why soldiers miss war

8/18/2019 Why Soldiers Miss War

1/19


2/19

me later.

“I’m fine,” I replied automatically, not knowing if it was a

lie. “I’m sure it’ll sink in later.”

He said nothing.

It was December 2013, and I was embedded with the U.S.

Army in Afghanistan as a foreign correspondent for United

Press International. Due to the frequency of Taliban

attacks, at the time FOB Shank was jokingly called “rocket

city” by the U.S. soldiers stationed there.

Hills and urban areas dotted the enormous bowl valley

within which the base sat in Logar Province, offeringplenty of places for Taliban militants to hide and lob

one-off rocket and mortar shots.

Consequently, the place was constructed like a medieval

castle. Reinforced concrete and rebar bunkers lined withsandbags and stocked with first aid kits were never more

than sprinting distance away.

Two Choices

y Soldiers Miss War about:reader?url=http://dailysignal.com/2016/01/06/why-soldiers-mi...

f 19 1/8/16, 9:26


3/19

When the air raid alarm went off, as it did several times a

day, you had two choices.

If you weren’t near a bunker, you just dropped to theground, covered your head with your arms and prayed

silently that the incoming round didn’t hit anywhere near

you.

You kept your eyes down and stared at a seam on the

plywood floor of the room you were in, or at a pebble or

blade of grass in the field into which you dove.

You focused on the sound of the alarm and waited for

evidence of the exploding Taliban weapon, hoping that it

was a distant thud and not a flash of red and white and

heat and then darkness. Survival is reduced to a few

seconds of waiting and pure luck.

If you happened to be near a bunker, then you went for it.

You stopped whatever it was you were doing and got your

butt under cover.

The entrances to the bunkers were open to the outside,


f 19 1/8/16, 9:26


4/19

with another vertical concrete slab a few yards away,

ostensibly to block horizontal shrapnel.

You usually could see blue sky out the entrance, though, which always made me wonder what would happen if a

well-placed mortar found its way into the little space

between the open entrance and the protective shield a few

feet away. Such a scenario would turn the bunker into a

death trap.

But the odds of that happening were low.


f 19 1/8/16, 9:26


5/19

U.S. troops at an observation post in Afghanistan. (Photo: Nolan Peterson/The Daily Signal)

Martin and I left the truck and walked over to a

3-foot-wide crater in a gravel clearing about 20 yards

beyond the walls of the Army compound.

It was mid-afternoon, and we had just eaten lunch. A

standard meal from the DFAC (a military acronym for

chow hall) of some indescribable meat and soggy

vegetables, topped off with a few Rip-Its for an afternoon

caffeine kick.

“Jesus,” Martin said as we looked at the charred crater

where the destroyed Taliban rocket had hit the earth.“We’re so [expletive] lucky to be alive.”

‘He’s Long Gone’

As if on cue, we both looked up and in the direction of the

rocket’s flight path. Along that line of sight there was a tall

radio antenna inside the Army compound, about 100 yards

from the crater.


f 19 1/8/16, 9:26


6/19

A few hours prior, Martin and I had been standing

underneath the towering steel structure, chatting while we

sipped on Blue Monster energy drinks. When the attack

came, we survived by diving into a concrete bunker that, asluck would have it, was only a few feet away.

Farther out in the distance behind the antenna, slightly

obscured in the valley’s eternal brown haze and well

beyond the base perimeter, was a low bluff covered intypically drab Afghan buildings. Apache gunships still

patrolled the skies above this area.

“That must be where they [expletive] shot from,” Martin

said. “Although they always put the rockets on timers andrun away before they shoot. Don’t know why they’re still

looking for him. He’s long gone.”


f 19 1/8/16, 9:26


7/19

The author, Nolan Peterson, interviewing an Afghan National Army general at FOB Shank in 2013. (Photo: Nolan Peterson/The Daily Signal)

Martin estimated that the Taliban militant had aimed therocket at the radio antenna, since it was an easily

identifiable landmark at that distance. It was a good shot,

he said.

The rocket might have hit the tower had it not been shotout of the sky by the Phalanx Close-In Weapons System

that guarded FOB Shank from indirect enemy fire.

