Unseen Soldiers

Another from my husband.  He's battles hallucinations for the past several years.  It's become an unnerving reminder of those days back in the sand.

"I see dead people". Yeah, kind of cheesy I know. But it's true.  I say dead because rationally, I know they are images from the past.  However, it takes me a while to finally rationalize this. They tell me it’s a direct result of my TBI but it’s still hard to comprehend.  And, no, I don't have ghosts rattling chains at the foot of my bed or slamming doors or any of that other paranormal mumbo-jumbo. I have worse.  That unsettling corner of my eye bullshit that makes me have to set down.  These apparitions aren't shadowy figures beeboppin' around.  Well, sometimes they are but they are mostly soldiers, fully clad in their battle rattle and just right there in the corner of my eye.  I can see them but cant look at them.  I can sometimes hear them and every once in a while I can smell them.  You smell that?  Yeah, that's "Army Strong".

These fuckers either sneak up on me without me seeing them and are just there -OR- I catch them walking out from behind the car or around a corner. Again, I can see them; I just can't look at them.  In other words they live only in my peripheral. Sometimes there is just a single soldier, sometimes a whole squad. At times I get pissed off enough to yell, "fuck off" out loud. But, and this is a BIG but, I don't encourage this openly verbal behavior within myself and you can damn bet I'm NOT going to be telling the head shrinkers about this. It's bad enough that they've already tagged me with an ever increasingly embarrassing acronym let alone them telling me I'm all schizophrenic and shit. I've got enough to think about and the initial diagnosis was hard enough to swallow. 

Sometimes I suspect that all this may be a leftover from being hyper-vigilant for so long because they aren't ALL soldiers.  I see his and her Hajis and kids. Those goddamned kids. So, you can imagine my reaction one day when the Hispanic neighbor's toddler son quietly walked up on me while I was out in the driveway, wrenching on my car.  Yeah, that was a shitty day...  Probably for us both.  

And then there are the sounds... 

There are occasions where I see nothing but hear all the sounds associated with combat.  I hear small arms, shouts, radio chatter and screams coupled with the sounds of RPG's and mortars.  Luckily none of these instances have lined up with the Jar Heads playing with their BFG's down the road.  Yeah, of all the places in the world I could have ended up, I bought a house just miles from a live fire artillery range. It could be worse I guess. Hell, I'm surprised I still hear anything over this damned ringing in my ears.  I guess these phantom sounds are so clear because they are coming from the wrong side of my eardrums. 

The frequency of these unwanted visions and sounds comes and goes and just when I get good and complacent about them, they come right back to bite me in the ass. Every time it happens my wife has to talk me down from the "I've lost my fucking grip" ledge.  And trust me, that's one slippery slope I've been traversing for years. Just when you think things are getting better, something, some shitty, unnerving fucked up thing happens to knock you right back down again.  I can't tell you how many times in my mind I've been recycled back to day zero.

I'm sure there’s a pill I can take to fry out my mind enough to suppress them. And, I'm sure the VA would be more than happy to provide such a pill in the interest of protecting others from me. But screw that, I've been all "zombie" before and as much as I don't want these fuckers hanging around, I do enjoy the clarity I somewhat retain from time to time.  Although there are the times when I wish they would just ram a shrimp fork of my fucking nose and scramble my frontal lobe with great vigor.