Yellow-Green Tennis Ball PTSD

I want a yellow-green tennis ball, the kind I had when I was a kid. Its scraggly fuzz should be worn to reveal a cracked, rubbery core. And somewhere there, between the mock stitches, it should have once said Wilson or Penn or Dunlop, but probably Wilson, except that it maybe wasn't even yellow or green anymore because the dirty old street gutter water and the chalky white sunscorched paint of the garage door transformed the nature of its appearance one screaming fastball at a time. Over and over and over until my 12-year old arms grew weary, and faster and faster and harder I charged to unload a short-armed quick toss across the diamond, across my body, to hear the pop against the inpenetrable wooden door. 

PAHK!

PAHK!

PAHK!

PAHK!

PAHK!

And then PAHK and PAHK and PAHK and PAHK and PAHKPAHK PAHKPAHKPAHK until I was sweating and swearing and crying beneath the Eucalyptus trees, my arm throbbing, and my calves stinging from the charge. I would pop the goddamned phlegm-colored ball or pass out trying. Then thirteen years later, in the courtyard of a Baghdad prison and surrounded by port-a-john's and concertina wire, there was a giant metal sign with words in English and Arabic. Huge metal sign, as big as a strike zone, and beneath my feet--all around me in the Murafa Yard--rocks. Several tons of rocks. Rocks that fit perfectly between the thumb and the first crease between your pointer and middle fingers. Some rocks jagged as a lava stone, and others smooth and rounded, or oblong and flat, but none never too far from fitting between the fingers like seams of a baseball. It was a yard of rocks so deep, so plentiful, my combat boots sank with each noisy step. And each overnight, 12-hour shift beside the airstrip at Baghdad International Airport, that giant, metal sign with the warnings in English and Arabic clanked and panged and sparked from the blazing fastballs I unleashed upon it. Hundreds of fastballs each night, that sign would PING and TANG until the goddamned sign fell from the fence or I would pass out trying. 

But I don't have a yellow-green or phlegm-colored tennis ball. I don't have a wooden garage door, or a giant sign to hang on my fence. There are a few rocks, but by this point, or after I've had another drink, there won't be enough. I won't have the ammo I need to throw my arm out, to charge and to quick step and to unload from a high, three-quarter arm slot until my legs collapse or constrict, or until I'm simply out of breath. 

This is how I deal with anger. 

Or depression. 

The kind of anger or depression that by tomorrow morning, it's still there. As are the charred, skin-pulled eye sockets of the corpses along the side of the road, or the rise and fall of the man's chest as he lay silently in the back of my humvee, me racing over center medians and through traffic to get him to the hospital, or that time when Dex and Boom stumbled out of their bombed-out room with blood running down their foreheads and necks. You could practically see the stars circling over them like it was a fucking Tom and Jerry cartoon, except that brothers aren't cartoons. Instead of word association, it's emotional association, the kind of feeling that doesn't stop feeling, and each new feeling is not just a recollection of the old, but an addition, another carcass tossed atop the burnpit. And so I drink and think about the feel of the worn rubbery seems between my fingers, the chalky-dirt layer on the tip of my middle finger, the tingling and then the numbness in my arm, and the pain the next day. That pain, that muscle soreness worn again the next night overcome by fever and anger and satisfaction that with each throw, a tiny little globe-world of anger hurtles toward destruction--its own, or mine. 

Baby Steps

Two Fridays ago, I came home from grandpa Orval's funeral. In my inbox were two emails for an opportunity to submit some work for the New York Times and the Huffington Post in honor (celebration? remembrance?) of the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.

Last week, my piece was included with others from VoteVets.org at HuffPo, and today, my piece, with my own byline, went live on NYT's At War blog.

I'm wordless. For the time being. And motivated.

Orval

Orval Miller, a retired chief supervising appraiser for the Riverside County Assessor, died on February 17 at his home in Tustin. He was 89.
The cause was pulmonary failure, his daughter said. He had moved to Tustin from Fountain Valley in October, where he lived with his grandson and family.

Mr. Miller, a Merchant Marine WWII veteran, was a master storyteller to all who knew him. “Once he wound up, he wouldn’t stop,” his grandson said. “We’d sit up each night after dinner and trade war stories.”