“We killed off most of the experienced Taliban fighters

long ago,” Martin said. “That one obviously had pretty

good aim, so he’s probably been around a while. It also

means he knows how to disappear, because we’re very

good at killing whoever shoots at us.”


f 19 1/8/16, 9:26


8/19

‘That Was Close’

That was how Martin convinced me that I probably wasn’t

going to die in a rocket or mortar attack when I firstarrived at FOB Shank. The Taliban didn’t live long enough

to get very good at aiming its rockets or mortars, he

assured me.

The Taliban refilled its ranks quickly, he said, but lacked

experience.

I felt so relieved.

After the attack, we inspected the exterior of the bunker

within which we had sought shelter and found itpockmarked by nickel- and dime-sized shrapnel holes. Any

one of those supersonic, molten metal bits would have

been lethal.

It was a miracle that Martin and I were alive, and thegravity of our near-death experience was beginning to

weigh on me. My head was spinning as if I were

drunk; time and emotions operated at some other speed


f 19 1/8/16, 9:26


9/19

than normal as I dealt with the what-ifs and the nauseating

reality of how close I had come to dying.

“That sound,” Martin continued, referring to the laserDoppler sound that bullets or shrapnel make when passing

overhead, similar to quickly running your fingernail down

tightly stretched nylon. “I know that sound. That was

close—too close.”

It’s a distinctive sound that, once you’ve heard it in the

context of combat, will trigger the primal part of your brain

that guides reflexive life-and-death responses.

Surviving on Autopilot

That’s probably why Martin beat me inside the bunker that

morning by several seconds. As a veteran of two wars and

eight combat deployments, he had been under fire a lot

more than I had.

They say that when you’re faced with a life-or-death

situation, your training kicks in, and you don’t think about

what you’re doing anymore. It’s all muscle memory. You


f 19 1/8/16, 9:26


10/19

operate on autopilot.

That’s true, to a degree. Training, after all, is just a safely

repeatable replacement for near-death experiences.

In his book, “Outliers,” journalist Malcolm Gladwell makes

the case that becoming an expert at a skill requires 10,000

hours of practice. Perhaps that’s true. But one near-death

experience has a similar effect to those 10,000 hours,

ingraining in your memory every action, no matter how

minute, that kept you alive.

And when any portion of that near-death experience is

recreated—the sound of an air raid alert, a car backfiring,

the Doppler sound of passing shrapnel, the pop of

miniature sonic booms as bullets pass overhead—the

unthinking responses that saved your life are triggered

automatically as if they had been forged by 10,000 hours of

practice.

As a former military pilot, I’m aware of this phenomenon.

In pilot training the instructors would put students in


of 19 1/8/16, 9:26


11/19

simulators and subject us to unsurvivable situations again

and again. We would emerge from the simulator dripping

in sweat and with our hearts beating out of our chests.

Even though we were just sitting in the simulator working

the controls and flipping switches, our bodies responded to

the effort as though we were doing back-to-back Ironman

triathlons.

Why Time Appears to Slow

But that’s the point. The hormones released by high-stress

situations instruct the brain to imprint memories more

deeply.

Evolution taught us that trick: The caveman who could

best remember how he escaped a saber-toothed tiger

attack had a statistically better shot at surviving the next

one.

That’s why time appears to slow down in a car crash or

while you’re getting mugged. The adrenaline coursing

through your veins triggers your brain into hyperactive


of 19 1/8/16, 9:26


12/19

memory storage. Your mind and senses go into overdrive,

absorbing every sensory detail with superhuman lucidity

and completeness.

Because of this, an event that might only last a split second

occupies as much mental storage space as a week or a

month. Years later you can recall details, feelings, colors,

smells, and sounds more vividly than you can remember

this morning’s breakfast.

More than 2,300 U.S. military personnel have died in Afghanistan since 2001. (Photo: Nolan Peterson/The Daily


of 19 1/8/16, 9:26


13/19

Signal)

Two years later, I can remember with perfect detail

Martin’s facial expressions when the rocket exploded

overhead. I specifically recall a spot of whiskers on his face

that he had missed shaving that morning.

In Ukraine last September, I had a Kalashnikov pointed at

me at a separatist checkpoint. Today I can recall the vein

pattern on the hand of the soldier.

