Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story (36 page)

And I was back.

“The more you do that, the more trust you’ll build that you can do it,” Denise said.

One morning, when Nico woke up with tears spilling slowly onto his cheeks, elegant little tears falling quietly and one at a time, I was there for
him
. Just a few weeks before, he’d woken up in the middle of the night unhappy, unable to sleep and ultimately getting out of bed because we’d been looking up San Francisco real estate for fun, and no matter that we couldn’t afford any of it, he realized that if he took out a thirty-year mortgage at the age of twenty-six, he would if he were like his father be dead before it was paid off. And that night, I couldn’t help him. I’d been at capacity with trying to hang on to myself, and had growled at him angrily, “I can’t
help
you.”

But this morning, I was able. That day was my thirteenth lucid and regular-person day in a row. So I wrapped Nico up in 125 pounds of sheer compassion while he caught his breath, exhaling his sorrow that when he saw his father in a dream last night, he didn’t have time to tell him he missed him.

*   *   *

“If I were a gambling woman,” Denise said, trying to lessen the shock of it even as we were celebrating my victories, “I’d bet you were going to have another bad day this month.”

Just a few days later, I did. Nico said, “It’s been a long time I didn’t feel you like this.” I was dreadfully disappointed and angry to feel it again. I wasn’t the only one who was impatient with my progress—now that my employer’s insurance company had accepted my workers’ comp claim, they were making Denise submit all her notes about our confidential and private sessions if she wanted to get paid, and started to call her regularly to ask if I was better yet, how much better I had to get yet, and when she thought I would be better. Sometimes they contacted me with a similar line of questioning.

But the continuing struggle was just the inevitability of the process, the ebb and flow of it. That was how far I still had to go. In the meantime, mindful of how far I’d come, I set off to finish the story about secondary trauma. Having met Brannan, it was time to go profile Brannan’s salvation and inspiration, the founder of Vietnam Veteran Wives, who was such a pioneer on the issue that thirty years after Vietnam and several years into two whole new wars, when Brannan went looking for understanding with all the tools of modern Internet technology at her fingers, what she found was Danna Hughes.

*   *   *

Way up North, and nearly as far west as you can go, in Ferry County, Washington, there’s a little town with no stoplights by the name of Republic. Nico and I arrived via the Spokane airport and three hours in a rental car to find an abundance of parks and lakes and campgrounds. No sooner had we got there than people warned us against hiking any unknown path because of all the trip wire and booby traps.

“They do
not
like to be bothered,” Danna Hughes told us of the high proportion of Vietnam veterans who lived around there, many of whom holed up in the woods. She used to go out there, after the war, to find them and make sure they filed for their VA benefits. Drove her husband nuts, the way she wandered into the forest to track down guys living on the dirt under cardboard boxes, trying to get them to fill out paperwork.

We met Danna at the grounds of VVW, where she was preparing for a Memorial Day fundraiser the next day. Back in the nineties, Danna served three counties and some 5,000 former soldiers via the center she founded, established nonprofit status for, and got the VA to recognize and reimburse. She’d started it because, like Brannan, she had a PTSD-disabled veteran in her life—only her husband had a violent incident that had landed him in prison. When he got out, he was still a ball of anxiety, and despite the prevalence of other suffering veterans’ spouses in this county, which had the fifth-highest percentage of vets of any county in this vet-heavy state, there was no organization for the families. Danna didn’t actually know what she was dealing with, because there wasn’t a lot of talk about PTSD then. “I didn’t know what it was,” she told me. “I just lived it.”

That experience was enough for her to feel that she knew what people needed. “
She
,” Danna said, meaning any wife—nearly all the vets around here were men—“NEEDS therapy.” She talked about how spouses of PTSD veterans lost themselves, were wrapped up and overwhelmed by the space the trauma took up, swallowed up by it. Dressed in blue jeans and moccasins and with short, well-styled silver hair, Danna smiled easy but moved pretty slow because she’d thrown her back out again. She used to be in beauty pageants, and it showed, in the subtly flirty but no-nonsense way she addressed everyone. She knew how it felt to have your nervous system turn against you, and that it was harder for veterans to get better if their spouses didn’t get treated. Danna’s husband was checking into in-patient psych treatments for almost three weeks at a time, she said, only to come back to his untreated wife and “within three seconds” be re-exposed to the same bad emotional environment he’d left. In 2001, he killed himself.

