All I've ever wanted to be. is. 

Safe.

tags: mortgage

Photo by xymonau courtesy of stock.xchng

I suppose that’s something one doesn’t hear every day. A few days ago or so, Richard saw an ad that reminded him of the movie Starship Troopers, from the novel of the same name, and asked me if I had seen it. I had not, and so he resolved that I needed to see it. My old friend Marvin is a huge Heinlein fan, but I have never read any. I’ve heard the negative criticisms, that Heinlein’s fiction is written at a juvenile level and doesn’t include any “hard” science, merely the imaginings of a schoolboy. I’ve also heard that his wit bit very hard. Richard remembered the movie as satirical and thought I would appreciate it. We were about thirty minutes in to it, and I was about to give up because I was getting bored, when, during a basic training sequence, a member of Rico’s squad falls down, and her weapon fires, blowing apart the head of a fellow solider whom Rico had told to remove his helmet.

The moment was visceral, disgusting in its ultra-violence, which was the point, of course, but it hit me in the intestines and the esophagus. I could barely breathe, and had to forcibly remove my eyes from the screen, the room. My skin crawled and my brain felt like it was on fire. I could not catch my breath and I felt a real physical pain throughout my body. I kept seeing the head shatter, splinter, over and over, in a quick flash, as it had happened on the screen.

Not in slow motion. Not in 3D. Not in Hollywood hyped-up hypersound. Just the visceral sound and sight from the screen, the flash. I still see it, and it still hurts. I ended up in the bathroom, the smallest room in the house, wanting to climb into a small dark hole, wanting to shut my eyes, my ears, and stop my brain from seeing this thing. The psychological pain of that moment was overwhelming. There was no time. Just that moment.

I came up for air enough to realize I needed water and I needed refuge, which would require a trip back out of the bathroom through the kitchen, and exposure to the living room where the movie was. I put my fingers in my ears, walked quickly. Richard muted the television, I think he apologized. I got my Blistex, my twenty-four hour a day oral comfort, and my water glass, and stepped quickly to the bedroom where I curled into a ball. Richard followed, he apologized, he stroked my hair. I wanted to stop breathing, go back in time, be in a realm where I did not see that image.

But I’m not. It’s not Richard’s fault. There was no blame, is no blame here; in the bedroom I could look at my pictures of the sea and imagine the sound of the waves rolling in, rolling out, rolling in. I remembered my first glimpse of a sea, in Florida at the Gulf of Mexico, the water warm like the bath, and being able to swim out so far I lost sight of my mother but could still see the bottom through the clear blue water, the sand bar still far out to the horizon, nothing but the sound of the waves and the bright sun and the gulls overhead. I would hold on to my inflatable raft and spin in circles for hours, and there was no time, there was no pain, there was no fear. I wanted to be there, be her, not be me, not be the person who can’t face the evils of this world without falling apart.

But I’m not. So today I have bowel spasms and diarrhea. What a fitting topic for a blog post that is. The pain in my abdomen has been excruciating today, and it’s been hard to concentrate on information for the sales comm. I am working on; like thinking through sludge. And that image is still there, in my mind. I know it will return. It will lie in wait, just like the car accident that brought me here, the devastatingly wrong left turn I made on Walnut Street onto I-40 that turned my car into scrap metal, my neck into ropes of scar tissue and left me with a permanent tic every time I turn left, when I expect that this will be the left turn that will kill me.

And it hurts.

tags: ptsd

When I closed the last page I understood this work explained PTSD, and it has sat in the back of my mind like a coiling snake waiting for the key to explain it here.

This morning I read yet another article about soldiers and PTSD by Mike Tharp, and Sergeant Seth “Doc” Musikant provided me the key when he explained his experience with combat fatigue after the Humvee he was in rode over a homemade bomb, resulting in the death of one of his fellow soldiers and the severe wounding of three others.

 “It’s like there’s an invisible wall,” Musikant said about the anxiety that temporarily troubled him.

