people, his diminishing eyesight made three lanes of traffic hard to negotiate. And I knew Donald’s reaction time was off; he had difficulty backing out of the driveway at their apartment complex. Larry and I laughed that Donald never heard other drivers honking at him. So, that day, I drove us along narrow back roads all the way to Ambridge, making a one-hour trip take three.
We had our lunch, but shopping took longer than expected. When it was time to go home, I didn’t want to drive the long way and suggested we take the highway. I was the driver, after all, so what was the big deal? We argued in the parking lot of a shopping center. Donald refused to get in the car if I was going to drive on the highway.
“He’s afraid I can’t drive just because he can’t,” I reasoned, so to get him in the car I said, “Okay, I’ll take back roads.”
I was sure he’d see that I could manage the highway traffic, and then he’d relax. My mother, with her bad knees, needed to sit up front, so Donald sat in the backseat behind me. And off we went.
One hundred yards up the road, I entered the highway ramp and heard Donald howl from the backseat. Again I assumed he was afraid of my driving, so I said, “Don’t worry, I’ll get us home,” as I accelerated.
My merging speed was up to almost fifty miles per hour when Donald lurched over me from the backseat and grabbed the steering wheel. His body forced my head into my chest, and my field of vision was completely blocked. Suddenly I was wrestling Donald for control of the car. I didn’t know if I should brake or how to steer. I had no idea where other cars were. And I knew I was going to die.
I made a conscious decision to minimize the damage and blindly swerved to the right where I hoped there would be a guardrail or shoulder. I was howling and so was Donald. I steered right hard, braked, and hoped I was stopping on something safe and out of traffic. I heard horns blaring and brakes screeching all around me. When my car came to a stop, Donald instantly sat back in his seat as if he had just picked up his hat from the floor.
I was still screaming, flooded with adrenaline, terror coursing through me. My sobs began as I realized it was over. I got out of the car and began to run wildly up and down the shoulder of the road. My mother and Donald sat in the car. I came back and yanked open my mother’s door and began to scream at her.
“He’s nuts, do you know that? He’s insane, he’s crazy, he tried to kill us; do you get it? He’s nuts; he’s just nuts.”
And there I was, a raging, sobbing, hysterical woman, racing around in public and screaming at two elderly people who were calmly sitting in the car.
Later, I tried to imagine what being in the backseat had triggered for a man who had been in warlike conditions and then been restrained. Had I naively stepped in front of the train—of Donald’s past and pain? But that understanding didn’t remove my own rage and my absolute recognition that Donald would have killed—all of us—again.
Out of Order
I am telling you this story out of order, and that is because Donald was out of order, my mother was out of order, and yes, I’m out of order, too—most people with trauma are. But it’s also because I learned Donald’s story out of order: First I learned about the ending—the murder. And then I learned about the beginning, which was China. And then I learned some of the middle, and I had to back up and start all over to put the pieces of Donald together again.
Donald was sad and then heroic. He was scary but also admirable. He had been terribly violent, and terrible violence had happened to him as well.
What I did not know when I first met him was that Donald’s life was severely out of order. I ache when I think of all the ways he had been traumatized: childhood poverty, a foster home, the Marines, the Japanese in China, St. Elizabeths, the murders, Farview, and afterward, too. But he had no words for any of it, and the people around him were also without words.
Words matter. Words help us make meaning out of experience; they give us something to hold onto. If we had had the term “post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)” in earlier wars, those soldiers might have had something to hold onto. But there was no post-traumatic stress disorder in 1937 or 1945—not even in 1969.
We forget that PTSD was not named as such in Vietnam—not even when our Vietnam veterans started coming home. It wasn’t until 1972 when psychologist Chaim Shatan wrote an op-ed piece for The New York Times and used the term “Post-Vietnam Syndrome” that people started to take notice. And it took another eight years for post-traumatic stress disorder to become an official diagnosis, five years after the Vietnam War officially ended.
A diagnosis can be a gift. Sometimes people with a mental illness say they don’t want to be labeled; they don’t want to be “in the system” and they don’t want to be identified as mentally ill. There are good reasons: stigma, fear, and often shame accompany a diagnosis.
But it can help enormously when you have words—when you can put a name to feelings and behaviors and thoughts. Say you come home from war and you are happy to be home and proud of your service, but then you notice you are jumpy, feel scared, and see danger everywhere and don’t know why; you can think you are insane. You don’t understand why you can’t go to the mall, take your kids to a movie, or make love to your wife. You just feel bad—bad about yourself—and it is a horrible and ruined kind of bad. But maybe if someone hears your list of symptoms and tells you that you are having this bad time because you have a disease, then you have a starting place. But until then you are out of order: you are broken and in disrepair.
It is important to think about what a diagnosis is. A mental illness diagnosis can sound scientific or definitive, but it is an outcome of language—of language and politics and even economics, as we’ll see later. This is especially true with military mental illness. Military trauma, with its many synonyms, shows us how language shifts and adapts to culture, and so what we believe and how we react to “bad behavior” shifts as well.
When I went looking for Donald’s story, I met veterans whom no one had talked to about their war experiences. They were men who had been both cruel and kind. They could be hard on people around them, but they were gentle with each other. They ran businesses, sold cars, and taught school. They were war heroes. I met Frenchy and Bones who cared about Donald, and Cliff Wells and George Howe who never judged him.
My mother loved Donald. When my brothers first learned his story, they were furious and wanted him out of my mother’s life. But over time, they came to care for this odd man who had joined our family.
And me? I liked Donald when I met him. He was quiet, polite, and kind, and in truth, I was glad my mother had someone to focus on, someone who would take care of her and give me some relief. But I had my own craziness. I didn’t escape the trauma of my mother’s addiction, and it caught up with me. It affected my thinking, my self-image, and my relationships. When I was thirty, I tried to kill a tree. I was so jealous of my first husband’s ex-wife that I tried to kill the tree they’d planted as newlyweds by watering it with bleach every day. The tree kept on blooming. I didn’t.
While I looked fairly good on the outside, my insides were filled with constant anxiety, and I had plenty of secret ways to manage all that pain. Just like Donald, I had no words for what was wrong with me, so the “home remedies” I used to “treat” my trauma were alcohol, food, and overwork. Then, feeling bad about that, I piled shame on top of shame.
Trauma
