by Bryan Wood
It did not take long before I realized that being a Marketing Manager was no longer the place for me. I did my best to do a great job at work, but it was just obvious I needed to find something new.
Life was no longer the same. Home did not feel like home anymore, I was forcing wedges between me and my oldest friends, and work became an enormous waste of time with people whom I had nothing in common with. My life became very stagnant, and I lived this way for about a year. I eventually reached a point where I decided I needed to make a change.
About a year after I returned home, I began applying with police departments in Florida. I knew that as a police officer I would be around other people who had seen the harder side of life. I would be around people who would see life in a manner much more similar to the way I did. I also knew it would be in a new environment, with new people, and it was the fresh start I needed.
I went to my father and asked, “Hey Dad, can I talk to you about something?”
“Yeah,” he said. “What’s up?”
“I’m thinking about leaving. I’m thinking about moving to Florida”
He asked, “I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, but why?”
I began to explain the way I had felt, and what my life had been like for the last year. I told my father that I needed a change and how I thought this was something I needed to do.
He explained, “I wish you would do something safer, but I understand. You see life through a very different perspective than a lot of other people now, and you need to go do whatever makes you happy. No matter what you decide to do, I’ll always be behind you, one hundred percent.”
It did not take long at all until I was offered a position as a police officer with a great agency along Florida’s Gulf Coast, and I relocated to a new beginning. Such a drastic change did not come without uncertainty. As I was making this change, I constantly wondered if I was doing something positive or making the worst mistake of my life. I set my fears aside, packed everything I owned into the back of my car, and I went for it. I will never forget my first day in the police academy, and when I realized I made one of the best decisions possible.
There were approximately fifty or so students in the police academy class on the first day, and everyone was waiting anxiously in their assigned seat in the classroom. A minute or two after eight o’clock in the morning, a short, stocky man, in his mid-thirties, walked into the room. He was wearing black shorts with a red, long sleeve tee shirt, with “Instructor” printed in white lettering on the front and back.
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 am 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. Tell 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 not perfect, but life was getting better.
I thought about Afghanistan almost every day. Every 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; other 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 hard to take everything day-by-day and just one step at a time. Whether my efforts to this point were a permanent solution, or just a temporary bandage, remained to be seen. For the time being, they were working, and I was getting through life. I managed to deal with every bad emotion from Afghanistan, and I bottled 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 continued 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 enjoying 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 was only a bandage covering a much greater problem, and sooner or later, bandages will fail and old wounds will bleed once more.
Chapter 5 – Falling Apart
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 people 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 this is not to say that there were not problems. Throughout these two years, the recurring nightmares continued off and on. The images persisted, but they gradually began to fade. Strangely, not a day went by where I did not 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 previous year, I had become increasingly frustrated with my wife. This story is not about her, and I am not going to go into great detail 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 were supposed to hang out tonight, just us.”
“Oh yeah, about that; we’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; we’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 home, 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 remembered 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 heard 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 through. 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, but 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 catching 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 doing 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!
“The reason why I’m writing to you is to let you know that something happened. I’ve been having a lot of problems with my left leg and it just never really healed properly. About a month ago, I had another surgery to adjust one of the rods that was placed in my thigh bone. After the surgery, a really bad infection set in. The doctors did everything they could to treat the infection, but it wasn’t helping. Last week, my doctor and I decided that it was time to throw in the towel and take my leg. On Thursday morning they amputated my leg just above the knee….”
Kevin’s email continued on, but I could barely read it. My stomach sank, and my heart was broken. I always knew in the back of my mind that this day was coming, but I just could not believe Kevin lost his leg. He had been through so much, and he fought so hard, only to lose after all this time.
I am not sure if it was the stress in my marriage that worsened the pain, but Kevin’s news bothered me deeply. It not only brought back feelings of pain and tragedy that I had not felt in a long time, but it brought them back with a magnitude that is indescribable. The feelings and pain that had been bottled up for so long were ready to explode, and in an instant, the temporary emotional bandages and facades were no longer working.