DeLillo managed, in his excellent art, to define a state of living without the ability to connect. I struggle, continuously, with my own invisible wall. I desire a closer union with other people, but I can’t manage it, no matter what happens, as if there is an invisible gel between myself and others that prevents me from feeling any connection. I find myself in limbo between projects, jobs, groups, unable to connect. I slip away. I get involved in things, but I’m not all there. I’m a remote observer. I don’t talk. I’m around, but I don’t quite participate. Often, it doesn’t even occur to me that I’m not involved.

I’ve been described as remote, arrogant, full of myself, angry, pissed off, annoyed, and other emotional states during these times. I am almost always surprised by others’ conceptions of the way I feel, because usually, I feel absolutely nothing, and unfortunately, nothing which would enable me to feel empathy or sympathy with them, or in contrast, I feel quite happy as I am. While I’m puzzled by others’ struggles with me, I feel quite at a loss to correct their conceptions or help them feel more at ease, and the gulf widens. I can’t fix it.

In DeLillo’s parlance, I’m a falling man who will never land. I've read book reviews that claim that DeLillo's falling men are ultimately saved, and they get it wrong. His men, who include one of the men who took over the planes that day as well as the shadowy lover of the main character's estranged wife's mother, who may or may not also be a terrorist, are never coming down to earth, never connecting with a savior, never going to join the larger swell of humanity.

I know now, although it is not a perfect knowledge, that this feeling, this invisible wall, this fog, is a function of the brain, a protective shield put in place when I was very young when things happened to me I did not understand, and it is a shield I cannot lift on my own. Paradoxically, the shield includes a powerful defense mechanism that makes me extremely vulnerable to certain stimuli, and when I am, suddenly, cast into a world of feeling absolutely ever leaf that twitches, I am thrust from the world of fog into a world where everything hurts. And the others around me cannot understand me then, either, because I seem to be someone who is made manic by stimuli that they are deaf to in most situations. In the case of terrorists and others who train to be killers, it may be an adopted shield, and in me, an involuntary one, but either way, it does not wash off.

I’m off balance. I’m falling out of a skyscraper every day, and most people are standing on the ground amazed at the event happening in the sky.

And that is PTSD.

Day destroys the night, night divides the day.

I am not an expert on Thompson in any way so I may have that a bit lopsided, but my interpretation of Thompson's ideals were that America was the land of the free mind unburdened by a free government. That meant that the individual could turn the gun back on the government if necessary, something a lot of liberal readers struggled with about him, myself included. I also struggled with something I saw as a uniquely male element to Thompson, a risk-taking recklessness with himself that I am not sure women can completely share. Mike explained that he felt HT had many moments of connection with the female psyche, and I have resolved to give him another chance in this department, and, indeed, to read more Hunter now.

Our conversation was one which fired my brain. Yesterday on the MOG, Barrie Sutcliffe, a friend who is probably responsible, along with my friend Frank (Hermes), for at least forty percent of the electronic music I've been listening to for the past year, introduced me to Ben Frost. Barrie's MOG post featured the title track from Frost's latest, Theory of Machines, a track which served to break my heart and then put it back together again, and after speaking with Mike I thought about drugs and other ways of deconstructing brain cells in order to reconstruct the heart. How sometimes to build, we have to tear up, tear down, and otherwise break out of ourselves. Frost's piece breaks everything away and then carries it down a path toward a light which bathes one in brilliant understanding. This kind of music is very personal and powerful to me, and something I don't talk about very often. Because it manages to reach behind the wall.

As someone whose felt the call to write since I was about eight years old, I've relished words for their ability to bring order, to give structure to the mind palace, to bring meaning to the formless void, but they can be a trap. They can wound, and kill, laying mines in the mind that remain for years after and fire repeatedly without expiring, wounding again and again. They can become bricks that hem us in. Words comfort but they can also paper us into a surface reality without meaning. Being a writer sometimes means existing on a surface where meaning doesn't even belong. As a professional communicator I've lived with the reality that my precious words are many times useless and worthless. And in my personal life, my inability to form words to those around me has often times left me alone because I can't bring them in. I have often longed for the bulldozer, the burning tower, the hurricane, the tsunami that will tear all my defenses down, but they never. ever. crack.

