Unspoken Abandonment (22 page)

He calmly and confidently said, “I’m Lead Instructor Richard Toffling. I’ll be leading
you
and molding you, hopefully
into successful police officers.
I a
m going to
tell
all of you something
right now;
not all of
you are going
to
make it.”

The tone of the room was somber and filled with anxiety and nervousness.

Toffling continued, “To see what I have to work with, I want to go around the room and have each of you introduce yourself to me and the
rest of the
class. T
ell me who you are, where you are
from, what you did before coming here, and why you want to be a cop.”

The questions seemed simple enough, but that proved to be anything but the case. Each
person was criticized for the
answers
they provided
.  Toffling managed to find something wrong with the information they
gave
, no matter what the student said. Each student seemed to feel belittled by the time Toffling was done with them and had them take their seat.

As it came to my turn, Toffling
had to squint
his eyes to read the name tag on my desk. “Bryan Wood, please stand up and tell us all about
you
.”

I stood up and said, “I’m Bryan Wood, from Taunton, Massachusetts. Before
coming here, I was in the Army, and
I’m a combat veteran
with a rated disability
. During my time in combat, I was awarded the…”

Toffling interrupted, “Where did you fight?”

“Eastern Afghanistan, sir.”

Toffling calmly and politely said, “Thank you,
and sit
down.”

I asked, “Is that all, sir?”

“Yes, that’s all. You can sit down.”

It was that very moment that I knew I made the right decision
,
and
I
had moved my
life into a
very
positive direction.
The remainder of the police academy was very easy, and I ultimately finished first in my class.

I excelled at my new career, and I loved what I was doing. Just as important, I loved
where I was doing it. All was no
t perfect, but life was getting better.

I thought abo
ut Afghanistan almost every day.
E
very time I closed my eyes
,
I still saw images I wished would have faded but hadn’t. My nightmares still attacked me two or three times
each
week.  Sometimes I would wake up
,
and
the dream
would
end quickly
;
o
ther times
,
it would go on until I woke up panicked and sweating.

No matter how my problems lingered, I became a master at hiding them. I learned to hide everything with laughter
and sarcasm. I realized that it is hard to suffer when you are
laughing, and I basically treated everything
in life as if it were
a joke. Being a smartass became
the
medicine
that
made life much
easier to deal with
.

I worked har
d to take everything day-by-
day and
just
one step at a time. Whether
my efforts to this point
w
ere
a permanent solution
,
or
just
a temporary bandage
,
remained to be seen.
For the time being, they
w
ere
working
,
and I was getting through life. I managed to
deal with
every bad
emotion
from Afghanistan,
and
I
bottle
d
them
away in a place
that allowed me to forget
them. They were bottled away so I could
deal with them some other day.

The next two years of my life co
ntinued on almost uneventfully.
I had sad days
, and I had
happy days, just as all people do.
I was living my
life
, and
I was enjoy
ing my life as best as I could.
I
thought I had found the answers, but
I now know that hiding your emotions behind a mask
,
and bottling your feelings away
,
is only a temporary solution.
It wa
s only a bandage covering a much greater problem
,
and
sooner or later
,
bandages will fail
and old wounds will bleed once more
.

To say the next
two years of my life were uneventful
would be
fairly accurate. I had
grown
into new habits,
I
developed new routines, and work kept me very busy. The best part of
my
new
career
was being surrounded by people who had a keen sense of tragedy. I worked with peo
ple who had experienced
and witnessed
suffering first-
hand
and
on a very regular basis. There was no arguing about petty expense reports, people prying for gory details about war, or anything
else
that I had dealt with in the past
.
It also felt very good to be in a position to actually help people, and I was making a difference in
the
lives
of others
.

All thi
s is not to say that there were no
t problems. Throughout these two years, the recurring nightmares continued off and on. The images persisted, b
ut they gradually began to fade
. Strangely,
not a day went by where I did no
t think about Afghanistan
in one way or another
.
As I mentioned earlier,
I
had done
an excellent job holding
my
emotions and feelings back
to this point
, but the
metaphorical
dam was set to burst.