The days, weeks, and months that followed sent me deeper and deeper into a dark period of depression. Like always, I tried my best to hide it, but it was always there, worsening with each day. Work became a disinteresting chore, and I began to distance myself further and further from friends and family. I painted myself into that proverbial corner where I felt I had nowhere to go, and I felt I had no one who could ever understand me. I felt as though explaining all of this to someone would be useless, as there was no way anyone could possibly comprehend what I was feeling. Hell, I barely even understood what was happening to me. No matter how hard I tried, I just could not control it. As I look back now, as I am writing these words, I thank God I never turned to drinking. I found a point where I wanted to turn to alcohol to make this all go away, and I knew that was the time to talk to someone - anyone.
I contacted the veterans help line, and I was referred to a local counselor who specialized in veteran care. I made my first appointment and met with the counselor. I was not sure what I was expecting to get out of this, but I was willing to try. The first meeting was not very productive. I guess you could say it was more of an introduction than a counseling session. The counselor had no military experience, but she claimed to have worked with numerous other patients in similar situations. Above all, she had very promising things to say. I visited her twice a week, and I also sought help from my family doctor. My family doctor prescribed me a medication to help me sleep, and it helped tremendously with the recurring dreams but did little else. Although I was doing this, very few of my problems were actually going away. I was taking all the right steps, but yet I felt like I was getting nowhere.
During one session, I talked about the frustration of not getting better. I explained how I felt as though in some ways it may actually be getting worse.
“Why do you feel as though you’re not making progress?” the counselor asked.
I glanced around the room momentarily before answering. The office looked more like a modern living room than an office. I sat on a very comfortable loveseat, while my counselor sat in a typical office-style chair. I loved the way her office smelled. She burned a candle that smelled just like clean laundry fresh from the clothes dryer. I watched the candle’s flame dance as I responded.
“Nothing’s going away; I’m just not getting anywhere. I just feel like I’m wasting my time here.”
She replied, “What are you expecting? Where would you like to see yourself?”
“I’m where I want to be. I don’t need to change where I am in life. What I want to change is feeling like shit all the time. Feeling like I have something hanging over me, something stalking me.”
I then began to describe to her something new that had recently started. I had been in a local grocery store, and I was doing a quick food shop. As I pushed the shopping cart down an aisle, I suddenly had the strangest feeling that someone was following me. I turned to look behind me, and sure enough, there was no one there. A minute or two later, the feeling returned, but this time it felt overpowering. The aisle felt like it was closing in around me, and I felt like I was in extreme danger. I had an incredible fear come over me for absolutely no rational reason. My heart was racing, and I could barely breathe. I abandoned my groceries, and I went to my car in the parking lot where I rode out this terrifying feeling. It lasted for no more than five or ten minutes, and the feeling vanished as mysteriously as it had appeared. The same episode repeated itself twice again within the same month.
When I finished describing what had happened, I was told I was havi
ng panic attacks. She said, “We can get you a mild anti-anxiety medication that should help with that.”
I said, “No, no medication. I already take one pill to help me when I’m sleeping, now another one to help me when I’m awake? Then what? Where does it stop? There has to be another way. Aren’t you supposed to be able to fix this kind of thing?”
“Bryan, maybe there is another way and maybe there isn’t. Either way, I wouldn’t know because you hold so much back. You need to open up completely about everything for this to work. You have been coming here for weeks, and you’ve told me practically nothing. I look at you every time, and I can see you want this to work. I also see that you are trying so hard, but you’re also fighting me every step of the way. If you don’t open up, we are just not going to get anywhere. I can’t make you open up; you have to be willing to trust me.”
I was holding back; in fact, I only spoke about a small fraction of the things that had brought me to this point. I admitted this, and I agreed to start being more open and revealing more detail with her. Even though I made that commitment to being more open, it was actually the last time I went to counseling. I cancelled my next appointment and did not return.
As I write this page and I look back, I really cannot explain why I did not return. I think it just goes back to feeling like no one would understand me. I believed then that no matter what I told her, I was going to get the same canned bullshit response that everyone else had been given before me. I knew very little about counseling, and I was not sure what to expect when I went, but I felt like she was merely there to guide me, or advise me on which paths to take to change my way of thinking. I was confused as to how she could guide me on a path she had never walked. The whole thing just stopped making sense to me. I walked away, and I put myself back into the position of trying to figure everything out on my own.