This will sound cheesy, probably, but I just finished Thomas Harris' Hannibal Rising, and Hannibal the serial killer goes through a similar process in his own heart, except at the end, he cannot face the breaking out either - he chooses instead to hold his walls steadfast, and becomes imprisoned inside them. I have always felt that I never had a choice in the matter, but after this morning, I realize that is not entirely true. Mike said that the issue was my belief in my own fear. The statement was like listening to Ben Frost's track for the first time, all over again.

The gate is straight, deep and wide. Break on through to the other side.

My PTSD is an involuntary thing. But it is also part of a pattern in my life I have chosen to believe in, something that has put a wall between parts of me I wish I could break free. If I chose to believe that there was no wall, would it disappear and release those parts of me, especially the creative parts I long to set loose? Or will I have to engage in my own process of deconstruction to bring them down?

tags: hunter s. thompson, MOG, barrie james sutcliffe, hermes, ben frost, deconstructivism, electronic music, ptsd

Richard and I still plan to visit Turkey in the summer of 2010 and see Engin play for Turkey in the next FIBA World Cup, but I think he will have plenty of opportunities to shine in the meantime. I have had a few ecstatic emails from my friends in Turkey this afternoon, but few details so far. They will carry on with the Engin fan club for me though I am sure.

Thanks to sariss at Interbasket for the news!

tags: engin atsür, fiba, efes pilsen, nscu, nc state basketball, wolfpack basketball, interbasket

Source

One weekend after I graduated from college I drove up from Gastonia to visit my friend Robin. We had been friends for about three years, and even though we lived only three hours apart, shared a spiritual bond that was strengthened primarily through long correspondences back and forth. Sometimes I thought it was merely my inaccessability that attracted Robin to me: my youth, naivete, virginity, and protected status on a private Catholic college campus must have seemed romantic in its distance from the harsh realities of his life as a S.W.A.T. officer and deputy sheriff in Forsyth County.

Robin penned his autobiography -- past / present and hoped-for future -- to me via long missives written on yellow legal pads in tight, cramped script. Inside legal envelopes he'd stuff pictures, drawings, and the detritus of his life - bits of notes he scribbled to himself on shift, polaroids he'd take of his cop friends rappeling in the mountains, pencil drawings of military tactics he's figured out and camps he had been in; foreign countries and missions he couldn't tell me the truth about, so he'd draw funny pirate maps of their locations and call the characters Senor T and Madame L. Triple-drawn x's would mark the kills. He had a wicked sense of humor and a dark, dark core. He always said he didn't have a dark side, he had a few bright spots. That line was never particularly funny to me, even though he was possessed of a great wit.

On this particular weekend, I was just leaving my apartment when my phone rang. Robin said he'd been called into work on an emergency but he expected it to be over about an hour after I got there, so he'd leave the key somewhere for me at his trailer. I drove on, dug the key out of the secret hideout and waited for him to come home. And waited. And waited. Hours later he came home, shaken, although if you didn't know him, you would never have known he was particularly upset. Robin was a very small man with incredibly small, graceful hands - this is important later, it was the result of a childhood illness which had led doctors to tell his family that he might never be like other children, a handicap which his refusal to accept led him straight into the arms of Fort Bragg and the 87th -- and he was preternaturally quiet, like the dark. His emotions were either usually so far under the surface you doubted he had any, or so far out in the open you thought he had bought them from somewhere, brand new, and when I first met him, that was powerfully attractive, of course - he had the dark and mysterious, just not the tall.

