Soldiers and Cops: A Brotherhood of Suffering
June 4th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
One thing that cops and soldiers share is a brotherhood of suffering with PTSD. There was a piece over at NPR yesterday that really drives that fact home. There’s a bit in the story that I really connected with.
The author of the story is a US combat vet who served in Afghanistan. He mentioned that after coming home he couldn’t escape the anxiety that caused him to purchase the same model combat shotgun he used in Afghanistan, a M4 carbine and an M9 pistol and to keep these arms handy. He ended up sharing this with some veterans.
One Iraq war veteran in the classroom confessed he felt alienated and vulnerable back home, unarmed and defenseless. In an attempt to show he wasn’t alone, I revealed the secret of my personal arsenal.
Right after I said it, I knew I’d gone too far. I expected the students and professors to lean back in their chairs and nervously eyeball the shortest path to the exit.
Instead, one student stood up and pulled out a large hunting knife he’d concealed on his waist. He said when he turned in his M16, he began carrying this knife. Not a day had gone by since he returned from Iraq that he didn’t carry it.
Then a professor reached into his pocket and pulled out a tube of ChapStick.
He said the day he left his job as a police officer, he had to turn in his pistol. He also moved to carrying a concealed knife. After a couple of years, he mustered up the courage to transition from the knife to his lethal tube of ChapStick.
He trained himself to accept the ChapStick as a protective talisman. It provided the peace of mind he’d previously achieved with the knife and gun.
Unfortunately, I have suffered with PTSD for a number of years because of my time as a police officer. In fact, that’s one of the reasons that I went from being a sworn officer to a civilian crime analyst. When I left being a police officer I deliberately avoided getting a concealed handgun license to try and distance myself from the PTSD demons that at one time caused me to consider eating the gun I carried all those years.
But all those years of being armed and on the alert for bad guys left me feeling awfully naked when completely unarmed. I too took to carrying a tactical folding knife “just in case”. Enough time has now passed and I have transitioned to a smaller, less fearsome folding knife as my protective talisman.
I don’t know if I will ever completely shed the PTSD demons. I do think I have made a lot of progress though. I was speaking to my physician the other day about PTSD and told him that I hoped that with all the renewed focus on PTSD because of the returning vets from Iraq and Afghanistan, that our understanding of it will improve. Maybe then we can put our talismans away for good.
