Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story (33 page)

“I’m so sorry my car is so filthy,” she kept saying on the ride over. “I wanted to clean it before you came but things just got…”

“Please,” I said.

In a waiting room at the Pensacola VA, which looks like any other large doctor’s waiting room except for the gun magazines lying around, we met her husband. Round and long-haired and bearded, he looked much older than her and extremely tough, but he shook my hand and said hello politely. I also met Shilo, the German shepherd at Caleb’s side. Shilo was a PTSD service dog—a product of one of those many treatment studies the government was funding. She was trained to bark at Caleb’s triggers and jump up on his chest when she could sense it coiling with the anxiety of an episode, providing instant warm pressure and sympathy. When all three Vineses were whisked in to see the doctor, I stayed behind and read about firearms.

After the appointment, Brannan and I drove home so she could work her other job. A sweet and spacious three-bedroom in a leafy subdivision, the Vines’ residence did double duty as Brannan’s office. She’d set up a desk and computer in what was supposed to be the dining room; it’d never been finished as a dining room, since they’d bought the house with the intention of fixing it up as they had with another house before the war but obviously weren’t up for that now. She sat down and got to work immediately. The stated mission of Family of a Vet, or FOV, was “to help you find your way, find the information you need, and find a way not only to
cope
with life after combat … but to survive and
thrive
!” It had a hundred volunteers and thousands of Facebook users, who met up in groups to compare and commiserate. If she wasn’t answering e-mails, Brannan was on the phone, which started ringing soon after we walked in.

“Deep breath, Helen,” she said to the caller. “Deep breath.”

Brannan worked, then filled me in on what was going on, and I took notes.

Helen’s veteran son was committed to a non-VA psychiatric facility, but he did not want to be there, because he, a severe-PTSD sufferer, was already paranoid, and one of the other resident loons had threatened to kill him. Also, he had fought for his country, he was screaming at Helen, and they promised they wouldn’t abandon him, and he swore to God and to his mother that if the VA didn’t put him in with the other soldiers, he was going to kill himself. Helen had already made as many phone calls to hospital administrators as she knew how but wasn’t getting anywhere; did Brannan know what to do?

“Breathe,” Brannan said to the next caller, too, a veteran’s wife who was calling from the parking lot of a Dairy Queen to which she’d fled because it looked as if her husband’s episode was about to become violent. Brannan said the same thing to the woman whose husband’s service dog had died in the night; waking up to the death smell had triggered him, and the wife thought he was on the verge of hurting himself or someone else if she couldn’t get him into a VA hospital. But the closest major clinic was four hours away, and she was eight and a half months pregnant and got three hours of sleep, and the clinic’s Web site said its case manager position for veterans of Iraq or Afghanistan was currently unstaffed.

“Breathe,” Brannan told everybody. Even as she said it, her voice was shaky and thin. I could practically taste the constriction in her throat from my place on the couch in the adjacent living room. When she had a break between phone calls and joined me there, I asked her if she ever took the deep breaths she herself was advising.

She readily admitted that she didn’t. “If I stopped, and started breathing,” she said, “I would be too sad.”

The house was quiet. We could hear the cat padding around. The air-conditioning whooshed, and a clock ticked. Usually, the place was ensconced in darkness even during the day; they kept all the blinds closed for Caleb’s light sensitivity and for privacy. But alone in the house, Brannan and I had opened them to the sunshine. Even when the phone rang, and she started talking and pacing, it somehow didn’t penetrate the stillness.

Discourse about trauma may have been ghettoized to support groups and private therapy in the outside world—and even then, sometimes couched in euphemisms and veiled terms—but in Brannan’s world, it was all trauma, all the time. Together, FOV volunteers and users normalized their experiences by collecting and sharing them. Everyone who had something “crazy” to say about what was happening in their house found that the same thing was happening in someone else’s. No punches were pulled. This was the place where you could admit addiction and rehab, relapses and spousal abuse, fear of getting assaulted in your own bed, and not getting divorced anyway. No judgments.

“My Husband entered the Marines shy and quiet,” someone had written in the comments of my PTSD-sex essay, “looking for educational assistance; but he came back angry, scared, and expressing violence that he, I, our 4 kids, nor the VA seems to understand. When everything is quiet in the forefront of our home … trust me, our bedroom can be frightening.”