I'm digressing, I'm sorry, but it's hard not to do with Robin. I haven't really confronted my memories of him since . . . well, it's coming. So, back to the story.  He came home, upset; there had been violence, dangerous violence, and that was why his team had been called in, and getting cranked up because they needed to be cranked up, and having something really bad go down, was worse than getting cranked up only to have to get cranked back down, looking endlessly for somewhere to drain the useless adrenaline burning off him like dry ice. Because the bad stuff stayed with him, and worse, the bad stuff, when it happened - when there were gunshots, and heads exploding, and blood in someone's front yard, and death - all the other deaths came back, all the other violence came back, all the things he had been trained to do, all the wounds he had caused, came back. Robin and I bonded, you see, because we both had flashbacks.

Robin strode into his little trailer, walking past me as if I wasn't even there, reached into his freezer and dug out a clear, cold bottle of vodka. He took down a tall beverage glass from the cupboard and filled the glass with vodka. Then he came into the living room, sat on a chair, and began to drain the glass methodically, as if he was taking medicine. Sixteen ounces of vodka. Later that night Robin tried to force me to sleep with him, provoking a flashback in me. Not a nice cycle. If Robin and I had ever gotten together, I think we'd both be dead. As it is, only I have survived our friendship intact. Several years ago, my friend, and the friend of many others of my friends, put a revolver in his throat and pulled the trigger. His body wasn't found for three days.

Philip at Furious Seasons linked to another great "War Torn" article in the New York Times today on the effects of the war at home: vets struggling with PTSD self medicating with alcohol:

. . . [in] a New Jersey study of 292 National Guard members who had returned from Iraq in the last year. . .  researchers found that 37 percent had experienced “problem drinking”; for those with post-traumatic stress disorder, the figure rose to 55 percent.

I would never argue that if Robin had gotten treatment for drinking, he would be alive, or that if Robin had gotten treatment for PTSD, he would be alive; that would be insulting his memory, and he did so many important things, more important than being remembered as a messed up veteran with a drinking and drug problem. But that's part of what he was, too, and it was the part that drove me away from him, that scared me away, that made it impossible for me to be his friend for a long time, and that plagues me, sometimes, with a crushing guilt since he died. How can any of us ever turn this around?

Photo by bigotry courtesy of stock.xchng

Source

tags: ptsd, war veterans, alcoholism, war wounded

A great article in the Sunday New York Times about the science of suicide attempts. Research into bridge jumping, and historical patterns such as the incidence of suicide-by-gas in Great Britain over the course of the last century appear to prove that simply reducing or removing the pathways to self killing prevent a great many people struck with cancer of the perspective from doing themselves in. 

In the 60s and 70s, the UK converted homes from coal gas to natural gas over the course of many years. This reduced the number of homes that had a convenient source of deadly gas in their kitchens, and a popular method of suicide in Great Britian, that of "sticking one's head in the oven," began to decline. 

A researcher who followed thwarted Golden Gate bridge-jumpers after their unsuccessful suicide attempts found that an astonishing 90 percent of them managed not to attempt to kill themselves again. 

. . . .“But to me, the more significant fact is that 90 percent of them got past it. They were having an acute temporary crisis, they passed through it and, coming out the other side, they got on with their lives.”

In Seiden’s view, a crucial factor in this boils down to the issue of time. In the case of people who attempt suicide impulsively, cutting off or slowing down their means to act allows time for the impulse to pass — perhaps even blocks the impulse from being triggered to begin with. What is remarkable, though, is that it appears that the same holds true for the nonimpulsive, with people who may have been contemplating the act for days or weeks.

“At the risk of stating the obvious,” Seiden said, “people who attempt suicide aren’t thinking clearly. They might have a Plan A, but there’s no Plan B. They get fixated. They don’t say, ‘Well, I can’t jump, so now I’m going to go shoot myself.’ And that fixation extends to whatever method they’ve chosen. They decide they’re going to jump off a particular spot on a particular bridge, or maybe they decide that when they get there, but if they discover the bridge is closed for renovations or the railing is higher than they thought, most of them don’t look around for another place to do it. They just retreat.”

Seiden cited a particularly striking example of this, a young man he interviewed over the course of his Golden Gate research. The man was grabbed on the eastern promenade of the bridge after passers-by noticed him pacing and growing increasingly despondent. The reason? He had picked out a spot on the western promenade that he wanted to jump from, but separated by six lanes of traffic, he was afraid of getting hit by a car on his way there.