This hyper-alertness often extends beyond the actual

experience that sparked it. For hours, maybe even days

after you evade death, life just seems, well, better.

You laugh easier. Things smell better. You notice little

details in places and things you have seen countless times

before. You want to talk about what happened, you want to

tell friends and family that you love them. You live harder

and truer than you ever have before. And it feels good.

‘I Feel So Alive’

The evening I returned to Florida after my time in


of 19 1/8/16, 9:26


14/19

Afghanistan as an embedded journalist, I drove across the

Everglades at sunset.

I pulled the car over on the side of the road, stretched outmy arms and felt the sun’s warmth on my skin. I closed my

eyes and could see the glowing red of the fading day’s light

through my eyelids.

“I feel so alive,” I remember thinking. “I wish I could live

my whole life like this.”

That is PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder.

It’s the inability of normal life to ever match the amplitude

of living that you achieved in war. It’s the letdown of survival, and the worry that normal life is just a countdown

to a gentle fade-out.

Ask most combat veterans to name the worst experiences

of their lives, and they’ll probably tell you it was war.

But here’s the confusing part. When you ask them to

choose the best experiences of their lives, they’ll usually

say it was war, too.


of 19 1/8/16, 9:26


15/19

This is nearly impossible for someone who has not been in

war to understand. But the lesson to be gleaned from this

confusing truth is essential to understanding the

experiences of the 0.75 percent of the U.S. population whoare in the military and the 7 percent who are veterans.

No Pity Required

Contrary to the steady stream of Wounded Warrior

Foundation commercials on TV, combat veterans are not

broken, and they are not victims.

They should not be pitied or looked at with a sad shaking

of the head or some reflexive “Geez, what a shame.” Pitying

them belittles their experiences and misrepresents the

challenges they face after military life.


of 19 1/8/16, 9:26


16/19

A U.S. Army soldier in Afghanistan. (Photo: Nolan Peterson/The Daily Signal)

Combat veterans have experienced a spectrum of emotions

whose breadth supersedes by a number you cannotimagine the emotional fluctuations of civilian life. That’s

why it’s hard to care about normal things when you come

back. Ask a combat veteran about this; it’s a common

feeling.

Normal life, whatever that is, seems silly and pointless. It’s

a gray rerun that leaves you feeling hollow. You live on a

razor’s edge, only skipping across the surface of life, never

returning to the heights or the depths of what you felt in

war.

But PTSD isn’t nostalgia. Nostalgia is really just forgetting

the bad parts of a memory. You never forget the bad parts

of war. The pain of losing a friend or the images of the


of 19 1/8/16, 9:26


17/19

dead reflect in everything you see and echo in everything

you hear in peace.

Yet, even in times of comfort, you find yourself missing thehardships of deployments. The tough times at least made

you feel something. And that’s what you miss the

most—feeling truly alive.

You say things like: “I was happier living in a plywood

hooch in Afghanistan with my worldly possessions reduced

to whatever fit into a backpack than I am now, living in this

apartment, where everything I could ever want is within

my grasp.” That’s from a veteran who now works on Wall

Street.

Reflections of War

How does that make sense? Why do the fantasies that

sustained us through the toughest times of our lives seem

like such a disappointment when we come home to live

them?

Maybe, for those who have been to war, the metric by


of 19 1/8/16, 9:26


18/19

which you measure pleasure and pain is permanently reset.

You’re not sad. You’re just flat. You start to lust for the

feelings to which you didn’t realize you were addicted, butrequired the worst experience of your life to achieve.

You grow resentful of those who go about their lives

indifferent to your experiences and the sacrifices of the

brothers and sisters with whom you’ve served. The little

pleasures and achievements that drive most people’s lives

and the challenges they claim to have overcome all seem

inconsequential.

You see reflections of your wartime experience in every

part of life, and you wonder, knowing what you know now,

how those around you can live the way they do.

That is PTSD.

Combat veterans aren’t damaged. They are enlightened,complicated souls forced to live life by a set of rules and

expectations that can make pursuing true happiness feel

like chasing the moon.


of 19 1/8/16, 9:26


19/19

And for those who ultimately descend into a darkness from

which they cannot save themselves, it was not war that

broke them.

It was the peace to which they returned, but never found.


why soldiers miss war

Documents