My Story: PTSD & Alcohol

I intend to share a lot more in time, but wanted to share the origin of my difficult struggle with alcohol. I am an alcoholic. It is not the result of these experiences, but rather these experiences seemed to have opened the door for its manifestation. I will share Paul Harvey's "rest of the story" in due time, but for now my hope is that this might help others who struggle with similar issues. I hope you enjoy.

I walked into the cleaners to pick up my laundry. The doors were propped open to allow fresh spring air to circulate. The nice Korean lady behind the counter greeted me with a broad smile. She was about to speak, wish me good morning, when there was an explosion in the distance. Instinctively, I flinched, all senses aroused in a flash. The lady stared at me in confusion. “That was an explosion,” I said, almost breathless. My mind intuitively launching into assessment mode – crisis mode.

I rushed to the sidewalk. As best I could tell, the blast had occurred about a mile and a half northeast of my location. I stood scanning the skyline, listening intently for car alarms or sirens, desperately trying to pinpoint where the blast occurred – Clarksville High School! Fear struck like lightning in my chest, electricity snapping its way through my body.

“Boom!” A second blast.

“I’ll come back later,” I told the lady and shuffled stiff legged to my truck.

My daughter was a senior at Clarksville High. Cynically, I thought to myself, there was no mention of a controlled blast in the orders. Big Voice, the intercom system we had used in Iraq and Afghanistan, did not announce a controlled blast, so that meant this must be real.

I drove as fast as possible through the parking lot.

“Kaboom!” a third blast vibrated through my truck, and I floored it.

All the way there I watched the horizon for a smoke plume, evidence. Could it have been an attack on the school? I wondered. I am eight weeks post knee reconstruction. I can hardly walk. Will I be able to help? Is Madison okay?

Not seeing a smoke plum above the tree line was somewhat comforting. Something inside told me that I was behaving ridiculously, yet I could not ignore what was happening. The physical response I was having was palpable. I had heard and felt the blast. Something exploded. There was no road construction going on near Clarksville High, so they weren’t blowing rock.

As I approached the school I slowed down. As I drove past the school my eyes darted from building to building, vehicle to vehicle, doorway to doorway. Relieved, I began to realize just how silly my reaction had been. Then I saw a heavy plume of smoke hanging in the air by a small building between the high school and middle school. Once again, it felt as though someone stabbed me in the chest with an icepick – a cold burning sensation. But no one was running from the buildings. That’s a good sign, I thought.

I saw men walking just behind a small stand of trees. They were dressed in Civil War attire. Adjacent to their tents were several cannons. A reenactment.

The date was April 26, 2019, thirteen years, two months and eleven days before I first noticed it. Heck, I’d been retired from the army for over two and a half years and the forward to this book had already been written.

I decided to edit it.

Thursday March 16, 2006 began like a typical day in Iraq, but March 16 would turn out to be anything but typical. I could say that the events of that day forever changed my life, but that’s probably not entirely true. What happened that day certainly trigged what would become a new norm for me, but I’m certain that those emotions had been building up somewhere in the shadows of my soul, lurking, waiting for the right time to manifest themselves. They simply chose March 16, 2006 to manifest themselves.

I was on my second year-long deployment to Iraq. Enemy forces shot rockets and mortars at our bases almost daily. We lived on the edge – always jumpy and nervous. I served as the Secretary of the General’s Staff – a special assistant to the commanding general of the 101st Airborne Division. That morning I got up at 4:30 a.m. and met the general in our headquarters building in Tikrit. We reviewed what had transpired overnight, he checked his emails and then boarded his UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter to visit soldiers at various locations throughout northern Iraq.

After the general departed, I spent several hours drafting correspondence for him and planning his future visits to U.S. Forces throughout Northern Iraq, what we called his battlefield circulation. Around noon, I called an old friend, Captain Renee Vigilante, and asked her if she’d like to go for a run. Renee and I had been teammates on the Fort Campbell 10 Miler Team. She agreed to meet me in front of our housing area, so I left the office to go and change.

