I was sitting in the living room with my Calmer
Half*, enjoying a cup of coffee and the mutual exhausted silence, when
he opened his eyes, looked around, and focused on Jen Satterly's book
lying blamelessly on the coffee table. It's Arsenal of Hope: Tactics for Taking on PTSD, Together, and it's the... well, last
year her husband, retired Delta CSM Tom Satterly wrote All Secure: A
Special Operations Soldier's Fight to Survive on the Battlefield and the
Homefront, in which he details the effect that training and operational
tempo, combat and losing friends and the resulting PTSD had not only on
him, but on his marriages, on his kid, and on his ability to adapt to
civilian life. And how he's fought his way back from the blackest depths
to healthy and happy, and is trying to show others the trail he's
blazed, and that it's possible and there's hope.
Jen's
book is the other half, on what living with someone with PTSD is like,
and the toll it takes from the dependent's view. It's also exactly what
is says - an arsenal of many different treatments, therapies,
approaches, and the cheerful, rueful note that none of them are a silver
bullet. Some don't work at any given time but work well later, some
work and then lose their effectiveness, some will never work for any
particular case. It's an honest, raw look at all the ways that things
get messed up between spouses, and that there's been a lot of pain, and
depression on her end, as living with rampant PTSD is depressing! About
how to treat yourself, and the importance of putting your own oxygen
mask on first, and helping yourself so you can be a help to your
partner.
If I had to distill them down to
quips, Tom's book is "This shit hits even the toughest of us. You're not
weak, you're injured, and there's hope to heal." And Jen's? "Here's
how, for both of you."
Calmer Half has
shown less than zero interest in reading the books. On the other hand,
he's willing to talk to me when I want to chew over things they've
brought up aloud. Sometimes his responses were practically cryptic, like
when I mentioned Tom's description of Mogadishu (which Calmer Half said
with a dryness that could mummify at ten paces "Yes, that is a very
understated description of urban combat all over Africa." He was quiet
for a moment, then added, "You never forget that smell.")
... yeah, not asking him to clarify that.
Sometimes
the responses were quite eloquent. And sometimes they were a revelation
to both of us, because he thought I already understood.
Let
me explain here that Calmer Half is not an American combat vet. He's
British South African, so his military was different, his wars were ones
our media didn't talk about, and even more importantly, his country did
not have a military dependent culture, not like the USA does. When he
got back from his first combat against the Angolans, Cubans, East
Germans, and Soviets, his dad finally started to tell him some of what
he'd seen in WWII. He finished it with "don't say anything to your mum
or your sisters. They wouldn't understand, and it would only upset the
ladies."
And he kept that stiff upper lip
for years, through round after round of combat, on through the struggle
to end apartheid, through the fights with communist tsostis and jihadis
fresh back from fighting Russians in Afghanistan and each trying to take
over the townships and destabilize the country so they could be in
control... all the way through 18 years of undeclared civil war. Any
tentative attempt to explain to the ladies there was met with
incomprehension to outright hostility, so he just bottled it up.
I,
meanwhile, grew up with a dad in the military, in a family that is full
of expats, engineers, and career military. My family's been army so
long we use the working saber with the nicks from vertebrae still in the
edge to cut our wedding cakes, because we lost the dress saber
generations ago. My brother went career military. Me, when I was asked
what I wanted to be when I grew up, I folded my arms and spat defiantly
at the teacher, "a civilian!" (Apparently I was the only one who didn't
see marriage to a combat vet coming from years off. Dad was highly
amused, and their first phone call promptly veered into words like "Vela
Incident" and "mustang" and "The second lieutenant had A Bright Idea"
and "sweating cordite." They get along great, even if their acronyms and
uniforms don't match.)
This also means
I've grown up with a great many coping mechanisms for 'battle fatigue'
built in, and an understanding that "Oh, that's just my soldier. You
don't have to understand why or what set that off, you just have to know
it will and love 'em anyway." Some of which I didn't even understand
were coping mechanisms, because they're just the way you do things.
Military and their dependents are a culture, and like any culture, it
adapts to the stresses and needs of its particular people.
We
didn't call it PTSD when I was growing up. That was a foreign term,
that it seemed civilian shrinks who proudly dodged the draft and a press
that hated the military tried to slap on any and all soldiers in order
to mark them as unfit, dangerous, and untrustworthy scum. Nobody I knew
would ever apply it to themselves. I certainly never, not in all the
things that ever happened to me, thought once to apply that term to
myself.
