Mac McClelland: The Ravages of War Related PTSD

Spread to partners and children of US soldiers. Brannan Vines has never been to war. but she's got a warrior's skills: hyper awareness, hyper vigilance, adrenaline sharp quick scanning for danger, for triggers. Super stimuli sensitive. Skills on the battlefield, crazy person behavior in a drug store, where she was recently standing behind a sweet old lady counting out change, when she suddenly became so furious, her ears literally started ringing. Being too cognizant of every sound, every coin dropping an echo, she explodes inwardly, fury flash incinerating any normal tolerance for a fellow patron with a couple of dollars in quarters and dimes. Her nose starts running and she's so pissed, and there she is standing in a CVS, snotty and deaf with rage, like some kind of maniac, because a tiny elderly woman needs an extra minute to pay for her dish soap, or whatever. Brannan Vines has never been to war, but her husband, Caleb, was sent to Iraq twice, where he served in the infantry as a designated marksman. He's one of 103,200 or 228,875, or 336,000 Americans who served in Iraq or Afghanistan and came back with PTSD, depending on whom you ask, and one of 115,000 to 456,000 with traumatic brain injury. It's hard to say, with the lack of definitive tests for the former, undertesting for the latter, under reporting, under or over misdiagnosing of boath, and as slippery as all that is, even less understood is the collateral damage to families, to schools, to society, emotional and fiscal costs borne long after the war is over. Like Brannan's symptoms, Hyper vigilance sounds innocuous, but it is in fact exhausting and distressing, a conditioned response to life threatening situations. Imagine there's a murderer in your house, and it is dark outside, and the electricity is out. Imagine your nervous system spiking, readying you as you feel your way along the walls, the sensitivity of your hearing, the tautness in your muscles, the alertness shooting around inside your skull, and then imagine feeling like that all the time. Caleb has been home since 2006, way more than enough time for Brannan to catch his symptoms. The house, in a subdivision a little removed from one of many shopping centers in a small town in the southwest corner of Alabama, is often quiet as a morgue. You can hear the cat padding around. The air conditioner whooshes, a clock ticks. When a sound erupts, Caleb screaming at Brannan, because she's just awakened him from a nightmare.