As I departed the building, I saw three of our soldiers standing by Brigadier General Mike Oates’ vehicle smoking cigarettes. It was Sergeant Thomas Adkins, who served as General Oates’ administrative specialists (we shared a large open office), Specialist Carlos Gonzalez, our communications specialist, and Sergeant Amanda Pinson, an intelligence analyst.

As I passed them, Sergeant Adkins asked if I wanted a plate for lunch. They were on their way to our dining facility but decided to smoke a cigarette first. I thanked him for the offer but told him that I planned to eat later and continued to my room. I went inside, changed into my physical training uniform, and walked back outside to stretch until Renee got there.

I could still see Adkins, Gonzalez, and Pinson standing in a small circle talking beside the truck.

I heard gravel crunching under feet and turned to see Renee. “How far you want to go?” she asked.

“Got time for eight?” We were both training for a marathon that was scheduled for the early summer on Tikrit Airfield.

She was about to answer when we heard a muffled explosion in the distance. At that second, time slowed down for both of us. Renee looked me in the eye and flinched. It was a surprised look of fear that said everything without saying anything. We both knew it was a rocket and it was heading our way.

Instinctually, we knew that we needed to dive into the nearest concrete bunker, but there was no time. We both sort of half squatted and turned toward the bunker and that’s when we heard the rocket motor as it passed just a few feet over our heads.

The explosion knocked us silly. I could not hear any sound except a high-pitched ringing in my ears. Gravel rained down in every direction and we were engulfed in a cloud of dust. It took a few seconds to shake it off, regain focus, and then I thought, where did it impact?

I realized that the rocket had landed near where Adkins, Pinson, and Gonzalez had been standing, but I looked, and they were gone. I ran up the slight incline to where they had been standing and saw a crater in the ground. General Oates’ vehicle was destroyed by the explosion, but they were nowhere to be found. As I frantically searched for them, I saw movement behind a Hummer about twenty yards away. I ran to the soldier and realized it was Sergeant Adkins. The skin on his arms was wrinkled and lumpy like cottage cheese. Gravel the size of acorns had been driven under his skin. He was bleeding from his nose and ears, but he was alive. A couple of people emerged from the division headquarters building. I screamed to them to get a medic. One solider ran to me and I turned Sergeant Adkins over to him.

I then began looking for Specialist Gonzalez and Sergeant Pinson. There were 20 foot tall concrete barriers all along the front of the headquarters buildings. They looked like an upside-down letter T, so they were aptly called T barriers. I ran along them searching to no avail. Finally, I decided to look behind them. That’s where we found Gonzalez and Pinson. They had been blown completely over a twenty-foot high cement barrier. Both were deceased.

Sergeant Adkins was taken to the Corps Support Hospital and treated. That evening countless soldiers went to visit him. The West Virginia native was well liked by all. The next afternoon I went to check on him again. I spoke with him for a few minutes and then he said, “Sir.”

“Yes, Sergeant Adkins,” I replied.

“I really appreciate everyone coming to see me and all, but can you tell them to just give me some time?”

“Sure, Sergeant Adkins. I can do that, but why don’t you want visitors? They think the world of you.”

Then he broke my heart.

“I just need to cry,” he said.

“Cry? What do you mean?” I asked.

“They killed my girl, sir. They killed her,” he said with tears in his eyes.

That’s when I realized that he and Sergeant Pinson were engaged.

That night I returned to my housing unit to catch a few hours of sleep. Exhausted, I lay down and was instantly asleep. I began to dream.

I rode in the passenger seat of a sedan. We were on a curvy mountain road. On the left side of the road a mountain went straight up. On the right was a short railing and then a massive reservoir that led to a waterfall that was at least 200 feet high. A strange older man with gray hair drove the car.

