Scroll down for an update to this post.

I’m more than a little angry right now.  Yes, I’m irate that some sh-tbag Major (“sh-tbag” is often used as a technical term in the Army) opened fire on a group of his fellow Soldiers killing 12 and wounding 30. But that’s not even what is under my skin right now. What is bothering me is the general reaction of our media and those stupid enough to think this was not an act of terrorism, but was caused by supposed PTSD caused at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. 

You want to know what PTSD is like? I'll tell you.  You have nightmares that go on for weeks.  Mine would always be the same.  Wherever the window was in the room in which I was sleeping I would see a bright white flash. I would wake up screaming to my wife “Get up! Get the f-ck up! An IED just went off!”  Sometimes I would just wake up screaming in agony as I relived the moment where my right arm was ripped from my body by an Iranian shape charge.  (I may not know what childbirth feels like, but I know what it's like to go an hour with my arm ripped off without painkillers (I'm allergic to morphine).)  PTSD makes you paranoid as hell.  “Why is that person staring at me?  Are they a threat? Where is the nearest exit? Why are these people so close to me?  Why is no one pulling security? What was that noise? Where is the nearest cover?  I need to get out of here.”  You lie wide awake in bed at night wondering if it's safe to go to sleep or if you should get up and start pulling security. When I got home from Walter Reed and started college (a week later, stupid idea) I would often stay up for days at a time without sleeping. Eventually my body would completely shut down from exhaustion and I would sleep for 12 hours or more only to complete the cycle all over again. (I still cannot believe I got all As and Bs.)  Since I was injured in a humvee I am especially susceptible on the road to the effects of my PTSD.  I still get nervous and hold my breath every time I drive by a piece of trash or tire debris on the shoulder or median.  I avoid guardrails and broken down cars on the side of the road.  On a couple different occasions I yelled out “tire!” to warn my wife (who was driving) of a potential IED in the road. There was nothing there (no tire, no nothing).  One late night while driving home completely exhausted on our small two lane country roads at slow speed I locked up all four tires on my car to keep from hitting a cardboard box in the middle of the road.  At that moment I would have bet the contents of my bank account it was an IED.  That's what PTSD is like.  At no point in time have I ever felt the desire or need to grab a weapon and go shoot someone or something up.  At no point in time have I ever grabbed a weapon and broken a law because I felt the need to protect myself.  PTSD urges you mitigate the risk of events that happened in your life.  But if you've never had anything traumatic happen in your life, you can't have PTSD. 

If you can get PTSD from treating soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center then why the hell haven't more people snapped?  Why haven't all the therapists in physical therapy and occupational therapy, and all the staff on Ward 57 ran around shooting up the place?  They have seen far more wounded Soldiers than this POS ever did. My occupational and physical therapists, like many of the civilian personnel at Walter Reed, have been there since the beginning of OEF.  They have taken care of countless (probably hundreds) Soldiers with a variety of different injuries.  Missing arms (like me). Missing legs. Missing both. Missing parts of the face.  Severe burns. Whole chunks of the skull missing. Missing jaws. Ears. Eyes. Severe PTSD.  Severe TBI (traumatic brain injury) to the point that Soldiers would forget where they were going while walking the 50 feet from physical therapy to occupational therapy (they would be found wandering the halls unsure where they were supposed to be going.  I had a buddy who used to do that walking the 20 feet to prosthetics. My TBI is bad, but not that bad).  

So why haven't they gone crazy?  Because you don't get PTSD from sitting on your ass around Walter Reed.  Not only is it not possible to “catch” secondhand PTSD, but it is not that kind of a place.  I would know, I was a patient there for nine months.  The place is simply not that stressful or chaotic.  When I was there my PTSD got better, not worse.  And I would be willing to bet my dog tags that I saw far more wounded Soldiers than sh-t bag Major did during our overlapping time there in 2007.  I regularly visited Ward 57 to give advice to the new wounded. Other Soldiers and amputees did it for me when I was there so I considered my visits “paying it forward”. I had daily physical and occupational therapy with other Soldiers.  I regularly partook in activities in and out of Walter Reed with present and past wounded Soldiers.  To say that this guy got PTSD from being stationed at Walter Reed is an absolute farce.  The people who are making this sh-t up have never set foot on Walter Reed, let alone met a soldier with PTSD.

  In order to actually have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, you have to go through some sort of traumatic event(s) to have “post stress.” Can therapists be emotionally troubled by the things they hear from patients? Yes.  But you cannot catch PTSD from someone.  It's not the f-cking swine flu.