“Crazy, huh?” Seiden chuckled. “But he recognized it. When he told me the story, we both laughed about it.”

Carrie Fisher, in her book Postcards From the Edge, called mental illness "suffering from cancer of the perspective," and I've always treasured that apt description. With all the drugs and billions of pouinds of paper dedicated to diagnosing our mental ills, I sometimes wonder if what some of us all need is just to put our heads down between our legs until it passes, and we can look up and notice that the sun is shining again. My anecdotal evidence for all of this is that with my own suicide attempt -- even though I had been contemplating killing myself for more than ten years -- when the last pill went down, I wanted to take it back.

I think this may be the most important lesson I could ever impart to another person contemplating the same act. 

tags: suicide, ptsd, carrie fisher

You do get sucked in - people who are getting beatdown every week have that appeal, it's the whole watching a train wreck syndrome of course - but tonight I feel compelled to comment, mostly because I think this show (and I can't single it out in particular because I really don't watch other reality shows, so perhaps they are all like this) fails to live up to its opportunity to be better than the shit that gets strewn on Fox and UPN every day of the week. The Food Network seems perfectly content to dive straight into the gutter with Maury and Jerry, when it could be trying to live up to its demographic.

Who wants to watch people put into situations they can't possibly succeed in? Do we, as a country, possess such self-hatred that we have nothing left but to mock those who fail more spectacularly than we do? This past week, contestants were asked to create a dish in half an hour using ingredients given to them, and were told they would have to then describe the dish on television. Just before they walked out to do their presentations, they were paired up and told they had to present the dish of their partner, a dish they not only knew nothing about - not what it was, not what was in it, not how it was made - but a dish they had to taste and describe in ninety seconds to a camera.

Nobody did well. Not anyone. And the criticisms leveled at the contestant were absolutely ludicrous.  There's something sickening about this as entertainment. The second challenge was not a bit tamer, and only one pair managed to do a decent job, mainly because they knew their limitations and didn't try to dazzle. There is a young kid named Shawn on this show, a pure talent, and I want to cheer for him because he seems to be an intuitive chef - in some way, despite the ridiculous situation he's being put in, the fact that he is really a natural chef comes through, born, basically, to cook - but the other part of me wants to should out the SPAMalot motto: Run Away!

tags: food network, reality tv, television, the next food network star

What I did not know then, but learned some twenty-odd years later, was that my stepfather came into my life after what might have been my first post-traumatic break. It must have happened after my great-grandfather died, in 1975, when I was 9. When my father came to visit us and tell us what happened. I had not seen my father for over three years, and the last time I had seen him, he had been driving away in a taxi, forced to leave after trying to take me from my mother’s home. My father remembers the day he visited me as a pleasant homecoming, with me staring lovingly into his eyes begging him to take me away from there. I don’t really remember what happened that day, even now; when I found my father many years later, I asked him when I could see my grandfather, and he had to tell me again that he was dead.

Whatever reaction I had, I believe it started the time in my life that is a series of fuzzy events. I remember eye surgery, trying to sleep all alone in the hospital and failing, terrified in the dark alone with the instruments, and vomiting all over the bed, forcing a midnight bedclothes change because a nurse fed me ginger ale while I was still on a drip. I remember a young woman teaching me to look up phonetic spellings in the dictionary, and trying to get me to stop reading when I encountered new words, which I never did, because I would manage to puzzle out the meanings, yet not later be able to explain how I did it. Today I can still puzzle meanings out of new words from context, a talent for words that has always been with me. An old friend that sometimes seemed my only friend. And I remember numerous discussions about me when I wasn't supposed to be listening; about fixing me. About my problem and about what happened and about what to do about it and about it's getting worse. I remember many nights of not sleeping, because I was afraid of the nightmares, and trying numerous tricks to stay awake. I remember my mother's father giving me an am/fm radio with a headphone jack, and listening to FM rock all night long, trying to keep the nightmares at bay, staring at the starred sky through my tiny, screened-in trailer window.