This woman and I had been in touch in the meantime, and Brannan knew about it. “I heard you talked to Christine!” she said; turned out she was a member of FOV.

Sometimes people complained to Brannan that her organization was making veterans with PTSD look bad by discussing these issues (“tired and depressed and very sore, PTSD episodes with violence suck…” a typical Facebook posting read), but she of all people wasn’t trying to stigmatize. She knew how stigma contributed to Caleb’s condition, to the way he felt about himself and the way other people interacted with him, but she also knew that honesty and awareness were the keys to spouses’ survival and to overcoming stigma. It was a fine line she was walking.

She’d been lost without PTSD awareness once herself, she told me on the couch. It wasn’t like she was born with the information, with taking it all in stride. When Caleb had come home from his second tour, in 2006, she didn’t know what to do with him. He was wound up and on a hair trigger. He had outbursts that scared her, when she’d never been close to being scared of him before. He hadn’t yet been diagnosed with TBI, so there was no explanation for why he was forgetting whole conversations minutes after they’d happened. When they had sex, sometimes it was great. But sometimes, he suddenly froze. Brannan didn’t know what he was experiencing when that happened, because when it did he got up and walked wordlessly out the door.

She could have been warned. Countless, documented multitudes had experienced what they were going through before them. They would have been less unsettled if the decades of research about it were systematically shared or spread. Instead, some panicked Googling led Brannan to the Web site of Vietnam Veteran Wives, where she ended up talking to its founder much the way that today’s phone callers ended up talking to Brannan. VVW’s founder, Danna Hughes, had been through the same turmoil decades ago and had opened a center to help get Vietnam vets benefits and educate their spouses and communities about their condition. Danna guessed what Brannan’s symptoms were before Brannan even admitted them. It wasn’t just Caleb who was different now. Danna knew that it was Brannan, too.

Secondary Traumatic Stress Disorder (STSD) is, as one medical journal puts it, “almost identical to PTSD except that indirect exposure to the traumatic event through close contact with the primary victim of trauma” is the cause. It’s been well documented in the spouses of veterans with PTSD from Vietnam. And the spouses of Israeli veterans with PTSD and Dutch veterans with PTSD. In one study, the incidence of secondary trauma in wives of Croatian war vets with PTSD was 30 percent. In another there, it was 39 percent. Kids have been studied, too, with researchers finding in offspring of veterans from World War II, Korea, and Vietnam such symptoms as a “higher rate of psychiatric treatment,” “more dysfunctional social and emotional behavior,” and “difficulties in establishing and maintaining friendships.” Forty-five percent of kids in one study “reported significant PTSD signs”; “83 percent reported elevated hostility scores.” The symptoms were similar to those researchers had seen before, in perhaps the most analyzed and important population in the field of secondary traumatization: the children of Holocaust survivors.

In 2003, though, a team of Dutch and Israeli researchers meta-analyzed thirty-one of the papers on Holocaust survivors’ families and concluded—to the fury of Holocaust families and clinicians alike—that when more rigorous controls were applied, there was no evidence for the intergenerational transmission of trauma. When I called the lead scientist and asked him about his results, he told me that he also wondered if the studies about veterans would hold up. But he speculated that if they did, the many differences between veterans and Holocaust survivors might account for it. Namely, that the survivors’ community rallied around them with support and resources and did not make them feel as though they were expected to sack up and get over it. To this day, Jewish groups offer home care and counseling to Holocaust survivors, as well as support groups to second- and third-generation members of their family.

Another, recent study of PTSD combat veterans’ spouses concluded that more than 15 percent showed signs of STSD, while most of them were generically psychologically distressed. As I sat in Brannan’s living room, a 20-year, 10,000-family study of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans’ kin, the largest of its kind ever conducted, was under way to settle the question more definitively. Meanwhile, the social-work programs manager for U.S. Army Medical Command conceded to me that “in a family system, every member of that system is going to be impacted, most often in a negative way, by mental health issues.” But though that was the sort of thing they told reporters who called asking specific questions about secondary trauma, they didn’t provide that information to soldiers and their families as a matter of course.

