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July 6, 2013 · 00:03

To Iraq and Back: Padre Steve’s War and Return

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“All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake up in the day to find it was vanity, but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.” ― T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph

It is hard to believe that six years ago I was almost ready to deploy to Iraq with my bodyguard and assistant Religious Program Specialist First Class Nelson Lebron. I had been in the military 26 years, 17 1/2 in the Army and at that time almost eight in the Navy. Our mission was to support the American advisors to the Iraq 1st and 7th Divisions, the 2nd Border Brigade, Port of Entry Police, Highway Patrol and Police forces in Al Anbar Province.

I was to be a life changing experience for both of us, no strangers to deployment or danger. In 2008 we returned to the United States changed by our experiences. It was also to test my marriage and even my career in the Navy. Both of which I thought might be lost within a year or two of my return.

To quote Charles Dickens “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” I came back diagnosed with a case of severe and chronic PTSD as well as chronic Tinnitus and and severely impaired ability to understand speech. Nightmares, and night terrors chronic insomnia, flashbacks, hyper vigilance, panic attacks and claustrophobia have all been part of my life since then.

The experience left me severely depressed, at times feeling the pain of despair and hopelessness, a loss of faith and it’s restoration.

Despite all of that I consider my time in Iraq to be the high point of my military career. It was a place that I was able to use every gift, talent and skill at my disposal to do a job that took me to places and allowed me to work with people that I could not have imagined. My tour in Iraq, though painful and life changing was also the best of times, it opened my eyes to things that I never thought possible, relationships unimagined and ministry unbound by the constraints of the terrible model of contemporary American Christianity.

Over the next six or seven months I am going to clean up and republish articles about our deployment and then add additional articles that back when I started to write back in 2009 was unable to do because the memories even then were still to fresh and painful to relive.

It is hard to believe just how vivid the memories still are. I found my notebook from my time there and hope that it as well as my memories don’t fail me. Of course I will take time to write about the post-Iraq experience as well.

Hopefully when they are complete I can get them published as a book. The goal, I hope is that others who have been through what I have been through, and those who have been through much worse will be able to know that what happened to them can happen to anyone that goes to war, including Chaplains and other care givers who are by nature of or calling and training supposed to be immune from such experiences.

I will place these articles under a new page tab at the top of the website called To Iraq and Back.

Peace

Padre Steve+

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January 14, 2013 · 23:59

HD Dreams and Stranger Things Part Two: Sleep Medications and Dreams, the PTSD Conundrum

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Ever since Iraq I have had terrible times with insomnia as well as very vivid dreams and nightmares. I have written about it in a previous article HD Dreams and Stranger Things: PTSD and Sleep.

Over the past four years or so I have been on various sleep medications, none of which has done much of anything to help my sleep. Most have left me drowsy on awakening the next day as if I was hung over, without the fulfillment of getting shit-faced the night before surrounded by friends. Believe me a good craft beer, or a lot of good craft beer does me a lot more good than various sleeping pills.

At the same time they have done strange things with my dreams. At times they are most vivid and terrifying and at other times for whatever reason they have been practically suppressed depending on the medication.

I found that because of the amount of the anxiety and insomnia that I had that my doctors prescribed high doses of the various medications used. Most had little effect, sleep was still at a premium and in the morning I would wake up groggy. That was my life the past for the past five years if you count the time before I started taking sleep medications.

In the past week that has changed. I mentioned in that previous article that I was beginning a course of therapy that would involve some different techniques to help me deal with the symptoms of my PTSD. That therapy was incredibly helpful and helped me to put my experiences into a perspective that before was not possible. Likewise my therapist dealt with my frequent sleep disruptions and made recommendations concerning how to manage my sleep.