Two years later Connie took my mother away for a week, and then my mother came back with a green station wagon and boxes. We moved to St. Petersburg. They had decided I was not going to skip any more grades because I needed social development, even though some experts had suggested I get bussed to a special arts high school in Sarasota. My mother had gotten married, like some kind of secret she was ashamed of; a second marriage by a divorcee was somehow something children didn’t attend, as if we didn’t belong, or it had nothing to do with us, a separation between him and us that caused huge problems right from the very beginning. Connie had a family with her, and she had a family with us. His relations with us were far from familial, and to this day I cannot forget for a moment how much damage he caused with his lies and his behavior. And I don’t think I have gotten any closer to forgiveness. I have just managed distance and time. I ran away from him after all, but that may have been all that I have ever really accomplished.

Photo by Byron Solomon of Lakeland, FL, courtesy stock.xchng

tags: ptsd, child abuse, verbal abuse, stepfather, stepdaughter

Dr. Raines (my psychiatrist) and I have begun to talk about my stepfather. Yes folks, I didn’t just get one abusive father, I got two! I won the bad dad lottery! Ahem.

My stepfather (man, I got a lot of ‘splainin’ to do here) was basically a very smart, cowardly drunk. It is the special, sick joy of the bright failure to rain doom on the young bright potential I think. Sexual abuse damages the nerves by twisting them out of true; verbal abuse damages the mind by planting weeds in the psyche that won’t die, won’t be stamped out, and won’t be silent.  The sins of the father are visited on the . . . well you know the rest.

And so my stepfather’s sins, perhaps, in his mind, not living up to the brightness of his brother, an artist who died young; perhaps not living up to the expectations of his own father; perhaps seeing in me the young daughter of his who ran far away and descended into drugs and an unknown underworld – the reasons are quite unknown to me – spewed forth onto me, warning of a darkness looming that would cover all of my brightness. And I was a very bright little girl. I learned to read, so the story goes, when I was just eighteen months old. In first grade I won a state prize for finishing more Scholastic readers than any student in history – the entire collection, in fact. I painted a picture that won a county prize and was displayed in an art museum, sang a song in front of the entire school, and rewrote a portion of the yearly school musical.  In second grade I was first sent to third grade math and science before being bumped up to the middle of the third grade, and then eventually the middle of the fourth grade, all in one year. By the next year – fifth grade – I was tested at reading at a collegiate level even though I could not always pronounce the words I understood. I was eight.

And here was the violence he spewed:

• You’re not that smart.
• There are others who are smarter than you.
• When you’re older, you will be exposed for the fraud you are.
• Your smarts won’t get you far in life.
• The world won’t change no matter how smart you are.
• No one cares how smart you are.
• There is nothing you can do to change the world.
• When you get to college, people will see what a fraud you are.
• When you get out of here, people will see that you are really stupid, not smart at all.

For years I prayed for instant karma to come take the words out of my stepfather’s mouth.  But karma took another five years to snap back.

Photo by Stacy Braswell, the Woodlands, Texas, courtesy stock.xchng

tags: child abuse, verbal abuse, stepfather, stepdaughter, karma, instant karma, charlotte gainsbourg, little monsters, 5:55

Read the whole story at Furious Seasons.

Learn more about Ken Griffey, Jr. at Brittanica Online.

Photo: Willard Lee, Associated Press, from the Seattle Times. 

tags: ken griffey jr., major league baseball players, suicide, ptsd 

That's what we do with Marines - we patch them up and send them back.

T-Bo went back four more times, doing a total of four tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan, earning a combat action ribbon and a trip to the White House.

He never adjusted to a course of treatment, however, taking up to twelve different medications, which he mixed with alcohol. The Marine Corps did not teach T-Bo how to live with his PTSD. The only time he felt free of his symptoms was when he went back to combat.

Where his stress reactions were actually helping him stay alive. God, we'll never learn.