After a 2000 VA budget crunch, the contract for Danna’s clinic was terminated. Now VVW had more modest but no less determined facilities: a camouflage-painted mobile home planted among tree-dotted hills. Tomorrow at the fundraiser the community would dedicate a new, second building, a log safe house open twenty-four hours a day so vets who felt themselves becoming episodic had someplace to go—it was better than driving to VVW’s parking lot and sleeping in their trucks, as they often did. The closest VA hospital was 130 miles away. VVW offered help with filing for medical care and benefits—“Money has to be first. You can’t breathe without it,” Danna said—but also offered counseling. To
everyone
in the family.

“They will hang in there until the last dog is dead,” she said of military spouses. She wanted to do everything she could to make that easier. She’d once been shot at, when a veteran with severe PTSD came in with his wife and in a strung-out rage, but that wasn’t a deal-breaker for Danna, and she didn’t think it should necessarily be a deal-breaker for the wife. Like Brannan, Danna was frank and unapologetic about her decision to stay with her husband despite the difficulties. “If you love somebody, you stick with them,” she said, and there it was, naive, and beautiful, and impractically pure.

As if to prove that good results could come of it, Danna introduced me to Steve and Charlene Holt, an unbearably sweet couple helping out with the setup around the grounds. She was a local artist with long, feathered gray hair and serious eyes; he was a handsome guy in his sixties with a white beard and cargo pants. He’d got divorced from his first wife after Vietnam, drinking wildly and warring with her, but he had met Charlene in 2001 and with that inspiration checked into in-patient in Seattle several times. He had quit getting drunk, and found Jesus, and every time they passed each other as they worked that day, they touched and kissed. A decade into their marriage, Steve called Charlene “my bride.”

“I’ve never known love like this,” she told me, looking like she was going to cry. “He is awesome.”

Everybody was chipping in with donated services and labor to get the fundraiser off the ground. Danna’s late husband’s best friend and war buddy Mike had come in from Montana. There were posters for it in the windows of the few shops along the main street. The nearby Indian reservation, which had 450 veterans of its own, sent military flag-bearers. And on the day of the event, between 200 and 300 people showed up, a big turnout in a county of 7,500 spread among 2,000 square miles. Nico walked around wearing an American-flag armband Danna gave him.

Throughout the afternoon, veterans and local politicians and musicians took the stage. Mike’s daughter, who was a few years older than I, drove all the way from somewhere with her drummer boyfriend, who filled out one of the acts at the last minute. One after another, the people who stood up to the microphone thanked Danna. They thanked her for saving their lives, for keeping them from suicide, for keeping them off the streets—or out of the woods. Their paperwork had been complicated or backlogged or lost or ignored, but Danna had kept advocating for them until they had what they needed to survive. She stood in the back against the trailer in a patriotic-red dress shirt, waving off their sentiments.

In the audience, Nico and I sat behind an elderly guy who, according to the badges on his cap, had served in World War II. When the color guard paraded onto the grounds, he barely had the strength and range of motion to salute. He started to put up his arm; he stalled, wavered and shook, then gave up. He tried again a few moments later, swinging his arm wider and harder, and his hand made it to his forehead. He managed to keep it there by cupping his palm around his big old-man glasses.

Vietnam vets still made up the bulk of Danna’s clients, though increasingly she was serving Iraq and Afghanistan returnees. She also told me she assisted more than one veteran of World War II—in which a third of the medical disability discharges were psychiatric. Some of those men still showed up to Danna’s office, having never been treated for anything, and cried, and cried, and cried. “So,” Nico asked me during the fund-raiser, making sure he was following everything correctly through his ESL filter. “These people fight war but when they come back if they’re sick they have to fight to get money, and sometimes they get nothing?”

Back at the hotel that night, I hit my wall. I started crying, lying on the bed, and I knew that I couldn’t take in any more for this story. I was full. “I can’t do this anymore,” I told Nico. It was my birthday weekend again, two years after the birthday I’d cried in a petroleum-soaked Louisiana. Nico stroked my face and said that was fine. And it was. I’d mostly finished my reporting. Other than briefly stopping by Steve and Charlene’s house, the only thing we had to do that Sunday was go out for breakfast.

