Support our troops

I finally got a chance to talk to my friend K. alone the other day. He's normally very cheerful & calm, but he's seemed tense lately. I mean, really tense. About to fucking snap. Loses patience over nothing at all. Sort of stands on the outskirts of everything, on his tiptoes, like he might blast off any second.

I asked him what was up & he did not let me see him cry. His mom had just had a heart attack. It was on account of him, he said, because the night before she had the heart attack he was robbed at gunpoint at a drive-thru food place in his old neighborhood.

I know he knows that she's had heart troubles for years, and that he didn't actually cause her heart attack, but it took a few days' worth of chance meetings in the hallways to sort out the whole story. I just kept listening.

After the guys who robbed him took off on their scooters, K. got a handgun (legal, registered, etc.) out of his glove compartment. He was freaked. They'd had a gun right in his face. He fired his gun, even though there was no one there. He called the cops. He told the cops that he had fired his gun, and they confiscated it. Told him to settle down or they'd file a charge against him for illegally discharging a weapon within the city limits.

It's a good thing that they took that weapon from him, because he went looking for the guys who'd robbed him. Figured they'd be easy enough to find on that shiny red scooter. Fortunately he didn't find them, and he went home. Stopped and got a pint of vodka first, to calm his nerves. Told his wife what had happened, and went downstairs. His wife called his mom, a second-shift nurse, and she came over on her way home. It appeared that K. was trying to assemble Molotov cocktails and get some of his old army buddies to come over and help him get these scumballs. Or something. Even K. isn't sure what he was trying to do.

See, K.'s a Gulf War vet. His story is not unusual. He enlisted to get money for college and make his mama proud. Only he got shipped off to Desert Storm a few weeks before his time was up. He knew, of course, that that sort of thing could happen when you're in the army. In his better moments, K's grateful for the opportunity to serve his country, and grateful that he came back in one piece and that he was able to finish college and get a job. And he got married, and he's absolutely crazy in love with his wife and adores his beautiful baby daughter. His mother should be proud of him.

But the thing is he didn't come back in one piece. He has PTSD. Looking down the barrel of a gun the other night scared the shit out of him. The idea that he might do something that compromises his daughter's and wife's and mother's safety scares the shit of him. The idea that he might do something stupid and end up in jail scares the shit of him.

"I know I need help," he said to me. "I called the VA to make an appointment. I can see a shrink in like February or March."

Surely we can do better than this.