We experimented. Since I was on a fairly heavy dose of Lunesta and still had to maintain a duty pager adjustments had to be made. On the nights when I had no duty I took no medication with the effect of getting no sleep at all and feeling like crap the next day. On days I took my medicine I would get some sleep, frequently interrupted and always with the consequence of a drug induced hang-over in the morning. Finally we tried a couple of more things. First was the use of a over the counter sleep aid used by many physicians that have to work odd on call hours called Insomitrol. It is a mix of Melatonin and Gaba extract. On the plus side I did not feel hung over in the morning. One the minus side my HD dreams went to 3D Luscasfilm HD and were the most memorable, surreal and occasionally frightening dreams I have ever experienced. We ended that experiment and went to over the counter Melatonin. It has worked well. My sleep is no worse, my dreams are quite fascinating and I do not feel hung over in the morning. I have discontinued the use of the Lunesta.

I still take an anti-anxiety medication to help bring me down at night and I will be obtaining either on my own or through the military a bio-feedback program to use on my computer before I go to sleep.

Since starting the Melatonin my sleep has gotten better. The HD dreams are still there and memorable enough that I can remember them and hope to find some meaning and interpretation in them, even the nightmares.

Those of us that deal with the aftereffects of PTSD and trauma have much to deal with. Sleep or the lack of it, dreams and nightmares, medications and the use of other drugs or alcohol are rampant among veterans with PTSD. There is no “silver bullet” or “cookie cutter” that works for all of us. But for me this seems to be a means of freedom and healing. I hope that my experience helps others and encourages them to work with their physicians, therapists and spiritual advisors on their journey to healing.

I don’t understand all the scientific aspects of sleep. I am beginning to learn about them though and as I learn it takes away some of the fear of closing my eyes, which for me opens a world more vivid, surreal and sometimes terrifying than keeping them open. But it is an unexplored world for me, one that I hope and pray helps me continue to integrate my life, faith and spirituality in ways that I never could have imagined before.

To me that is absolutely fascinating and something that I look forward to experiencing.

Peace

Padre Steve+

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November 29, 2012 · 00:01

Horizons, Tapestries and the Possibilities of Different Futures

Captain Picard: I sincerely hope that this is the last time that I find myself here. 

Q: You just don’t get it, do you, Jean-Luc? The trial never ends. We wanted to see if you had the ability to expand your mind and your horizons. And for one brief moment, you did. 

Captain Picard: When I realized the paradox. 

Q: Exactly. For that one fraction of a second, you were open to options you had never considered. That is the exploration that awaits you. Not mapping stars and studying nebulae, but charting the unknown possibilities of existence. 

Yesterday I wrote about epiphanies that were occurring in my personal, spiritual and professional life. As I mentioned yesterday they were brought about during a rather cathartic session with my Doctor regarding my PTSD. I think that it was a breakthrough type session because so many new horizons seemed to open at once. Last night it was hard to put it all into words or to sort things out. So after I published that article I went to bed and was subjected to the most intense night of dreams that I have ever experienced and that is saying a lot because my dreams are often frighteningly real. They are like super high definition to begin with because my brain goes into warp drive when my eyes are closed, but last night even more so.

It was like past present and multiple futures intersecting around the them of roads taken, roads not taken and the possibility of different roads home. They spanned my life and many dealt with my time in Iraq while others seemed a blend of many experiences. It was positively surreal. So much so that when the alarm rang I was absolutely exhausted having not slept the previous night because I had left all of my sleep medicines in my gym bag that I had taken to work. So I made a direct call to my Commanding Officer to let him know what was going on and that I needed to take a personal day to rest and reflect on the flood of spiritual, emotional and existential things that I had experienced in the past day. If I had to give an example of what last night was like, it was like the final episode of the Star Trek Next Generation series as Captain Picard kept switching between different realities of past, present and future while being relentlessly grilled by the being simply known as “Q”.

So this morning I rested, spent time with my dog Molly, pretty much avoided the computer and television and then went out and ran about 7.5 miles on the beach. The weather was wonderful and the tide conditions were such that the nearly deserted beach was optimal for running. As I ran the brilliant blue of the sky, the calm waves of the deep blue Atlantic lapping upon the tan sands of the beach. It was as if I was running where the sands of the Western Iraqi Desert met the Atlantic. I was at peace and the images of the previous night began to make sense.