 I cannot tell you how angry I am right now as a former patient of Walter Reed.  It is an absolute slap in the face for people to use his time there as an excuse for what he has done.  It is an absolute slap in the face for all the wonderful people there who help soldiers every single day.  Some of the most kind, caring, and noble people I have ever met in my entire life work at Walter Reed Army Medical Center day in and day out helping wounded Soldiers like me.

 To fallaciously say this guy has PTSD from his time at Walter Reed as an excuse for opening fire on a group of innocent Soldiers is beyond reckless.  It's an absolute slap in the face for every caregiver and every wounded warrior who ever set foot on Walter Reed Army Medical Center. 

Update- Nov. 9

First, I would like to thank everyone who has been reading my thoughts and passing them around the web.  When I decided to write this it was not my intention to create something that would go viral.  I was simply blowing off steam and debunking yet another ridiculous claim by our fact-less media.  Second, I feel it is necessary to address my rather colorful language in this post.  A day or so after I wrote this, I went back and reread it and thought “wow… I sure did swear a lot!” As regular readers (all three of them) can attest, I almost never include such expletives in my writing.  So how did they come to be?  It has to do with the way I “type.”  The IED that almost killed me left me with four remaining fingers, only three of which somewhat work (my pinky is just “along for the ride”).  So when I type something long like this blog post, I use my voice recognition software. So I'm not actually “typing,” I'm talking.  When I'm very angry and I talk I tend to throw around an expletive here and there, like any good combat Soldier should to prove his worth with the English language.  Unfortunately, such language tends to turn off much of the general public, and tends to retract from the overall statement being made.  So I decided to clean up the language to a more PG-13 rating so that it will possibly get bit more exposure.  Please realize I am not doing this so that I can get more attention, but rather to protect the good name of my fellow Soldiers and all the hard-working folks at Walter Reed Army Medical Center by debunking some of the BS being perpetuated by our media.  (If you're the kind of guy (or gal) who likes a bit of vulgarity in what you read, you can still view the unedited version right here. Proceed at your own risk.)

 

  

I was sitting in class at the Dunwoody Institute of Technology in Minneapolis. It was a regular Tuesday morning, and the professor was lecturing about some web development assignment. Being the not-so-studious student that I tended to be, I was chatting on AOL Instant Messenger with a friend of mine in New York City. We had met when ESPN's Great Outdoor Games were held in Lake Placid New York, and she worked for the media company in charge of the website covering the event. She worked four blocks from the Empire State building. We occasionally chatted, talked about random stuff, and swapped e-mails back and forth. This morning was different. Around 8 a.m. (my time) she started frantically sending strange messages. “We’re under attack! New York City is under attack!” I thought she was joking. I asked her what she was talking about. “They're flying planes into buildings! Go look on CNN!” I try to go to CNN.com, or any other news source I could think of. Nothing. The entire Internet had clogged from the sheer number of people trying to find out what was going on. It had bottlenecked to the point of shutting down almost completely. I told her I couldn't get anywhere, so she e-mailed me a picture. It was a grainy image of a large passenger plane flying into the World Trade Center. I couldn't believe what was happening.

My professor and my fellow classmates were oblivious to what was happening. I felt the need to say something, so I interrupted his lecture. “Mr. Haluska, I'm sorry to interrupt you but I need to tell you something. New York City is under attack. They are flying airplanes into buildings. I'm not making this up. I have a friend in New York City who I have been chatting with. They are under attack. I'm not making this up.” He didn't believe me. He tried to check the Internet for information on what was happening. Nothing. When he said he couldn't find anything, I carried my laptop to the front of the class and showed him the picture my friend had sent me. After that he said, “All right, everyone take a 10 minute break.” I ran downstairs to the student lounge where there was a TV. A large crowd had gathered. On the screen was the World Trade Center with smoke pouring out of it. Everyone was in disbelief.

We went back upstairs to class, and the professor attempted to get back into his lecture. My friend kept relaying information from New York City. For a while she was saying that a plane had hit the White House. It was later revealed that it had hit the Pentagon. A friend sitting next to me told me when the first tower collapsed. Shortly thereafter my friend in New York said that they were evacuating her building and she had to leave. As bits of information became available it spread around the classroom like wildfire. Eventually the professor gave up on lecturing and sent everyone home early. He said he couldn't focus anyway and wanted to find out more information on what was going on. As we walked out to the parking lot, I said to a fellow classmate “This is fucked up man.” He replied, “Shit… you’re telling me man.”