I once asked dad what PTSD was,
because of all the people tossing around that loaded term, I trusted
him. He paused for a long moment, and finally said, "It's the right set
of responses to the wrong environment."
That
was a perfectly workable definition for going on with, and it meant in
my world, it was perfectly normal and fine when the prof broke out his
ultra-new techie toy, and waved his "laser pointer" at the overhead
projector, and the ceiling, and the lecture hall... and my study buddy
on the GI Bill was suddenly underneath the tiny, cramped desk, while
papers were still fluttering down to the ground. When he came out from
under the desk fighting mad, and walked out with fists curled into white
knuckles, I just kept taking notes.
After
class, I tracked him down where he and a couple other vets from class
were standing at their favorite smoking redoubt, chain smoking one
cigarette after another, and dumped their assorted backpacks and stacks
of books and notes on the nearby bench. "Right responses, wrong
environment. But next time, can you come back for your backpacks? These
are heavy, guys!" (Look, I was 98 pounds at the time. They added up to a
significant fraction of my body weight.)
The
response was a long, silent crushing hug, followed by a quick sorting
of everyone's stuff, checks that certain items were still stowed in
their backpacks (and few snugged back into their belts), and "C'mon kid.
Let's go get lunch. No, I'm paying." And off we went, so they could
copy my notes, and horse around, blowing off steam. Of course, I knew
exactly which seat I'd get: it'd be the one with the back to the door -
because that's just how soldiers are, right? They never sit where they
can't see the exits, and there's no need to think about it, because it's
as natural as breathing...
Right
responses, wrong environment was great definition... right up until I
married a combat vet. Right up until I found that there were things we
had to work through, and work around, that seemed utterly inexplicable.
And Peter was keeping a stiff upper lip, completely silent as to why he
would get so upset about something, and we both had to learn an entire
set of routines and responses just to avoid having yet another pointless
fight.
Weirdly enough, what really helped?
The movie Act of Valor. I wanted to go see it, because I'd heard it was
seals playing actors playing seals, which seemed so hilariously meta
and awful that I figured it would be as campy as Rocky Horror. And since
I didn't want to go alone, I talked my Calmer Half into going with me.
This violated one of my mother's primary rules on movies, by the way.
"Never watch a war movie with soldiers, and never watch a flying movie
with pilots!" I figured it would make him wince and groan and shout at
the screen about everything they were getting technically wrong, and be
hilarious.
I was utterly wrong. Oh, the
seals were awkward, especially in that way of: "We are now showing the
cameramen a conversation written by scriptwriters like we say this
normally, when you and I both know we said this ten years ago and now
have it down to a lift of an eyebrow and a faint nod." The effects were
disturbing where they didn't mean to be, because they did too many
things too right, or too close to real instead of to the stylized
Hollywood tropes. And at the end, when one seal throws himself on a
grenade to save the others, and you see the blood pooling and the dust
drifting down in front of his open, lifeless eyes... the credits rolled
on that image, and I looked over at the big guy who'd been squeezing the
blood out of my hand, even when I wasn't wincing or jumping. And in the
flickering light, I saw him staring at the dead man staring back from
the movie screen, tears rolling down his face.
Look,
I don't think men can't cry. I just think women cry at the drop of a
hat, and men don't cry unless it's extremely important. Calmer Half
comes from an even more reserved culture than me, so how it hit him... I
just hugged him and sat there as the theater emptied, until he was
ready to move. When he finally shuddered, and came back to the here and
now, and started half-clumsily reaching for his handkerchief and trying
to apologize with extreme embarrassment, I just hugged him harder. "It's
okay to cry. It really is. Soldiers do that, sometimes, at war movies.
It's normal."
He looked at me like I'd
grown a second head, but wiped his face, blew his nose, and we headed
out into the drizzling rain to walk back to the car. Having taken so
long to get out of the movie, the parking lot was fairly well deserted,
and we went at a gentle amble, holding hands. He finally said, a little
brokenly, "I hope that maybe... that seeing that, you might start to
understand... That some of that was what it was like, downrange."
I
squeezed his hand, and said, "Honey, I'm a military brat. I was raised
to understand that I don't have to understand what you saw and what you
did out there, I just have to love you. You're perfectly normal, for a
soldier."