They were about roads, paths, possibilities and the journey to home, wherever or whatever that it is. They were a juxtaposition of past, present and future and variations of each. People, places, images and actions blended together in ways that were at times comforting and other times terrifying. But they were all about possibilities new and unimaginable and as Q told Picard “charting the unknown possibilities of existence” and not being trapped in the past that we cannot change, that even if we could would make us less than we are now.

In another episode of Next Generation called Tapestry, Picard has a death experience where he is confronted by Q and regretting decisions that he made which helped cause his death Q offered him a chance to go back and make it different. When Picard found that the Picard that played it safe was not a person that he would want to be he confronted Q.

LT. j.g. Picard: You having a good laugh now, Q? Does it amuse you to think of me living out the rest of my life as a dreary man in a tedious job?

Q: I gave you something most mortals never experience: a second chance at life. And now all you can do is complain? 

Lt. j.g. Picard: I can’t live out my days as that person. That man is bereft of passion… and imagination! That is not who I am!

Q: Au contraire. He’s the person you wanted to be: one who was less arrogant and undisciplined in his youth, one who was less like me… The Jean-Luc Picard you wanted to be, the one who did not fight the Nausicaan, had quite a different career from the one you remember. That Picard never had a brush with death, never came face to face with his own mortality, never realized how fragile life is or how important each moment must be. So his life never came into focus. He drifted through much of his career, with no plan or agenda, going from one assignment to the next, never seizing the opportunities that presented themselves. He never led the away team on Milika III to save the Ambassador; or take charge of the Stargazer’s bridge when its captain was killed. And no one ever offered him a command. He learned to play it safe – and he never, ever, got noticed by anyone.

It is funny that those two episodes of Star Trek TNG came up a number of times this week with different people. I think what I am discovering is that life is a limitless set of possibilities and that our past, as tangled and messy as it may be at time is part of a tapestry that is who we are but not what we can become. As Picard noted to Counselor Troy after his resuscitation:  There are many parts of my youth that I’m not proud of. There were… loose threads – untidy parts of me that I would like to remove. But when I pulled on one of those threads – it’d unravel the tapestry of my life.

Past, present and future. Dreams and reality, hopes and fears, things real and things imagined. A future unexplored and hopeful so long as we are willing appreciate our past without being trapped by it, to live in the present and imagine the future that we have yet to chart.

But to do this we have to be willing to take the risks, be authentic and realize the possibilities that God in his love and grace imagines for our future.

Peace

Padre Steve+

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August 23, 2012 · 00:55

HD Dreams and Stranger Things: PTSD and Sleep

Those that have followed me on this site for any length of time know that I have been dealing with PTSD since my return from Iraq in 2008. I have written extensively about it including times when I was not doing well at all. Just take a look at some of my articles from 2009 and 2010 and you can see how bad I was doing. I have occasionally likened my dreams to the character of Binkley in Bloom County with his “Closet of Anxieties.”

I am like thousands of other active duty, reserve, retired military personnel or veterans  that suffer from PTSD related to my time at war. When I started treatment in 2008 one of the things that my therapist asked was if I thought that I could talk about my condition. It was a scary thought because there is where we like to admit it there is a stigma attached to PTSD and other psychological conditions. At some point I decided to say “what the hell, I’m going to talk about it.” That was really a big part of why I started writing on this blog. Since then I have been able to share my story in a number of venues and have had a lot of people contact me, many to share their stories and simply to offer either thanks or support. There have been a few knuckleheads but what amazes me is how many people contact me and how many military personnel or family members deal with the same things that I have faced.

I am hyper-vigilant as hell and there are a lot of places that I don’t feel safe. I still have bad days and there are plenty of times that I get in situations, like doing through airports, malls, Wal-Mart and sluggish traffic where I really have to fight anxiety and panic. The sight and smell of smoke and brush fires and sewage send me back to Iraq. The smell of death, which I still occasionally deal with has its own dread quality. Certain types of vehicles, aggressive drivers and debris on the road can send me back to Iraq. I can attribute a number of speeding tickets and an HOV violation to flight or fight responses in traffic.