Over the course of the p
revious
year
,
I had become increasingly frustrated with my wife.
This story is not about her, and
I
am
not going to go into great deta
il about this aspect of my life;
however,
my marriage
was a catalyst for future changes
, and it is
important to explain.

My wife had become very distant from me in many ways, and
she
often felt very cold
and
somehow disconnected
from
our relationship.
I would routinely confront this
which would temporarily fix things, but the
cold
feeling would
always
return very quickly. This began a cycle of routine fighting and arguing with very little resolution. It bordered on impossible for me to get my wife to enjoy any time with me at home. It got to a point where any time we did spend together felt forced
or unwilling
on her part.

This
distancing
manifested itself into numerous problems and breakdowns in our relationship. I watched as my marriage slipped deeper and deeper into disrepair, until it seemed as though it was a struggle
for me
to continue. One night, everything came
to a head
.

She said, “I’m going out with some friends tonight. I shouldn’t be home
too
late.”

“What do you
mean ‘going out with friends?
’”
I asked. I reminded her, “
We we
re supposed to hang out tonight, just us.
”

“Oh yeah
,
about that;
w
e’ll just plan again for another night.”

I asked, “You and I will plan
for another night
, or you and your friends?”

“
Me and you
;
w
e’ll just do something next week.”

I was going back to my days on at work, and since I worked the evening shift
,
it would be days until we saw one another again.

I said, “Sometimes, I honestly think you couldn’t give a shit about us.”

This
statement erupted
into a back and forth battle
until I just
stopped
,
and
I
started thinking. I instantly recalled every step of the last
two
years. I remembered
being back
in Afghanistan and asking her to send me pictures of things from h
ome
,
things
to remind me of happy times
,
and getting none. I remembered begging her to send me a black backpack to carry extra ammunition
,
and it never coming. I thought about the care packages I received with nothing extra in them to brighten my day. I remem
bered all of the emails I received
with very few sent
to see
how I was doing
,
and
instead
only asking for
a
PIN number, a password, or how to do something. I recalled all of the nights I woke up from a nightmare in a dripping sweat, only to have her roll over and never speak a word of it. All of these things
,
and more
,
came rushing to me when I he
ard her finally say what I had suspected
for some time.

She looked at me and said, “I don’t love you. I mean I love you, but not like I should. I don’t look at you as my husband, you’re just my friend. I haven’t been attracted to you in a long time, but I just don’t know what to do about it.”

The fight calmed
,
and we talked about
our problems
. As much as it hurt to hear, I knew that it needed to be talked through. Initially, it was treated as a downswing in our relationship
,
and
we thought it was
something we could work thro
ugh. In reality, the same issue
surfaced over and over again,
and
it became painfully obvious that
my
staying in this
marriage
was a fool’s errand.

Over the next several months, my wife would have periods where she would make an effort
and try to make things better, b
ut as quickly as these times would come, they would quickly pass
,
and we would be back at square one.
This cycle repeated itself numerous times as
I painfully watched my marriage wither before my eyes.

Kevin and I had maintained contact through email since he left Fort Drum. Over the last year our emails had become fewer and fewer
,
and by this point
,
we barely wrote at all. In every email we would send
to one another
, we would talk about taking a trip to get together at some point and catch
ing
up. We would both agree we needed to do so soon, but life
always got
in the way
,
and it never happened. Kevin would usually write and update me on his progress
,
and
he would
let me know how he was healing. Over the last year and a half
,
he had been do
ing very well and made a lot of progress.

One day I was
looking
through my email
when
a new message from Kevin appeared, “You’ve got mail.” This email will haunt me forever.

Kevin wrote, “Hey Bryan! I hope you’re doing well. It’s been a long time since Fort Drum. It feels like it’s been forever since we were there. Do you ever talk to Bernie? Last time I emailed him, he was doing awesome. Good for him!