The look this time was less like I
was spouting something totally alien... no, this time, it was something
so profoundly grateful and amazed, like a starving man who wished for a
crust of bread and was handed a banquet, that I was the one starting to
feel uncomfortable and embarrassed now. And then he opened his mouth,
and years of pain started to pour out.
It
didn't immediately make everything fine, but at least now, when
something upsets him, we can talk about it, and work it out. And that's
made all the difference in the world, as we rub along together over the
years. Sometimes bits of shrapnel come out of his skin, sometimes
painful memories come out of the whatever depths of his mind they were
shoved into.
(Sometimes these are
completely random. You know, when you're married to a guy for 10 years,
and then in the course of mentioning I'd just learned from a podcast
that when a guy took an IED to the face and was blinded, he actually was
"seeing" vividly intense interpretations by his brain, as though he was
still in the 'stans. He'd hear a nurse talk, and look over and "see" a
village elder talking, standing there among the mud brick huts, even as
he could smell and hear that he was in the hospital. This continued
until they gave him a drug that made everything go black.
I
had never heard of that before, so I mentioned it to Calmer Half. I did
not expect him to get very quiet, and then start feeling up in his
hair, and say "Yeah. This dent, here. Can you feel that? God, I wish
they'd had that drug back then."
Ah, yes,
combat vets. Sometimes a surprising amount of WTFery is in store, when
you marry one, and never from the direction you expect!)
This is where we come back to his responses to Jen Satterly's book.
So,
coming up on 11 years of marriage, and he's cooking dinner, the roomba
is running along underfoot, and I'm putting dishes away and talking
about Jen's book, and I say, "...So she says it's not just right
responses, wrong environment, it's also that the limbic system which is
primed for combat gets switched on in the middle of everyday, and so you're viewing everything as
threatening chaos that needs to be controlled or eliminated on the fight
or flight level, whether you want to or not."
Calmer
Half put the spatula down with a precision that said he's distinctly
annoyed, and turned and gave me a look that left no doubt. "Well, of
course!" He snapped, and then stopped, and visibly calmed himself down,
and added, "Didn't you know that?"
"No?" I stopped what I was doing, turned to him, and held out my hands.
He took a deep breath, let it out, and said, "I'm trying to focus on a task. You're walking behind me repeatedly. That,"
and he glared at the roomba which was now bumping his right foot like
it wanted to mate with him, "is underfoot and annoying, and there are
too many things moving I can't see and control while focused on this."
"Oh!"
I picked up the roomba and turned it off. "Okay, then I can put the
rest of the dishes away later, and this can cease annoying both of us
right now."
He blinked. "You really didn't know that?"
"Well, I do now, and we can work on that."
Yeah,
I wish I'd had both books years ago. Tom's book is great for giving you
the view from inside your soldier, and Jen's book is great for the view from
inside the spouse, and together... together, they are more than the sum
of their parts, because you get to see the same incidents described
from two different viewpoints, and it completes the picture of their
relationship, and how they've struggled with and worked together to
achieve the health and happiness and great marriage they have.
But
if you're only going to read one, Jen's has more strategies for making
life better, and even with all Peter and I have achieved, it's still had
a new piece or two that's been helpful.
And
this brings us back to this morning, when we were sitting there enjoying
the silence together, my Calmer Half opened his eyes, looked at Jen's
book, and said, "You should write a blog article reviewing that book.
Both books on PTSD. Together."
"Um.." I
looked at him. Because I really started my blog only so he could see
what I was doing when I was 4,000 miles away, and so people who worried
could keep track when I was flying my plane down. It's fairly defunct,
and mostly a way to store recipes. "What?"
He locked eyes with me, and said in that utterly calm, and utterly sincere way, "You should write about it."
"But..."
I had already lost, I knew. I don't write reviews (well, the
occasional review on Amazon, but rarely books even then), but I was
going to write this. And now I have.
*for
those of you who wonder, the term Calmer Half is something of an old
joke between us, going back to the day that two old vets, friends, fellow pilots, and
mentors of mine looked at me over their coffee and informed me that they
approved of Peter, and he was good enough to marry "Our Dot." As one put
it, "We always knew you'd marry a combat vet! You're too high strung!"
The fact that he tends to respond to my having domestic disasters with
"Calm down, love! It's a good day! No one's shooting at you!"**... or,
when looking at his dead truck with a shrug, "Well, at least you didn't
hit a landmine"... yeah, he got grumpily tagged Calmer Half instead of
Better Half.
