A Moment in Time that lasts Forever – Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder aka PTSD

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A Moment in Time that lasts Forever –Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder aka PTSD

Walking in peace under the calming and reassuring clouds of heaven, my mind was rudely interrupted by the sound of a spinning single pair of bladed evilness connected to an ugly bird lumbering slowly above my head. Common to all who served in the Republic of South Vietnam during the era of 1965 through the middle 70’s, the twin-bladed whirling sound of the UH-1H helicopter can quickly bring the devil inside your head without trying. For most who served there whether they be a grunt, a radio operator, mechanic or artillery assigned, it is an instantaneous transformation from heaven to hell – an involuntary reaction to the past.

Although the sound of the helicopter often meant the arrival of angels who would swoop down from the dark smoke filled sky to come rescue you, it is also the sound that brings back the malevolent and sinful horror hidden deep inside the skull and that creeps into the conscious awareness like scorching red-hot lava runs to the sea, as it intrudes the peace of the mind with a single stroke of flashbacks and memories that cannot be ignored.

This is a pure sensory episode of hell and heaven. It is the soldier’s reality of life and living through the time of their life where all the chaos and all the destruction of human proportions made no sense whatsoever and wrapped up in one ball of fire that eventually created a ring of fire inside your head forever.

It is a trigger mechanism that sets the soul on fire and an experience that every soldier who spent their time in hell will not ever forget. It immediately clears the mind of all the reality of the present time and creates a taut and tense sensation within them as it time travels at the speed of nanoseconds and brings the mind back to the past where it lives forever.

The transformation of the brain cells retrieving the triggers of past memories kept in the back of the mind brings the soldier a twisted imprint of psychologically tempted pain and deeply and violently spins him or her into the frenzy of panic or anxiety. This temptation is not a controlled moment in time.

In an instant, the peace is gone and the war is back on. A besieged psyche of being dragged back into a war between being sane and insane, chilled and hot-headed and crazy versus pure craziness. It was the worst of times and it binds or bonds you to the present or future, whether you like it or not. It controls you better than you can control it because somehow, your mind has taken over the incompleteness of your humanity and time-traveled you back to those days where the infernal conditions of perdition swooped you up from the reality and cerebrally carry you into the winds of war unmercifully and irrational pain of yesterday. 

At this moment, you feel as if you are being punished for being somewhere that was forsaken by the morality of life and the destination of nothing but the earthly destruction of a human race caught in the perils of war and annihilation that resemble a genocide of mankind. A punishment that last forever and ever without reprieve or respite of the pressures your heart and brain endures during such episodes. Thus your breathing becomes heavy and almost choking you into a seizure of conscious awareness that is generating hormone-created pain throughout your body.

Your body shudders as your mind tries to capture the moment to stabilize your sensory awakening into the past. Looking up into the sky, you can hear the blades whomping loudly and the sight of the helicopter reassures you that all is real and what you are undergoing is a normal reaction to an event in your life that has left you scarred and branded forever.

So with minuscule time passing by, the faint sight of the ugly helicopter above you streams away like a drifting dark and gloomy cloud that makes an earth shuddering noise to your ears. Standing there, frozen and unmoving your eyes, your soul, and your head goes back in time and already alerted your senses as you can overhear the gunfire, the mortar explosions, smell the smoke and fire and the spells of horror that filled your heart with more than the years since it happened for reals. A tear begins to trickle slowly and leaks onto your numb face around your red water filled eyes and soon, the weeping flow like an uncontrolled river of tears you wipe away with your shaking hands and unsteady knees.

It is beyond logic or common sense what these tear-filled eyes have seen as these images are engrained into the mind incessantly and played back repeatedly whenever the sounds of hell are detected or heard above me in the clouds of the open sky.

Time and space – it was the worst and best of friends and foe but it was the one binding material in a tapestry of a war of many pieces. Mostly mental since the war has actually been gone for decades now, these dreadful remnants seem to live inside you forever.

This hovering image of the Huey was both a bird of a blessing and a companion of pain and sorrow. What was laden on this ugly bird were images of war never taken for granted.

Its shape endured all kinds of rain, terrain or weather but its arrival was usually associated with pain, death, and sorrow. For many, it is not just the sound of the Huey that triggers this emotional outburst. For other soldiers, it is the sound of gunfire, the celebration of the Fourth of July or the tune of a song that was played over and over on their favorite tape or Radio Saigon, a small link to the free world and set up to entertain the troops while under duress and stress of this war. You learn to deal with it by taking the hit or walking way so nobody sees the tears or trembling lips.

So as the mind travels at the speed of light, you become the unavoidable magnet to the connection between the days of the past and the present. Without any intentions voluntary or involuntary, you step into the haze of yesterday’s yellow, purple or green smoke and bloodshot magma-like fire and stepped into the dirty bird or stepped off the vibrating skids of the ugly green colored bird, devil or angel, to do what you are hired to do – be a soldier. Your mind freaks as you break into a sweat, your heart is pounding and your fingers seek to hold onto something solid as your knees get weak.

Your psyche is primed to adjust your rifle slung over your shoulder, and your helmet is held down with your free hand as you jump off the bird onto the ground only to turn around and see it drift away into the heavens or hell of the horizons where they dropped you and leaving you behind with others knowing they won’t be back for you for a very long time.

A time that is constant as the insides of your sensitive nostrils smells the presence of grease, oil, and hydraulic fluid while you were sitting on the bare floor inside the oddly shaped bird moments ago, and is rapidly replaced by the smell of sulfuric smoke of gunfire and mortar shell around you.

The smoke screen is lifting; your hasty footsteps are hammering the soft muddy ground as you make for cover the best you can under conditions known only to those who stand or crawl there with you.

The weight on your back is only compounded by the role you have – a medic - tied to a unit that is engaged in the revulsions of war with an invisible enemy that moves around the jungles and nighttime like ghosts in the horizons of your mind.

Trying hard to blot out the constant sound of the rotating blade as it eats up the air that keeps it up there semi-floating in the sky, you momentarily struggle with the reality around you, falling to the past and all its horrors. You know that there is no logical way to overcome this dilemma, there is no cure for the past and the momentary physics attached to your memories that will last into eternity.

So you try to divert the anxiety, the stress and the soldier’s decision of ‘fight or flight’ as well as the thoughts of never coming or going home again. The order is clear to ‘advance the enemy’ and any ideas of turning around were negated by the footsteps of the assertive and aggressive forceful motion forward.

Reflection in your loneliness on this one-time period of hell makes you grateful to God and all His angels for bringing you home from this insanity. It would be hard to imagine to go through this experience more than once but many endured more than one tour of duty in this war and for that, I honor and respect them immensely.

Throughout all these trials and tribulations, you survived with only the craziness inside your skull to deal with the realities of war but in the end, you survived it and you are going home and when you finally arrive, it wasn’t at all like you pictured it would be. For some reason, your stay with your buddies in uniform has become your security blanket of life or survival as their comforts and companionship gave you more calmness that was emotionally helpful.

Well known to many, there is a fine line between being insane and crazy – we all took that trip when we served in this war and came out alive that being crazy was the result of being in an insane war fought around you.

Finally, the episode passes as the helicopter fades away into the distance. Your madness drifts away slowly lingering as long as it is allowed to linger as your mind malingers as well. Your body tells you to breathe again slowly, no deep panicked breaths like before but slow and deliberate breathing.

The sky is clear, the helicopter is gone and like before its arrival into your psyche and space, you return to the peaceful day it was before the ugly bird arrived, realizing that such an episode takes a toll day after day for the rest of your life.  So it is experienced to be a moment in time that last forever.