The Shakes

It happens to some people. They start shaking. It's a combination from and overdose of adrenalin and very stressful situations. The vervous system literally goes into overload at some point and there will be times that you see muscle tremors and other psychosomatic symptoms that appear. For me my right had shakes and i sudder visibly. For those that don't know I'm not nearly as bad as Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan, but it's pretty bad.



Three weeks ago I had started feeling better, I wasn't depressed and for the first time since I came to WTB I started feeling a sense of hope. But somewhere along the way in the past week it all started going south again. Part of it was sleep. I wasn't able to get to sleep at night even with the ambien. Part of it was my imagination running wild. Sadly part of it had nothing to do with imagination and everything to do with things that actually happened.

My case manager DJ asked me if I was really ready for duty again. She almostt looked at me as if asking wheather or not i was truly ready or if I was just bulshitting my way through. Truth is I've come to the concluson that though I truly despise Iraq, the brown and all that goes with it, I am in my own way trapped there. I've left peices of my spirit in that place and now it always seems to be right behind me. If I just turn around there will be Jaysh al-Mahdi rearing for a fight, and I'll be just as ready to kick ass and take names.

I want to belive that there is more to me than the War. I want to belive that when this labor is over there will be more for me to do. I tell myself that there are a ton of things I'll do AFTER this is all over, but the truth is I don't want to do those things anymore. I can almost feel the Colt manufacturing's m-16 or the M-4 variant. Its almost liek it's still on a sling attached to my chest or shoulder. I can lamost feel the IBA, the K-pot. Part of me hated those things so much. Everywhere I went there they were, they became my second skin, andsomehow made me invincible, and now without them I feel weak and vulnerable.

Part of it is stress. The thoughts about the future always fill me with such fear. What if I take the wrong path? What if the path I take leads me to the conclusion I know I want to avoid? But more than that it's the question of if I can still hack it. Can I be depended on again to have peoples lives under my responsibility. Can I take the heartbreak if I lose another?

Whether I get an answer to these things now or later is a moot point. Sooner or later I'll have to face what it is I have become. I fear that these breif resbits between deployments will become the only way I count the time between missions.