Loud noises, screams, explosions and numerous other external and unexpected stimuli can trigger one hell of a startle reflex and anxiety. Tonight I was walking Molly down to the beach, a normally peaceful experience when an unexpected loud scream and crashing noise from a beach house startled and scared the hell out of me. That is not normal for my neighborhood. Thankfully Molly was there to protect me and her unflappable reaction was reassuring.

I am also unsettled by the political vitriol in our country, especially that stirred up by preachers because I have seen the results of such vitriol in Iraq and the Balkans. When I read or hear about the killings of US or NATO personnel by supposedly friendly Afghan “partners” I have a hard tome sleeping. I spent my time in Iraq traveling and doing a “circuit riding” type ministry with US Marine Corps and Army Advisors to the Iraqi Army and other security forces.  I look at some of those times and it causes me to think of just how easily I could have fallen victim had any Iraq Soldier or Policeman turned on any of the small groups of Americans that I was out with. But it is night when things get weird.

One of the things that I deal with is chronic insomnia. I used to be a very good sleeper but a few months into my time in Iraq I found that I wasn’t sleeping. So for about five years I have had very few good nights of sleep despite numerous attempts by doctors to help with sleep and anxiety meds. Those help sometimes but have side affects. On duty nights when I might be called in to the hospital I can’t take my meds because I want to be able to drive the 23 miles to work down a rural state highway.

Since Iraq my dreams have become rather HD, or High Definition involving some quite terrifying blends of Iraq and other parts of my life. I know that Judy and our dog Molly have been been awakened by me screaming or fighting the things that I battle in these dreams which are often nightmarish. Even relatively benign dreams have the DH quality now.

When I was in Houston a couple weeks ago and staying in a hotel the dreams were quite disturbing. Somehow not being in a familiar setting is bad for my sleep. But even the least disturbing was a dream was rather startling. In the dream I was sitting between the stands and the left field foul line at a major league game about 50 feet from 3rd base. I woke up when dreaming of diving for a baseball I ended up on the floor. I have to admit that the outfield grass was the lushest and most beautiful that I have ever seen. I don’t think that the left fielder and third baseman appreciated me being in their way when tracking down the pop ups and line drives hit towards me in the dream.

Thankfully though startling that dream was benign.  I find that the dreams of wounded Marines and soldiers in Mass casualty situations, night convoys with small teams of advisors, patrols and getting shot at on occasion that are the ones that really get me. When they are intermingled with current life events or other parts of my life in HD it is quite terrifying.

The dreams are almost like horror movies that you can’t leave. I have woken up from a dream, gone back to sleep and have the same dream resume. Other times I cannot go back to sleep.

I wondered why and a few weeks ago I was able to get evaluated with a QEEG or Qualitative EEG. Basically it is a brain map that tracks responses to various stimuli. Some of that testing is done with your eyes closed to see the differences in how the brain works when there are no visual stimuli. Before I had the test I spent a couple of session telling the doctor what I was going through and he would tell me what part of the brain that was affected. When I took the test it showed in graphic form what was going on and validated what I had been experiencing for these past five years.

Normally when people close their eyes they can relax. I used to be able to do this, but it has been a long time. The results of the test showed that unlike normal people when I close my eyes my brain basically goes into overdrive. The doctor remarked “no wonder you can’t sleep and have such vivid dreams.”

I have another couple of evaluation sessions before I begin EMDR and or Biofeedback therapy. For the first time in a long time I am hopeful that I will get some relief and improvement in my condition that may actually help me get off some of my medications. That would be nice. Normal sleep and a decrease in the HD dreams and nightmares would also be a good thing.

