Inside, Eddie goes through his routine. His eyes dart around to all the exits, calculating location and distance. He scans the crowd. It’s early on a weeknight, so the few customers are subdued, but it doesn’t matter. Eddie looks them over, picking out the biggest, the loudest, the ones who look like they could fight. He studies them, looking for clues in posture or state of drunkenness, looking for the way he will bring them down if he needs to.
We find a table and order a round of drinks. Nobody but the waitress pays attention to us. But all the while, Eddie’s eyes wander, tracking everyone in the room at once, as restless as a tiger pacing its cage.
Eddie, not his real name, is a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps. He served multiple tours in the latest Iraq conflict, first in the heavy fighting around Fallujah, then in the counterinsurgency and policing that followed Saddam Hussein’s collapse. He has a Purple Heart medal and a dozen little pockmarks across his upper back where shrapnel tore into him, a dot-to-dot puzzle he will never solve. He has been a civilian for two years, but he’s still a Marine. Any veteran of the Corps will tell you there is no such thing as a “former Marine.”
Eddie is in his mid-20s. He lives in Milwaukee and works as a security guard. He drinks, sometimes to excess, and often gets into fights. Sober, he behaves like everyone is about to attack him. Adding alcohol is unlikely to lead anywhere good. Yet he’s not always the aggressor. His brand of jumpy-looking paranoia attracts a certain kind of bully. It makes him look like easy prey.
I’ve been present for two of his fights. Whatever the Marine Corps teaches in hand-to-hand combat training does not involve wasting time. Both fights were over in seconds, with Eddie sitting atop a bigger man and landing a final punch or twisting his opponent’s limbs in improbable directions. In an awful way, it was impressive to watch.
Since his discharge, Eddie has acquired an arrest record: public drunkenness, four counts of disorderly conduct, one count of resisting arrest when he turned on a police officer trying to break up a brawl.
“I shouldn’t have swung at the cop,” he says. “He was just trying to do his job. I get that.” As he speaks, an early drunk stumbles into our table and roars with laughter. Eddie sizes him up for a full minute, looking for vulnerabilities.
Eddie may suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. It’s difficult to diagnose, thanks to its scattershot list of possible symptoms: insomnia, hypervigilance, anger issues, emotional numbing, avoidance of stimuli that relate to trauma, persistent flashbacks. An estimated 14 to 20 percent of combat veterans from the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts suffer from PTSD. But military counselors believe the rate is actually much higher due to unreported or undiagnosed cases.
Eddie has never been analyzed by a psychologist, nor diagnosed.
Of veterans diagnosed with PTSD, barely half seek treatment. Some assume this is due to the machismo inherent in military culture. No veteran wants to be the one who couldn’t deal with combat – the very situation every enlistee trains for. Activists claim the military discourages veterans from reporting PTSD symptoms, and dissuades medical and psychological personnel from making official diagnoses. Perhaps the likeliest explanation is that combat veterans with PTSD don’t think of it as a disorder. Troops in a combat zone are under the constant threat of violence without warning. Aggression and hypervigilance are survival traits. Their definition of “normal” changes, and they bring the new version home with them.
This is what we do to people we send to war. We tell them they will serve their time overseas and then come home. This is a lie. A war does not end with a change of scenery. Habits of mind forged in the crucible of combat travel with them. The world they return to isn’t home anymore; it’s a place where threats can appear from anywhere, where any moment might call upon them to fight. They no longer fit into a peaceful environment.
As we drink, Eddie tells stories about Iraq. He talks about camel spiders, grotesque creatures he says grow to the size of hubcaps and scream like tormented children. He talks about an Iraqi interpreter moved to tears by the gift of a box of Cocoa Puffs. Absent from his tales is the presence of a visible enemy, a sense that someone was trying to kill him – or that there was anyone he had to kill. Iraq is a series of amusing anecdotes without danger or casualties.
Eight beers in, Eddie is talking again about the fight in which he struck a policeman. He shakes his head ruefully. “I didn’t mean for that to happen,” he says.
So why did it? I ask.
Eddie shrugs. “I don’t know, man. I guess I just wasn’t done fighting yet.”
