The Foreign Service Journal, January 2008

A New Trigger My next assignment was to work on the Lebanon program, which entailed traveling back and forth to Beirut on a regular basis. In April 1983, I had just left the city and arrived back in the U.S. when the embassy was blown up. In the bombing, I lost my mission director, Bill Mc- Intyre, our Lebanese secretary and many other colleagues and good friends with whom I had worked for the last year. I helped with the disaster response fromWashington, mostly communications with the families of injured and dead colleagues. I noticed that many of the symptoms of the previous PTSD episode returned at this time, but I felt that if I were patient, they would pass as they had the first time. It was an especially difficult time for me because my husband and I were separating. I ended up taking three months of leave without pay just to get my life, my emotions and my living arrangements back together. Taking my cue from my for- mer boss, this time I never gave anyone the real reason for need- ing the leave. Other than the general outline of major events, I’ve never really been able to talk about the experiences in El Salvador with family or friends. Somehow, the topic has always felt overwhelming to me, and I never knew where to start a conversation about it. (Of course, very few people ever asked about it in any serious way.) I have never again sought therapy for PTSD. Nor have I ever taken any medication for related symptoms, even though for several years, seeing violence in movies F O C U S 44 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 Sometimes I had what I called “daymares,” in which I’d “see” a colleague in a meeting suddenly fall victim to some horrible trauma.