Behind me sat my seven-year-old son, Franklin. Behind the driver was my five-year-old daughter, Madison. I had just enough time to take all of that in, vividly capture the image, and then the man swerved into the railing. We crashed through the rail and plummeted into the reservoir. The car slowly began to sink. Remaining as calm as possible, I opened my door, moved to the back, and opened the door where my son sat. I pulled him from the car and began swimming to the shore as fast as I could with him in tow. When I neared the shore, I shoved him to land and turned to go get my daughter, but the car was gone.

Instantly, it felt as though a dagger had been thrust into my chest. I began to swim as hard as I could back to where I thought the car had sank. With each stroke, anxiety built inside me. By the time I made it back to where the car had been, I felt as though I’d explode. I began diving down into the water, to try and find her, but the water was dark, and I could not see anything.

Suddenly, I saw something below me – slow movement. I stopped diving and just floated on the surface with my face in the water and I saw her. Madison was moving with the current. Her hands were up above her head and spread. Her eyes were closed. Her mouth was just slightly agape and there was a small air bubble on her lip.

I began frantically diving to try and grab her, but no matter how hard I swam, I could not reach her. We were both moving with the current toward the waterfall. Again, the anxiety surged inside me. No matter how hard I dove and swam, I could never get my hand closer than a foot from hers. I tried and tried to reach her, but to no avail. Realizing we were moving with the current, I looked down stream and instantly we were both swept off the waterfall, and I woke in a frantic sweat.

My heart rate must have been 200 beats per minute. I could not go back to sleep. The next night I had the exact same dream again, and again the next night. After a week, I was a zombie. I decided to go talk with my dear friend Lieutenant Colonel Ron Thomas, the division chaplain. Ron had set up a driving range on the base in Tikrit, Iraq. “People won’t open up on a couch, but there is just something about hitting golf balls into the desert. They seem to want to talk,” he’d told me.

I stopped by Ron’s cubicle and said, “Let’s go hit some balls.”

Over the next hour, and several dozen golf balls, I told Ron what I was experiencing. He explained that it was natural. “You feel in control here in Iraq,” he explained. “You feel that you can, in some way, influence the outcome with the enemy, but you are completely vulnerable at home. Anything could happen to your family and there’s not one thing you can do about it. The stress manifests itself where you are vulnerable.”

I lived with that dream for over a year. Once I returned home, after a period of time, it stopped, but the jumpiness remained, along with a new feeling that I still struggle to explain.

I began to experience bouts of anxiety during which I felt like I would explode in my chest. I recall sitting in a tree stand hunting whitetail deer. I was all alone in a large stand of timber, twenty feet up in a tree and suddenly began to feel this helpless feeling. It was as though I was being overcome with something that felt hopeless, helpless. Suddenly, I wanted down from the tree stand, but I feared I’d fall if I tried to move. I sat still, hoping it would soon go away.

That’s when I first admitted to myself that I could see how people might choose to take their own life due to such experiences. I recall thinking that the mind is so powerful. I had never in my life felt so out of control, but this was something I could not explain.

Eventually, the anxiety subsided, I climbed down from the tree, and went home, but I never told anyone. I denied to myself that the things I felt were related to my combat experiences. In fact, every time I entertained thoughts of PTSD, I felt guilty. I am a religious person. I am very active in my church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I’m educated. I have a great family. What could be wrong with me? I didn’t lose a leg or arm like so many others that year in Iraq.

Deep down, I knew that something was wrong, but I didn’t want to tell anyone because in some strange way, I felt that if I told someone I would be admitting to myself, confirming, that I was experiencing post-traumatic stress.

Secretly, I missed combat. I wanted to go back, be a part of a brotherhood again. We were at war and I was a soldier. I should be in combat. Yet those feelings brought with them guilt. My family needed me. I love my family more than anything in the world. Our relationships are solid. Why would I want to leave them to go back to combat? It made no sense, yet inexplicably, that’s what I wanted.