Nico and Mike had exchanged phone numbers. They’d bonded over the senselessness of the work they’d been ordered to do, though they’d obviously been issued very different kinds of orders. Mike had become upset when Nico told him that other units in the gendarmerie had been sent to Afghanistan, and that he’d been ready to go himself. “There was no point,” Mike said. No point to his being in Vietnam, no point to Nico’s being in Afghanistan, or even Haiti, or anywhere. I saw Mike tell Nico that he was glad he hadn’t gone to war, and Mike looked genuinely relieved.

They wanted to spend more time together. Mike’s obligations to helping Danna tied him up, so they hadn’t been able to go for coffee in the short time they were in town. Even that Sunday morning, he had breakfast commitments, but he invited us along. Nico and I stepped out of the car in the parking lot of a shabby diner—the only kind of diner in Republic. The sun was out, but the late-May air was cool; that far north, the sun never seemed to penetrate the skin. It shined down to just a couple of inches out of reach.

Inside, our long table was packed with weirdos. There was me, and my French military-police boyfriend, and Danna the frisky savior, and her niece, who’d also come in from out of state, where she taught kids at a school for the extremely behaviorally challenged—often resulting from trauma. There was Mike the surly but kind-faced Vietnam vet, and his considerable brown mustache. There was his daughter, who looked much older than I with her chin-length dyed hair and a faded tattoo on her face but had the clearest, brightest crystal eyes. There was her boyfriend, lanky and older-looking than she was and apparently a serious musician.

“Is that your coping mechanism?” Danna asked him in regard to playing drums, as though coping mechanisms were regular, polite breakfast conversation. I didn’t know what he’d gone through that made Danna ask him that, but he nodded. Mike’s daughter, I quickly understood on the other hand, had been arrested a lot.

“I always tried to be nice about it when the cops came to get her as a kid,” Mike said, “since it was my fault that she was screwed up from living with me.” When I asked him what had happened to “wife number one,” he said, “War stuff.” Wife number two as well. He gave cohabitating one more go with gal number three—“How could I help it? She’s blond and six foot one”—before giving up. He couldn’t keep a woman, not with the killing he’d done, he said, and since “the war
really
starts when you get home,” he was committed to staying noncommitted for life. He hadn’t been on so much as a date since 2005. Now he ran a one-man security company, escorting American businesspeople to scary corners of Russia and Sudan. “Where it’s dangerous, I feel a peace come over me,” he said.

As I said: what a bunch of weirdos.

Only that we weren’t. It was getting so that everywhere I looked, I saw trauma. From Brannan’s coffee table to this breakfast table, I was surrounded by family members who would never be counted or offered treatment. They were the collateral damage that didn’t end with veterans, that everyone pretended didn’t exist in a case of that clinical and cultural amnesia Judith Lewis Herman talked about. Their soldiers were the one group that did get recognition for their PTSD, and even they, after serving in a war, often got neglected, or judged, or outright fucked over. Their treatment didn’t bode well for other traumatized people’s. They were owed, and they still didn’t get what was coming to them. All rape victims did was get raped.

And what
about
rape victims? Sexual assault and child molestation victims? They were a bigger proportion of the PTSD population, and without as many government resources behind them. Among men, the rate of PTSD for rape survivors was 65 percent, versus 31 percent for in-theater Vietnam veterans. (For women, the rate was 45.9 and 27 percent, respectively.) Looking at rape victims or veterans alone was enough to overwhelm someone, and they weren’t the end of the epidemic. There were the children that Danna’s niece taught. There were the reports about the severe impairments of children from violent backgrounds; scientific conclusions that unresolved early life trauma could equal emotional-awareness problems, substance abuse, problems regulating emotions, self-harm, inabilities to feel safe, trusting, secure, or worth anything. Brain damage. There was the book about multigenerational post-slavery trauma among African-Americans (exacerbated, according to its thesis, by the fact that no one was ever held accountable). An entire field of academia called postcolonial trauma studies. An estimated thirty percent of children who’ve suffered sexual abuse develop PTSD. Thirty-five percent who are exposed to violent neighborhoods. As many as 2.9 million American kids are abused and neglected a year, and PTSD drops an abused kid’s verbal IQ by 30 percent, with the fear centers of their brains overdeveloped and self-care, self-understanding, and self-reflection centers underdeveloped—their symptoms severe and specific enough that there’s a movement to get developmental trauma its own designation in the
DSM
. Ninety percent of “juvenile delinquents” have been exposed to trauma. Thirty percent have PTSD. A large proportion of the national prison population does, too.