B.A. had always been a strong person, but as they say, the bigger they are, the harder they fall. The final straw in his case had been being awake as he was being loaded onto the plane to Fort Bragg. War was hell, and it could break anybody.
He might have been fixed afterward if he hadn't been stuck where he was with the doctors and nurses who were all convinced he was ill, and had contradicting ideas as to what would heal him after his final mission in Vietnam had gone so horribly wrong.
Every week, there was a new treatment, but that was all there was about this place that was new. He probably would have lost all sense of time and reality in this place where they constantly fed him pills that made him fuzzy, twitchy, or a million other things if it weren't for his friends. His friends would always come and break him out when they needed his mechanical expertise for a job, and he was always happy to help. The alternative was being surrounded by too white walls and fed pills to the point where the walls became wavy, shimmered, and started to look like they were melting.
The best part about having his friends around was that they put up with his quirks, curbed his violent behavior when necessary, and put up with the fact that he was so scared of flying that the thought of being on an airplane practically paralyzed him. To his friends, he wasn't an interesting case that could be cured one day if only the right treatment could be found. He wasn't a guinea pig to be fed a wide variety of drugs in order to see if they would stabilize his mood and get rid of his violent tendencies. He wasn't a patient.
To his team, he was just B.A., and he was happy just being B.A..