This post appears off-schedule our usual publication schedule for two reasons.
One, it’s Memorial Day in the United States. For many, it’s a day of grilling and picnics. IAVA (Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America) is encouraging everyone to #GoSilent at 3pm for one minute to remember a fallen service member. It could be a family member, a friend, or a member of the community. If you don’t know anyone personally, check out the Instagram account @lutzlivetotell. They regularly profile service members who have passed.
Two, it’s John Conrad’s birthday, so we’re reviewing his book. Happy Birthday, John!
“Among the Walking Wounded: Soldiers, Survival, and PTSD” is Colonel John Conrad memoir of his experience with PTSD. While his first book, he wrote about his experience as a logistics officer in Afghanistan in 2006. At that time, he was part of a support and logistics unit that pulled off a minor miracle of keeping Canadian soldiers fed and supplied over vast distances over dangerous and difficult geography. This is the very definition of “stretched thin.”
This zeroes in on his experience with PTSD. As with other memoirs that I have read or reviewed on this blog, the telling is deeply personal. The usual topics are covered: triggers, nightmares, rage, family conflict, and the damage to careers. What sets Conrad’s book apart is the writing and degree of introspection. More than any other book that I have read, this one effectively conveys what it is like to have PTSD.
The writing is like poetry. Words are chosen for both their sound, shape, and imagery. The sections and chapters in the book are introduced with quotations from books or poems from the likes of Yeats and Shelley. It comes as no surprise that Conrad was an English major at RMC, the same as Captain Nichola Goddard. When describing a medic, he wrote, “checking for a pulse as lightly as if she were selecting an egg from a nesting box.” While working on his farm, baling hay, some of the thoughts that run through his mind are, “The southern Ontario sun hot on my neck could be Afghanistan’s; the weight of the hemp twine in my hands mimics the extraction strap of a solider’s webbing. …Easier to move than the dead.” The last refrain continues for all twelve hundred bales of hay.
He uses the concept of a “doppelgänger” to explain how an opposing, extreme version of himself shows up when his PTSD is triggered. He uses italics to indicate an insidious second voice in his head. Sometimes the voice is the doppelgänger and sometimes it’s the original. Conrad is triggered by lack of appreciation for his work and lack of respect for his competence, both typical of the paranoia and low self-esteem the comes with PTSD. He wrote about one incident when his doppelgänger made an appearance. He returned from lunch one day to find that his cubicle had been completely cleaned out. Unbeknownst to him, it was a prank by his colleagues. His colleagues played it cool, while Conrad fought panic.
“They would not tell us anything,” Bob continued. “Are you being moved to Tech Services?”
“I am not being moved! No one has said bugger all to me,” I snapped. I chewed on his words and contemplated a couple of negative possibilities. Bob was credible. Perhaps I was being moved?
You’re fired Get out.
…It was at the point that I tore away from reason and took flight. I had the sensation of being apart from myself and looking down on the entire office scene.
“I have had enough of this, you fucking assholes. Where is my goddamed stuff?” I yelled.
Silence from the room. Stunned surprise on the face of the naval office; his bored annoyance gone. My emotion was primitive and primal. I felt like I was watching someone else and already I was embarassed for that person.
There were two occasions in Conrad’s story where peer support was pivotal: one with a deceased colleague and another with a newfound one.
The first occurred when speaking to Darcia, the widow of Ray Arndt who had served under Conrad. She wanted to speak to his commanding officer to learn more about their tour in Afghanistan.
“What was a typical day like outside the wire?” she asked. It was that sort of thing. We talked and talked for the better part of half an hour. By the time the call wound down I felt like we had known each other for a long time I tolder her about some of the convoys that I had been on with Ray, and the conversations we had had: we talked about the waiting and the long tracts of mind-numbing boredom, less so on the punctuated minutes of pure speakable terror. Talking with her I had the strangest sense that Ray was sitting right beside me.
“You can, you know.”
“Can what?” I asked him.
“You can get help and keep it low.”
Shortly thereafter, he made an appointment with the mental health section of his medical support unit. He began regular sessions with a civilian therapist name Carol, which were a success and continued for years.
The other occurred one night when he took his reserve unit out on a field exercise. He was sitting in a tent with Sargeant Andy Singh and he opened up for the first time to another soldier.
I cannot recall how the conversation started. Whether it was something Singh offered of himself or something I said about mistakes and learning. It was clear to me that he had been suffering from mental wounds. I proceeded cautiously, not wanting to go offside with him. All I can recall is that at some point I found myself telling this sergeant about my biggest PTSD stuck-point: ineptitude— a deep sense of shame and paranoia, the firm conviction that I was not a good officer.
“I wish I had learned my lessons at a younger age,” I suddenly found myself saying. “Most of what carried me through my tours was the result of mistakes or just-in-time learning.”
Crack! Crack! A pair of rifle reports, harmless blank rounds, sounded on the far eastern edge of our perimeter.
“Let’s give ’em another thirty minutes before we shut it down, eh, sir?”
“Yeah. Sure.” Suddenly I was ready and willing to unburden. “I wondier if I might not be a hypocrite,” I blurted out. “I had tehse thoughts during the double suicide attack in 2006 that came out of nowhere. That none of it was worth dying for. And yet we, the men and women of my own unit, were immersed in the fight every single day.” My words suprised me a bit as they tumbled forth. Andy did not leave them unchecked. He came back immediately.
“For me it is that black Toyota Corolla. I see it my dreams. The eyes of the suicide bomber meeting mine. Understanding too late what was about to happen before he detonated… being powerless to stop it.”
Over time, Singh became a valued friend and supporter. He is a central figure in the book, both through quotations and events that he was involved in.
“Among the Walking Wounded” is a layered and textured account of living with PTSD. It has a level of self-insight that I found missing in Roméo Dallaire’s Waiting for First Light. Dallaire has that self-insight; I’ve heard it in interviews, but it didn’t make it into the writing.
I recommend this book to anyone who is supporting a person with PTSD. The book captures the conflicting voices, the baffling loss of control, the obsession with meaningless stuck points, and the roller coaster of emotions that happen on the inside of someone with this injury. The writing is compelling and the stories are unforgettable. Read it.
Five stars.
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Among the Walking Wounded: Soldiers, Survival, and PTSD
by Colonel John Conrad
Dundurn Press, 2017
231 pages, $24.99
ISBN 978-781459-735132