I did go back. In 2009, I led a cavalry task force to Eastern Afghanistan – to bloodiest piece of terrain on planet earth. We fought daily with the enemy in some of our generation’s largest battles. I would go on to write a book about that year titled, PALE HORSE – Hunting Terrorists and Commanding Heroes with the 101st Airborne Division.

And again in 2014, I led a brigade of 3,500 soldiers back to Eastern Afghanistan, for yet another tour in combat. When I returned from that deployment, I was selected for a position on the Joint Staff in Washington D.C. I had handled the two deployments to Afghanistan well, but with the stress of Washington politics and bureaucracy, I started changing.

I began to feel angry all the time, yet I was not always sure why I was angry. My wife and I began to argue a lot. I lashed out and was short with her. We’d been married twenty-three years at that point, and she shared with me that she’d told her mother that she could not live like this. I had changed and I knew it. I kept these feelings that I could not understand or explain pent up inside. For the first time in my life, I felt that I was not in control.

Eventually, I sought counseling. I asked the counselor if he could medicate me, take the edge off. He said that, due to my job and clearances, I could not be in that position and take medication. Jokingly, I said, we’ll I guess I have to turn to the bottle, and he stared at me with this approving look. “It’s not the right answer. You can’t abuse it, but a drink will sometimes take the edge off.”

It was the kiss of death.

As previously stated, I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. We don’t drink alcohol, so I was torn. One day I got off the commuter bus in Manassas, Virginia and I felt angry inside. I was going home, and I was stressed out, so on the way home, I stopped and bought a six-pack of beer. I pulled over on the side of the road short of my house, drank two, and hid the rest in the back of my truck. This would happen off and on for the remainder of the year we were in Virginia.

In December 2015, I was driving my family through Vienna, Virginia. My son dropped something in the floor in the backseat behind me. I almost jumped out of the car and screamed at him. It was out of character for me. My entire family sat there, mouths agape, staring at me with an alarmed look on their faces. “What just happened?” my wife asked gently.

At that point, I told them the story of the rocket and the dream. It was the first time I’d spoken of the dream – nine years after the event. Why I had never opened up, I don’t know. I seemed to think it was just something in my head. It was a weakness that I needed to overcome. My wife knew something was wrong. I was a different person, but she couldn’t understand why or what was really going on with me. At least now she understood a little.

There were many things that influenced my decision to retire from the army. I had been blessed with a great career. I was selected early for promotion, what we call below-the-zone, at the rank of major, lieutenant colonel, and colonel. It made no sense to retire, but I was angry at so many things – some things that I could not even explain.

In the summer of 2016, we moved our family back to Clarksville, Tennessee. I now write, consult, and speak professionally. Gig to gig living brought new stress into my life, but there will always be stress in this life. I still miss the brotherhood, the camaraderie. I still have an episode here and there, when Civil War reenactors fire their cannons unannounced, or a freezer door slams, or a car backfires, or...

In early 2019, I dreamt that I was flying a mission in Afghanistan with one of my PALE HORSE officers. As we flew north in the Kunar River Valley, a valley I knew like the back of my hand, one I’d flown a thousand times, we were engaged by the enemy. Almost instantly, we were shot down. I saw the earth rising to meet us and knew we were about to die. We slammed into the ground on my side of the aircraft. The helicopter folded itself on top of me. My copilot literally exploded in my lap, yet I was completely uninjured. My heartrate must have been north of 200 beats per minute when I woke in a sweat. Slipping out of my bedroom, I logged onto my laptop and checked my copilot’s Facebook page. Was it some kind of omen? Did something happen to him?

I wanted to message him, but I felt foolish. He’ll think I’m nuts, I thought to myself. Throughout the following day, I fought the urge. That evening, I was exhausted and stressed out. I bought a bottle of whiskey and found a place to be alone. It’ll take the edge off, I told myself, and drank. I stared into the brown water, sloshed the bottle in my hand, and thought, how easy it would be to fall into a bottle.