PTSD, among other things

I think about PTSD sometimes. For instance, I recently applied for a job assisting veterans with mental health issues, including post-traumatic stress disorder. I haven't heard back yet from the potential employer, and I'm not entirely sure I want to, in spite of the growing desperation in my employment situation. Tonight I read an article by a woman who was diagnosed with PTSD after childbirth, a kind of strange diagnosis perhaps, but certainly believable, considering her circumstances. I am writing a short story that sort of deals with the subject of PTSD.

Regarding my own "issues," I doubt that I ever suffered with the disorder part of post-traumatic stress. I drank too much after I came home from Iraq. But I wasn't exactly a poster-child for sobriety before I left. I just had a lot of that active-duty combat pay in my bank account, and single-malt scotch tasted good and made the weird dreams go away. I probably had a serious predilection toward scotch-abuse long before I ever joined the army. In the past, occasionally something might have triggered a fucked-up kind of memory or instinctual fear. The best example I can think of is one moment when I was entering a freeway on-ramp and I drove right over some piece of trash in the middle of the street. I clenched up in dread as I expected that the rubbish in the road was some kind of improvised explosive that would blow me sky-high. But I was in Nashville, Tennessee, where there have been few (as in zero) incidents of roadside bombs in recent memory. And after that, I just kept driving. I think that someone with a real case of PTSD would have probably had to stop and shut down and suffer for a while.

But now I am rethinking this whole issue. It is February and Football Season Is Over, baseball season is two months away, and basketball, hockey, and the Winter Olympics all make me miserable. I am without sport to entertain me. For some strange reason in my personal economy, I still have cable on at my apartment, and I have the MLB Network, which broadcasts a lot of off-season gossip and shows that try to determine who the best right fielder was during the 1960s. I can think of three who were all the best: Hank Aaron, Roberto Clemente, and Frank Robinson. They also do these recap shows on entire seasons of Major League Baseball, and tonight they are showing 2003. The year we invaded Iraq. The year I went to Iraq. The year that the Chicago Cubs went to game six of the NLCS with a 3-2 lead in the series, all the way to the 8th inning of game six with a score of 3-0. After a flyout in the top of the inning, they were five outs away from their first pennant since 1945... and then the Bartman "incident." No rational person still blames Bartman for the Cubs' loss, much like no rational person would pay $22 to walk around a "science" museum that shows off mankind's recent relationship with living dinosaurs. No, the Cubs pissed that one away all on their own. Yet it still haunts me. I  recall thinking what a great moment this would be, while I'm stuck in a stinking shithole war-zone in the Middle East, if the Chicago Cubs could possibly alleviate my agony (I was really whiny about being in Iraq, by the way) by just making five more fucking outs and going to the World Series. We had satellite television, on which we could get not only all kinds of European soccer and pornography, but also rebroadcasts of the baseball postseason. And it was in October 2003 that my dreams died. Later that month, I came back to the States on leave, and after being home for no more than a day, my girlfriend broke up with me. I wandered around in a drunken haze for two weeks, barely caught the several flights I needed to make it back to Baghdad, where I suffered from an increasingly serious lack of motivation regarding my military duties, and then two months later got myself crushed by an overturned High-Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle and sent home with a tube in my chest.

So if you ask me if I suffer from PTSD, I'll probably say no. Until you mention the 2003 Major League Baseball season.