As I drove through downtown Minneapolis, I remember staring up at skyscrapers like the IDS Tower, the Wells Fargo building, and all the other spectacular buildings that made up the skyline. Downtown Minneapolis was like a ghost town. Other than a couple city buses, I was only car on the road. All the buildings were empty, having all been evacuated earlier. I turned on my radio to 93X, and heard a short speech by Governor Jesse Ventura asking people to remain calm and cool in this difficult time.

I would spend the next five days and nights glued to the TV, living on the couch of the rundown campus house that we rented. The next day when I drove to class there were F15s circling Minneapolis. The Federal Reserve building that I drove right by every morning was now surrounded by concrete barriers. To uparmored suburbans were parked on the perimeter. There were men in suits and dark sunglasses carrying fully automatic machine guns.

Nothing had hit me quite like this. I was another naïve, bulletproof, twenty-something college kid. Nothing affected me in my world. Before 9/11 history was only in the past. Now I was living it.

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Shortly before the two-year anniversary of 9/11, I walked to an unfamiliar armory in Rochester, Minnesota. I found my way into a Master Sergeant's office (the recruiters were both out), sat down and said, “Sell me.” I made him give me the whole pitch. It didn't matter what he said though. He didn't have to sell me. The terrorists of 9/11 had already sold me. I was joining the military. Two days short of the two year anniversary of 9/11, I signed on the dotted line.

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As Paul Harvey used to say, “And now you know the rest of the story. Good day.”

Coping
Written Sunday, January 21, 2007
I’m doing the best that I can, considering. I spend a lot of time really pissed off or really upset. I know I am getting better at a pretty good rate, but still. In Iraq I was the go to guy for anything that could go wrong with my CET’s (convoy escort team) humvees. I was the guy that could build or fix anything. Heck, I even built the door and a bench for the building our company stages in for convoys, simply because I was bored and had a little extra time before I went on R&R in November. There was nothing I couldn’t fix, build, or do.

Now I’m struggling with the mentality that I’m just a one armed, four fingered gimp. I have sharp memories of the accident that haunt me everyday; the sudden explosion, the taste of blood in my mouth, realizing the bottom half of my arm was missing with nothing left but a couple of fingers and part of my hand hanging off by some skin and tendons, and then realizing how much pain I was in. All I could do was hold the end of my blown off right arm with my shrapnel filled left hand and wait for the medic to arrive and put a tourniquet on my arm. The most terrifying part of the memories is constantly remembering my gunner screaming and then looking down and realizing my arm was nothing more than some ragged meat and two bones sticking out.

I realize there are a lot of other people out there who are worse off than me. I am not asking for sympathy here. All I am trying to do is let you know what it is like to experience this. I have constant phantom pain in my arm where it feels like my hand is still there, and someone is sawing on it with a knife. The nerves are still trying to tell my brain that something is wrong. The phantom pain is there every moment of the day and hurts like hell. My left hand is barely functional since the surgery. What really pisses me off the most is that my left hand feels like it isn’t put together right. The doctors removed my ring finger all the way down into my hand, and then pulled my pinky next to my middle finger and tied the tendons together. When I bend my fingers it feels like the bones are at different lengths and just don't line up right. I was really hoping I would at least have one completely functioning hand since I lost an arm. Unfortunately because of my wedding ring stripping the skin down to the bone, and multiple pieces of shrapnel that entered my hand and severed my nerves, and the shrapnel that completely shattered my ring finger’s knuckle, this wasn't to be.

I am happy that I am finally rid of all the tubes, IVs, nerve blocks, and catheters sticking out of my body. Today is the first time in over a month I haven't had an IV or some other tube sticking out of my body. I am finally to the point where I can go to the bathroom by myself without any help. What is really sad to me when I think about it is how lucky I am compared to a lot of the other people here at Walter Reed. I think of the pain and frustration I am experiencing and I realize how it is multiplied for them. My pain is always there and I'm told will be for months to come. I can only imagine what it is like for the others here. There are soldiers here with injuries that I cannot even describe. Some are missing both legs. Some are missing both legs and both arms. When I think of this I can't help but feel a little selfish for my own grief. I spend a lot of time crying and I don't know why. Sometimes I look at my hand or I look at my arm and I just start crying. I think of when my hand used to be there, or when my arm used to be there, and what it was like. The arm that was there for the last 27 years is suddenly gone. All the little blemishes, all the little battle wounds, all the little scars from being a carpenter, everything is gone. The ring finger that held my wedding ring that was put on by my loving wife is gone. The last time I saw my wedding ring it was being snipped off with a pair of bolt cutters at the hospital in the Green Zone in Baghdad. It was also here in the Green zone that I also got to look at my arm and see that it had been sheared off by shrapnel. It was a gruesome sight, but I couldn't help but look. It's an image that will forever be burned in my mind. Sometimes the loss feels overwhelming for me and I just start crying. Other times I’m very positive and look forward to getting out of here and getting on with my life. Other times I just don't know what to think.

