A/N: I'm not sure how I feel about this one. I know next to nothing about military history. This is only my view of how Goren got his Purple Heart, which until a week ago, never really registered to me. I would really like constructive criticism on this one since I think it sucks up until close to the end.
A man fires a rifle for many years, and he goes to war. And afterward he turns the rifle in at the armory, and he believes he's finished with the rifle. But no matter what else he might do with his hands, love a woman, build a house, change his son's diaper; his hands remember the rifle.
I have a list of topics that are safe to talk about with (nearly) anyone. There's a list of topics that I'll only talk about with Andy or in casual passing where a conversation is unlikely. There is a small list of things I will never, ever talk about.
That short list consists only of The Gulf War.
Why am I thinking about it now? A simple reason: Jarhead was on TV today. That movie is about the Marine Corps. I'm Army. Big difference. But war is war and the differences between branches become minimal. Either way, I can't watch that movie. Or Full Metal Jacket for that matter, despite it being about Vietnam.
For months after I was discharged, I suffered from PTSD, silently and sometimes not so silently. I didn't sleep for fear of night terrors; I didn't eat because even the thought of food made me sick. The flashbacks were the worst, striking me down with vivid reminders, mental reenactments of the horror I was witness to. I drank a lot, simply to avoid. As I was doing a couple months ago, I tried to help myself by avoiding lucidity. It would let me sleep, or rather, pass out dreamlessly. During the day, I was too messed up to even notice the flashbacks. Or I'd gotten used to them.
Every day, something insignificant would trigger one. The smell of diesel exhaust from a bus would conjure up images of burning oil shooting from wells in the sand. A car backfiring brought up memories of roadside bombs. It was always something that most people ignore. Sights, sounds, smells-- something that most people wouldn't even be able to remember from their day easily stopped me in my tracks, freezing me in place with an iron grip of fear and anxiety.
Any memory was just as likely as another to manifest itself in sensory ways, but there were two that plagued me more than the rest.
My squad was on a patrol when we came upon a small village, maybe 10 families. The place had been decimated, massive holes in the tiny houses. It was ghostly, the slight breeze blowing tattered curtains, and doors hanging off hinges creaked as they swung slightly. It was deserted, but we soon found out why. Behind the houses, down a dune into a trough in the rolling terrain, we found the families from the village. Or most of them. We had found a pile of charred bodies, each one either a tiny child or man, but there were a few where it was hard to tell gender. I stood on the hill, hands clenching my rifle, staring transfixed at the scene in front of me. My heart pounded and my stomach did back flips in my throat but I couldn't tear my eyes away. Beside me, just out of my periphery, I could hear a friend of mine getting sick.
That scene, while forever imprinted in my brain, only haunted me a small percentage of the time. It was what came a few days later that made up a majority of the flashbacks I suffered from.
On my back, hidden from everyone, I have a scar, a jagged line, from the base of my spine diagonally up to my ribs on my right side; the reason for my discharge and the basis for my Purple Heart. A jagged line, one that will be there for as long as I live, marring my physical landscape. I can see the top of it poking out from under my arm as I get dressed in the mornings. It's a permanent reminder of man's predilection for death and destruction, subtle commentary on humanity's fragility. I'm not sure if Andy's noticed it or not-- if she has, she hasn't said anything about it and I thank her for that.
It had been a routine patrol, a trek down a desert road lined with the remains of tanks, hummers, civilian cars. Proceed with caution; those cars didn't end up like that by the hand of some cosmic deity. Roadside bombs, incoming missiles, something had torn up the road and it's travelers. That something still lay in waiting for us, just beneath the sand, untouched until we hit it. Our jeep exploded into a blackened mass of flying shrapnel, the acrid smoke billowing high into the air. The explosion had been behind to my right. The force of the blast knocked me down, but not before I was hit with a piece of metal with a razor sharp edge, tearing across my back. I remember lying with my face in the sand, my right side feeling like it was on fire, a white-hot pain radiating through my leg, my stomach. I remember screaming in pain, writhing in the sand. I was convinced I was dying. Then I blacked out.
I was later told that I'd been one of the lucky ones. If that piece of metal had a trajectory a few inches more to the left, it would have severed my spine. I was also told that I was one of a handful of guys in my squad to survive.
At the time, I didn't consider myself lucky. I thought the guys who'd died had been the lucky ones. They didn't have to live life constantly looking over their shoulders, hardly sleeping, self-medicating. Even now, I occasionally wish I hadn't been "lucky". I wouldn't be missing anything. The VA hospital pieced me back together and sent me back to New York for an honorable discharge and a medal. Seemed like an anti-climatic end to the longest nightmare I'd ever had. Pinning a purple ribbon to my uniform, while something to be proud of, is not compensation for the hell I'd lived through.
Slowly, day-by-day, I pieced my life back together, eventually getting myself under control. On the advice of my friend Lewis, I sought help. I survived. I am alive.
If only just barely.
I can still feel the pain, phantom twinges that barely register now but are as real as the day it happened. Some days more than others. The memories are a big part of who I am today and I'll never be who I was before I deployed.