The Foreign Service Journal, January 2008

began sleeping soundly through the night, I started having the night- mares I wasn’t sleeping well enough or long enough to have had before. In early 2007, I started dreaming almost nightly about being back in Iraq with the rockets and car bombs, only this time with my friends and family there, too. I dreamed of flash floods sweeping away my friends and trying to save them. Insurgents kid- napped us, and I would escape to try and rescue them, running hard and fast for hours. My dreams were filled with helicopters, concrete barriers and gravel. Angry wild animals attacked me and the people I cared about. I was so exhausted that sometimes I dreamed about sleeping, only to wake up sweating, heart racing, clenching my hands into fists or balling up the sheets. Still, I was at least getting a full night’s sleep. Some of the hardest months for me were after most of my physical symptoms were addressed, in the spring of 2007, when the situation in Iraq took a turn for the worse, as well. Of my former employees, all but two left the country because of threats on their lives. Several of my Iraqi contacts were horrifically assassi- nated. I learned of their deaths by e-mail from other Iraqi friends, several times a month. My nightmares literally started coming true. At first I felt a despair at being unable to do anything to help them, a despair so deep that I ceased being able to function. I went through the months of March, April and May in a fog. Sometimes I was so miserable I broke down sobbing at my desk in my office. But even this was a sort of progress because at least I knew why I was crying, and the senseless deaths of friends and contacts was something worth crying about. Part of the recovery process for me has been accept- ing that I will never be the person I was before I went to Iraq. I am not sure I believe that anyone can spend a year in a war zone living under more or less constant threat of death by rocket, mortar or road bomb, expe- riencing the deaths of numerous Iraqi and American friends, and come out of that experience unchanged. And, even if it were possible, I don’t think I would want to be such a person. I’ve also come to realize that recovery doesn’t mean reverting to your old self, the person you were before the trauma. This has been the hardest part for my friends and family to accept. They keep waiting for the “old me” to come back. They seem to think that once I am better, I won’t think about Iraq any- more, and I won’t be bothered by it. I am touched by their concern, and their support has been absolutely necessary; but sometimes I feel they don’t understand that I have to get better, not just be better. Besides, if I am not interested in trying to get my old self back, why should anyone else be? Making a Difference I didn’t go to Iraq looking for spiritual growth, but one of the side effects of serving there was that it gave me the chance to become a better person. It was mak- ing the choice to recover from PTSD that actually made me a better person. A major part of the recovery process for me has been learning that there are things worth losing a night’s sleep over. There are things worth getting angry over. And there are things worth fighting for. The solution is not to refrain from ever getting angry. It is to make your battles ones worth fighting, and dying, for — and to fight them without giving up. When I first came back from Iraq, even so mundane a chore as standing in line at the pharmacy felt so dan- gerous to me that I usually gave up, dumped my items on a shelf and bolted before making it to the front of the line. I was preoccupied with the fear that a crimi- nal would burst through the front door and shoot us all down like sitting ducks. Now that I’m getting better, I have made up my mind that if that criminal ever does show up, I am going to throw myself in front of as many people as pos- sible, push them to the ground, and try and tackle the guy. I just cannot stand the idea of watching any more people get killed or hurt around me. Bolstered by that determination, I am now able to make it to the front of the line and complete my purchases every time. There have been other unexpected pluses to devel- oping and recovering from PTSD, which no one ever F O C U S 40 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 8 Reliving the worst days of my life over and over again left me wrung out and exhausted after every session.