Thank you for your prayers and kind words. It has been a while since I have written about this in any detail and I hope as always that what I share will help encourage others suffering from similar issues and hopefully encourage and educate those that have to live with them. Believe me, it has not been easy for Judy.

There are resources available and one that I recommend for those that are dealing with PTSD is the Real Warriors Campaign http://www.realwarriors.net. I also recommend Doonesbury’s The Sandbox http://gocomics.typepad.com/the_sandbox/  Both sites allow military personnel to share their experiences. There are numerous other resources and if someone asks I will gladly post some others. I do have a link to the National Center on PTSD on the site.

Peace

Padre Steve+

 

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July 22, 2012 · 23:49

A Pause to Reflect on Iraq, Afghanistan and Unpopular Wars on a Sunday Night

This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

From the Speech of King Henry V at Agincourt in Shakespeare’s “Henry V” 1599

Five years ago I was in the process of deploying to Iraq.  It is hard to believe that it has been that long.

For me the past few weeks have been filled with sleepless nights, flashbacks and nightmares, mostly related to my time in Iraq.  I have been far more hyper-vigilant and anxious than I have been for a while.  Crowds and crowded places cause me great anxiety. I guess it is sort of like the Hotel California, you can check out anytime you want but you can never leave.  The experiences and places are forever in my mind. I can close my eyes and the images are fresh.

I jokingly refer to my continuing struggle with PTSD as the “Mad Cow,” somehow that takes some of the edge off for me.  But even my attempt at humor belies the fact that it does get old.

At the same time because of my service in Iraq I am part of a very special brotherhood, that brotherhood that Shakespeare’s Henry V voiced so well.

I have the wonderful opportunity to serve alongside men and women who have given much for this country, men and women who also bear the wounds of war, physical, psychological, spiritual and moral. I have the honor of serving with men and women who continue to deploy in harm’s way to Afghanistan and being stationed at one of the installations that have borne then heavy burden of this war I am reminded daily of the cost of it. I look at the casualty reports daily and last week yet another Marine Military policeman from Camp LeJeune was killed in Afghanistan. Two sailors from a Squadron based in Norfolk were killed in the crash of an MH-53 Helicopter in Oman, an aircraft sent to beef up capabilities against Iran in the Strait of Hormuz. This weekend at least 8 NATO troops or contractors were killed in Afghanistan, three being American contractors  killed by an Afghan policeman while training Afghan police in Herat. The war is never far away.

I am also grateful to people in the community who care to say a kind word when I am in public in uniform. Many people in the area have served in uniform, many during Vietnam as well as an ever dwindling number of World War II and Korea War vets.  I have had to make trips up to a local jail in a town up the road from us to see two of my sailors accused in a terrible crime.  I make those visits in uniform and on the way back one day I stopped to get a Coke at a store. As I walked in a man thanked me for my service.  While I was paying another man began to talk to me. He also thanked me and then went to describe his service in Vietnam.

Such encounters are humbling for me and a reminder of the very special brotherhood that I am just a part. That brotherhood for me is especially close for the that liked me served in Iraq but also Afghanistan, Vietnam and by extension the French veterans of Indochina and Algeria. We are veterans of unpopular wars that are fought by a minute segment of the population.

I saw a video of an advisor to Mitt Romney note that “real Americans don’t care about Afghanistan.” I did not take his remark personally but it did hit home. The man is a seasoned political advisor, his business is to look at numbers and polls. It was a remark that showed me what I already know, that for many Americans the war is not real.  Unfortunately as real as the war is to me and to many people that I know we are in the minority. The most recent opinion polls show that Afghanistan ranks 10th of 10 major issues that Americans are concerned about.  At the same time polls show that the military is the most trusted institution in the nation.

Tonight I will try to sleep and in the morning, Inshallah, I will wake up and go back to serve the men and women who serve this country caring for the Marines, Sailors, Soldiers, Airmen, Coastguardsmen, veterans and their families at Camp LeJeune.

The war is not over and despite what opinion polls and politicians say it is important to some of us.

Peace

Padre Steve+

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