Back in those dark confusing days, psychiatrists and social workers could’ve told Brannan how contagious trauma was. People who worked with traumatized people needed support groups of their own, and families’ exposure was a hundredfold. Studies that did or didn’t validate this wouldn’t impact Brannan either way. She knew what her life was like. And Danna had known what her life was like. Danna had guessed, correctly, that she’d stopped being a whole person. That she’d lost herself in constantly orienting herself around her unpredictable husband, and that she’d developed new, unrecognizable emotional tendencies. In her living room, Brannan told me what it was like when hypervigilance overtook her. She remembered a time she was at a drugstore and was standing behind a sweet old lady counting out change when Brannan suddenly became so furious her ears started ringing. Being too cognizant of every sound—every coin dropping becoming an echo—she exploded inwardly, her fury incinerating any normal tolerance for a fellow patron with a couple of dollars in quarters and dimes.

Brannan had never been to war, but she had a warrior’s sense of hyperawareness and stimuli-sensitivity. They were skills on a battlefield, but crazy-person behavior in a drugstore.

We laughed about this sitting in her living room. We laughed about it together because she knew I had the same kind of problems sweeping my floor, or writing e-mails, or missing a train.

After talking to Danna and finding out she wasn’t the only freak show in the universe, Brannan took it upon herself to found her own organization and pass the information on to as many people as she could. She wanted to give people hope by surrounding them with other people like themselves; she wanted to show people how other people were making it. She’d made herself familiar with all the research and history. It was the stuff about the kids that worried her most, because she and Caleb had a six-year-old, Katie, who was at school now. It was a lot for Brannan to juggle, FOV and the caretaking and their daughter. Especially when her symptoms overwhelmed her normal cognitive functioning.

“Sometimes I can’t do the laundry,” she said. “And it’s not like, ‘Oh, I’m too tired to do the laundry’; it’s like ‘Um, I don’t understand how to turn the washing machine on.’ I am looking at a washing machine and a pile of laundry and my brain is literally overwhelmed by trying to figure out how to reconcile them.”

She used to be different. She used to travel, just up and flying to France one time. Now new places and new people stressed her out rather than excited her. Caleb had been through intensive in-patient government therapy twice, and Brannan was bummed good treatment wasn’t available to her. Now she didn’t even like going to Walmart, because she remembered the time Caleb went into scary meltdown there; because she was always hypervigilant watching for triggers for him there; because maybe these days Walmart was too overwhelming for her, too.

Soon Caleb came home. When we heard him pulling into the driveway, we jumped up and drew the blinds, plunging the house back into its usual darkness.

*   *   *

I arrived back at our hotel later in the evening. I’d left Nico with a rental car and to his own devices. He had southern Alabama to explore if he was so inclined. He had access to a hotel pool and a gym. He had his mom to talk to—they’d been having hours-long Skype conversations since he left France. He had unlimited amounts of Netflix to binge-watch, using it to practice English-listening and -reading comprehension with the closed captions on. When I got there, he was in our room.

I didn’t realize until I saw him that I was hoping he would be gone. Being my affectionate boyfriend, he wanted to wrap me up in hugs and kisses and hellos as soon as I walked in the door, and I needed a minute. I needed ten minutes. I needed maybe forty-five to ninety minutes to myself. Or maybe like a week.

I excused myself to take a shower. I sat on the floor of the tub waiting for the water to heat up, huddling around the hot faucet for a while before I pulled the metal tab to send it up to the showerhead. I’d hemmed up a meltdown earlier in the morning when I’d felt it coming on but hadn’t had time to deal with it. Now it escaped fast as I took deep, gulping breaths and cried. I thought about Caleb. I thought about how we’d talked when he came home, how mad he was when he told me that someone at the VA had once said to him, “Kids in Congo and Uganda don’t have PTSD,” as if those kids were tougher than he was and proof that he was making it up. I thought about Katie Vines, who had been in trouble when I met her that afternoon. Brannan and I had gone to her school to pick her up, and she’d bounded into the car, her blondish bob flying, her face nice and round like her daddy’s. We didn’t realize she was in trouble until she handed Brannan a folder from the backseat that had notes about the day from her teacher.