Please remember this when you think about freedom. This isn't a dream, this isn’t some fictional story about patriotism, this isn't some story I'm writing to be a hero. This is my life here at Walter Reed. I am the true cost of freedom. Welcome to my life.

Happy Veteran's Day.

I’m doing the best that I can, considering. I spend a lot of time really pissed off or really upset. I know I am getting better at a pretty good rate, but still. In Iraq I was the go to guy for anything that could go wrong with my CET’s (convoy escort team) humvees. I was the guy that could build or fix anything. Heck, I even built the door and a bench for the building our company stages in for convoys, simply because I was bored and had a little extra time before I went on R&R in November. There was nothing I couldn’t fix, build, or do.

Now I’m struggling with the mentality that I’m just a one armed, four fingered gimp. I have sharp memories of the accident that haunt me everyday; the sudden explosion, the taste of blood in my mouth, realizing the bottom half of my arm was missing with nothing left but a couple of fingers and part of my hand hanging off by some skin and tendons, and then realizing how much pain I was in. All I could do was hold the end of my blown off right arm with my shrapnel filled left hand and wait for the medic to arrive and put a tourniquet on my arm. The most terrifying part of the memories is constantly remembering my gunner screaming and then looking down and realizing my arm was nothing more than some ragged meat and two bones sticking out.

I realize there are a lot of other people out there who are worse off than me. I am not asking for sympathy here. All I am trying to do is let you know what it is like to experience this. I have constant phantom pain in my arm where it feels like my hand is still there, and someone is sawing on it with a knife. The nerves are still trying to tell my brain that something is wrong. The phantom pain is there every moment of the day and hurts like hell. My left hand is barely functional since the surgery. What really pisses me off the most is that my left hand feels like it isn’t put together right. The doctors removed my ring finger all the way down into my hand, and then pulled my pinky next to my middle finger and tied the tendons together. When I bend my fingers it feels like the bones are at different lengths and just don't line up right. I was really hoping I would at least have one completely functioning hand since I lost an arm. Unfortunately because of my wedding ring stripping the skin down to the bone, and multiple pieces of shrapnel that entered my hand and severed my nerves, and the shrapnel that completely shattered my ring finger’s knuckle, this wasn't to be.

I am happy that I am finally rid of all the tubes, IVs, nerve blocks, and catheters sticking out of my body. Today is the first time in over a month I haven't had an IV or some other tube sticking out of my body. I am finally to the point where I can go to the bathroom by myself without any help. What is really sad to me when I think about it is how lucky I am compared to a lot of the other people here at Walter Reed. I think of the pain and frustration I am experiencing and I realize how it is multiplied for them. My pain is always there and I'm told will be for months to come. I can only imagine what it is like for the others here. There are soldiers here with injuries that I cannot even describe. Some are missing both legs. Some are missing both legs and both arms. When I think of this I can't help but feel a little selfish for my own grief. I spend a lot of time crying and I don't know why. Sometimes I look at my hand or I look at my arm and I just start crying. I think of when my hand used to be there, or when my arm used to be there, and what it was like. The arm that was there for the last 27 years is suddenly gone. All the little blemishes, all the little battle wounds, all the little scars from being a carpenter, everything is gone. The ring finger that held my wedding ring that was put on by my loving wife is gone. The last time I saw my wedding ring it was being snipped off with a pair of bolt cutters at the hospital in the Green Zone in Baghdad. It was also here in the Green zone that I also got to look at my arm and see that it had been sheared off by shrapnel. It was a gruesome sight, but I couldn't help but look. It's an image that will forever be burned in my mind. Sometimes the loss feels overwhelming for me and I just start crying. Other times I’m very positive and look forward to getting out of here and getting on with my life. Other times I just don't know what to think.

Please remember this when you think about freedom. This isn't a dream, this isn’t some fictional story about patriotism, this isn't some story I'm writing to be a hero. This is my life here at Walter Reed. I am the true cost of freedom. Welcome to my life.