the ancient greeks treat their soldiers better than we do?  

we may keep them alive longer, but what sort of life do we really give them?

ajax:

These facts are all very interesting, but was interests me more is his note on human cost. If we are capable of fending off Death from US soldiers, what sort of life are they left with? Sure, they are alive, but in what state? Many are missing limbs or organ systems, such as, I dunno, their rectums.

This is what popped in my brain:
1. This is expensive. 
2. This presents a lot of surgical training opportunities aka Fun For Me, Not For You. 
3. The defense secretary gets to boast that less people are dying in these wars than previously.

I think most of us realize that the majority of people here in the US are dumb. If the media wants to exploit this fact, it may cause a nationwide influence that sounds more like: “This isnt a real war; look, less soldiers have died than in WWII or Vietnam!” instead of what it really means, being: “This is costing us more money than any war before, not only in the number of people (soldiers and civilians) injured, but also in the millions and billions of dollars spent on keeping them alive, rehabilitated, and socially acceptable.”

And what I find personally intriguing is that it also benefits 
anyone associated with medical education, by offering more
guinea pigs, if you will, for training and research. I hate and love it.

My god, didnt Trumbo attempt to tell us this over 50 years ago? (if u haven’t read it already, go pick up Johnny Got His Gun)

(originally written 14 February 2009)