Yesterday in Grand Canyon National Park, T-Bo, 36, and his older brother, Will, 38, faced down a cadre of Tohono O'odham tribal police and U.S. Border agents after they ran through a canyon checkpoint with a stolen car. T-Bo had wrecked his own car trying to drive it into the canyon, a la Thelma and Louise. But this ain't Hollywood.

According to Arthur H. Rotstein of the Washington Post:

As tribal police and Border Patrol agents closed in, Twiggs, 36, apparently fatally shot his 38-year-old brother, Willard J. "Will" Twiggs, then killed himself.

Pinal County Sheriff's spokesman Mike Minter said no motive has been established. But Kellee Twiggs said the decorated Marine would still be alive if the military had given him enough help.

"All this violent behavior, him killing his brother, that was not my husband. If the PTSD would have been handled in a correct manner, none of this would have happened," she said in a telephone interview from Stafford, Va.

No motive has been established. I bet T-Bo had an answer for that. Too late to hear it now.

Grand Canyon photo by Bill Silvermintz via Stock.xchng

tags: war veterans, Iraq war, ptsd, war wounded, suicide, grand canyon  

"She'd just keep hitting you until you quit crying," Jessy said. "You learned to just stand there and take it.". . . .For more than two hours, Jessy Paddock described an angry mother who grew more and more out of control as her family welcomed more adopted children into its home.

To keep Sean and another daughter, Kayla, from wandering at night, Lynn Paddock wrapped them in blankets and cordoned their bound bodies between beds and shelves of books. Sometimes, duct tape would cover their mouths.

I knew Jessy would get there. I didn't know this in the dread-building-up way of horror movies, when the creepy music builds in crescendos and the blonde puts her trembling hand upon the door she just. shouldn't. open. Not in the inevitable, end-of-the-road feeling you have when you're coming home from work and you finally turn off onto your own street.

No, it was just a bone-deep instinct, like knowing how to put one foot in front of the other. Like taking your next breath. This is what happens when children are abused, and I know this because I was too. Nobody starved me for four days. But I was locked in a closet and I was left in my own urine.

Another time. Maybe after the trial. It's hard to talk, but harder to remain silent. Not if Jessy can speak.

tags: jessy paddock, lynn paddock, sean paddock, raleigh, north carolina, raleigh news and observer, child abuse 

The N&O profiled 20-year-old Iraqi war veteran Michael Beck on Sunday, a young man literally shredded by war. He went to Iraq as a guardsman - a guardsman! - and came back in pieces: 

To put it simply, Beck is torn up. It's almost more a question of what parts of him weren't injured. At hospital stops in Iraq, Germany and finally Walter Reed in Washington, doctors began work on a long list of damaged limbs and organs: colon, kidney, spleen, liver, left eye, right leg and left foot.

They removed the front half of his left foot. They clamped what was left of each lower leg in an external fixiator -- a framework of metal rods around the leg to support it and keep it stable. They did three days of surgery to gradually close the severe stomach wound that reached from his pubic bone to the bottom of his chest. They used Gore-Tex mesh that acted like a shoelace drawn gradually tighter.

All told, Beck's family estimates, he has more than 100 wounds large and small where shrapnel tore and burned his body.

It's hard to imagine a time when Michael will be whole, because he won't be. He is forever changed, his body a permanent marker in time of hell on earth. The hell George Bush put in place on September 12, 2001, and after, the hell we let him wage on this earth, the hell we still finance today. Imagine how long Michael might live, if he is saved. What he will resemble over time. Something like a wounded tree whose scars live on in wounded, twisted bark.

At the turn of the last century, aging Civil War veterans roamed our streets, many of them homeless, a continual reminder of the cost of five years of hell we inflicted on our soil.  Michael Beck could be reminding his generation for the rest of the century about what we did to them. I'm betting they will never forget.

Ever. 

Unusual tree knot by Onatas (Josh Klute) via Stock.xchng.

tags: ptsd, war veterans, disability, war wounds