Dying on the inside
Sleep. That's all I wanted, all I needed.
Just one night's sleep, but it's impossible, that's when they return; the memories. At first, they crept into my dreams hazy and dreamlike, like a thick fog blanketing the fields that we were ordered to protect. It was like watching a movie with bad reception and the sound turned way down, you couldn't make out any real details. As the shock of being home wore off, the dreams grew clearer, so vivid that they began to haunt me, forcing me relive it all over again, the pain, the death and the destruction.
Sleep.
During the day I can control it, keep the horror at bay. It's hard, but I can do it. At night I have no control, no power to stop it from playing once again. The screams wake me; I don't know if they are from my dreams or if they are my own. Either way I always wake to find myself in the same state; alone in my old room in a sweat drenched frenzy, my pulse racing, my breath rapid and a look of maniacal terror on my face. The dirty threadbare sheets on the bed are always knotted in a ball at my feet like a macramé craftwork. It always takes a while for me to remember where I am, and I'm always scared. It's the least I deserve.
Sleep. Once a favourite pastime, it was now something I feared. I spent most of my nights staring down at the empty end of a whiskey bottle with the hopes of achieving one night of nothing. It rarely happens.
No one told us how to cope with war, like the emotional shit. The officers in charge didn't say anything before we were sent to Vietnam, I s'pose they didn't want to kill our buzz, the only thing they wanted to kill was enemy soldiers and that's what we did. Indiscriminately it seemed, whether it was from the air or on land our army took thousands of thousands of lives. It never occurred to me or the other men at that time that alot of the lives taken were innocent. We were fighting on civilian land and it was the civilians that paid the price.
At my weaker moments, images flash through my mind. They are usually triggered by harmless things like a passing train or a backfiring car causing flashbacks of rapid gunfire to surge through my brain.
There's no one I could talk to about this. Sure, there are others wiggin' out over the same heavy shit, but we don't speak about it, fuck that we're men. Men don't talk about things like that, besides what use is some head shrink to me? So the only thing to do is pretend like it never happened, the dreams are the only thing that remind me that it was real.
Sleep, I find myself fighting the urge to drift off, it doesn't always work and I slip into a fitful slumber; its unavoidable.
I never asked for this. I never volunteered, I was drafted. I remember watching the broadcast as if it were yesterday. We were all sitting around the TV in the basement, my band mates, my sister and her best friend. We watched as the men in their slick suits drew out numbers. I remember the way my stomach twisted as they read out my birth date and the way it dropped to the floor when I was given my number, when called upon I was being sent over first. I was an ideal candidate, young, unmarried, no kids, no money and no college courses to attend. Following my dream of becoming a great musician, perhaps the next Jimi Hendrix, had been my death sentence.
They told us we were going to defend our country, defend our freedom and on our return they told us we'd be hailed as heroes. They were wrong. There's nothing heroic in what we were asked to do, in what we did. It was shoot or be shot, and on the killing fields that's all that mattered. I was one of the lucky ones, after four solid days and nights of the heaviest rain I had ever seen, the enemy attacked. I saw men, guys who had become my closest friends die. Ignoring my wounds, I tried to save as many as I could but managed only three. As day broke, the fighting stopped and the enemy soldiers moved on, satisfied that they had exterminated our unit. Covered in a mixture of blood (both mine and others) and mud and running on pure adrenaline I emerged shakily from my hiding spot and radioed base.
If I knew how hard it was going to be to deal once I got back, I wouldn't have fought as hard as I did. Two of the men I had saved from slaughter died before the 'chopper came. The last bled out a few minutes after we were in the air. I was the only survivor and due to my heroism or some shit like that I was awarded the Purple Heart, as well as a ticket home.
It was difficult to adjust to being back home, the lack of sleep fuelled the growing fire that had begun to take over since arriving. Anyone that was close to me got burned, my sister Janey was hurt the most. I had been back for a few weeks, after those fucking nightmares started. She had tried to wake me while I was having an episode, and I had attacked her but not before she found my new method of coping. Before long, alcohol made no difference I became immune to its numbing affects and had started to look for other ways to forget, I started using. I'd always been against real drugs; sure I'd toked up once in a while but pot isn't not a drug, heroin was heavy; the real deal. Before the war I would never have touched the shit, you were signing your own death warrant. Now, I'd lost everything that was me. I couldn't write songs or play my guitar, I couldn't even watch the old band play; Max's drumming was too much. I'd shut myself away from my friends and now the only family member I had left.
Sleep
It took twelve stitches to repair the knife wound on her arm, but it would take a hell of a lot more to repair the emotional damage of finding out I was using. Her words seared my ears 'Great, so you're a skag head now?' The look on her face said more than she could have in words. 'You need help Trent, before it's too late.'
"She was right Trent," Trent's gaze slowly made its way up from his bony fingers that idly picked at the seam of his jeans, to the corpulent bespectacled man that sat behind the large desk, Doctor Alfred Finkelstein. "I'm sorry that it took you so long to seek it."
"I wanted help, I knew I was going the wrong way about it, but the more I took the less I remembered and that felt amazing. But as the high wore off the added pain of withdrawals made me pray for death, an end to the bullshit. Six months passed, I hadn't seen Jane since that night at the hospital. I couldn't go back, not while I was like that, like this." Trent raised his sinewy arms, "Doped up and out of my mind, living off the streets and doing what I could to score my next hit."
"But you're not on the streets anymore," Doctor Finkelstein replied and gave a non threatening smile.
"No, I'm in the fucking Nuthouse." Trent scoffed.
Doctor Finkelstein sighed as he exhaled, "This isn't a Nuthouse. You're not crazy. This is a place for people like you to come and recover."
"People like me?"
"Men who served in the war and are suffering what we call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, men who are having difficulty coping adjusting to civilian life."
"I was coping just fine." Trent said defiantly.
The man arched an eyebrow at Trent, "Trent, you have described some classic signs of PTSD. The reason you are here is because you were found in a back alley in a bad part of town. You tried to overdose; you were in a coma, if it hadn't been garbage collection night,"
"Yeah I know, I would have died, I should have you know."
"No, I don't know. What I do know is that I'm here to help you. This won't be easy and it will only work if you're willing to try to help yourself. Our first goal is to slowly ween you off your Heroin dependency by administering doses of methadone to curb the withdrawal symptoms. You will also be required to attend daily group and one on one therapy sessions, so we can closely monitor your progress and see how you're handling it here."
Trent gave a grunt and watched as the Doctor scribbled in a note pad. "Can I go now?"
Doctor Finkelstein gave a concerned look and then nodded. "Group is at ten a.m. every morning, our sessions are at two. You are free to leave whenever you wish since you signed yourself in, but," Doctor Finkelstein sighed and looked at Trent earnestly. "I strongly suggest you stay, at least until you have finished your methadone treatment."
Trent nodded, "Thanks Doc." He said and walked out into the lobby area.
'I hope this works.' He thought to himself as he exited the building into the communal gardens and lit up a cigarette.