1. Do you always keep a pistol on your nightstand?
2. Do you refuse to travel without a firearm?
3. Do you sometimes find yourself checking to ensure you locked the house...a second time?
4. Do you get anxious in tight crowds, so much so that you avoid them?
5. Are you often startled by your wife just because she approached you from behind in the kitchen...laundry room etc?...
A plausible fear of being killed often results in the above.
I met a man at the local VA...a group I attend...72yrs old. Viet Nam vet.
Diagnosed with PTSD last year. He had been living with it since his return and finally decided to see if he could fix it.
We have some younger relatives, who had the problems that you listed below, due to their jobs, where they worked and lived.
Most have had successful career changes and relocation’s to safer work and home areas including their commutes.
2. Do you refuse to travel without a firearm?
3. Do you sometimes find yourself checking to ensure you locked the house...a second time?
4. Do you get anxious in tight crowds, so much so that you avoid them?
In today's world that's just common sense.
Sounds like my Great Uncle Howie - he was on a ship that got Kamikaze’d in WWII. Took an upstairs room in my Grandparents house and would wake up screaming in the middle of the night as the dreams slunk in...took him a long time (mid 80s) to drink himself to death at the local VFW and was on a hair trigger if anyone seemed the least bit aggressive. I spent some time with him and heard some stories a pre-teen, early teen shouldn’t have to hear but I loved him dearly and he enjoyed my company too.
In the list, you left out the nightmares that last for long after. And the drinking and the failed marriages. For a long time afterward, experiencing deep sorrow that you made it back and so many friends, good guys, didn't.
Pretty well all of us, I guess.
I never looked at myself with having "PTSD" but I knew that I had changed - just couldn't put my finger on it. The book definition of PTSD is that it comes from the brain's reaction to fear. That's part of it. I think that it also comes from seeing things that normal folks will never see, of learning that killing other people is pretty straightforward, of experiencing sustained deprivation and discomfort and sleeplessness, and maybe most of all, detachment from everyone except the ones who experienced the same things that you did. Our reception when we got back magnified everything.
The more I learn, the more that I am sure that each and every surviving combat veteran has some or most of these effects. We have all done well in our lives (other than marriages) and we have been productive, moral people - but we are changed.
They keep three things at their bedside: pistol, machete or bowie, hatchet or tomahawk.
Always three defensive weapons.