Like the time he took up smoking because, “that’s what you do when you’re in the service.” And then, just like that, he had quit: He learned that he “could make a lot of money bartering a carton of cigarettes to worse off suckers than himself.” Or the times in the Pacific when his Liberty ship was delivering fuel to Allied forces abroad. His blue-grey eyes would bulge from beneath his heavy brow, and his hands would fly up to animate with childish fervor, “We were a floating time bomb! It’s a miracle we never swam with the fishies!”

For a while after the war, Mr. Miller took over his father’s chicken farm. He joined the Freemason’s, and then served as Secretary for the county Rotary Club before joining the county Assessor’s office. Aside from chicken, he disliked rice, rock and roll, and disruption to his routine. He was a “whiskey man,” and a self-proclaimed “Chocaholic.” He loved to dance, and he cherished the time he spent “getting to know his great-grandchildren.”

Orval Irvin Miller, who held dual American and Canadian citizenship, was born on July 6, 1923 to Austin and Sarah Moynes Miller in Saskatchewan, Canada. The family soon moved to Southern California, and had bounced around between Redlands, Alhambra, and West Hollywood before settling in Nuevo. After High School, he attended Cal Maritime Academy. His wife, Florence Luanna Davis, whom he married after her graduation from USC Medical School in 1952, died in 2008.

Mr. Miller’s survivors include daughter Luana Roth, son Brian, grandson Jason Davis, and granddaughter Kerri Hoagland.

A funeral service will be held at Riverside National Cemetery on Friday, March 15 at 1:30 p.m., Staging Area 3.

Leica iiib, Fuji Neopan Acros @ASA400, Rodinal 1:50

10 Years Ago Tonight

7 March 2003
Ten years ago tonight, I drank the most important glass of rum in my then short life. I thought it would be my last. Just one more night, I thought, and then the end.

I couldn't process the thought then as I understand it now, so with her hand in mine, I led Robyn out the front door of our small three-bedroom home. I wanted to see the stars.

We ascended the driveway and stood in the middle of the street. There was no sound. There was no light but the gentle, mocking twinkle of a billion orbs of burning plasma hanging from the heavens. With each silent exhale, our breath sailed into the starry sky. The neighborhood was quiet because everyone else had already left.

8 March 2003
What I supposed would be the beginning of the end felt like every other morning. The sun had risen early and the sky was perfect and beautiful and blue. But it wasn't a Saturday I would spend in the driveway or in the yard. I instead stood in the shower to soak beneath the warmth of the falling water. I thought of the day that I raised my right hand. I swore to defend the Constitution of the United States, and now that I had to do that in Iraq, I didn't want to play. If only I could slip down the drain… I wouldn't need to say goodbye.

Robyn drove onto base through gate six and past the run-down housing reserved for Privates and new soldiers. Every door was shut. Every window and curtain was closed. Deer wandered the deserted streets and picked at grass in the front yards and doorsteps of empty homes whose wives and children had left for the company of family in other places.

The road was smooth and quiet, and as I looked out the passenger window, I felt the cool air glide over the fingertips of my outstretched hand. We drove past the 2nd and 3rd Brigade gyms and their empty parking lots. Even the Post Exchange was empty. Fort Campbell, home of the Army’s prestigious 101st Airborne, was deserted. The only remaining activity was my unit, the last of the 502nd Infantry Brigade preparing to deploy in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

“DAVIS! Hurry the fuck up!”

I bent down to pet my dog. She was happy and smiling and unaware. I hugged Robyn tight, kissed her, and grabbed my bags from the trunk of our car. Halfway down the parking lot, I looked over my shoulder and saw the car start up and drive away. That was goodbye. For six months, for a year, or forever.

Fourteen hours later, Headquarters Company and Bravo Company 2/502 Infantry flew out of Campbell Army Airfield on a commercial 737 airliner. After a one-stop, seventeen-hour flight to Kuwait International Airport and a two-hour bus ride to Camp New York in the Kuwait desert, I walked out of my tent and looked into the night sky. I saw the same stars, but their glow was awkward and misplaced, like an unknown gesture from someone speaking a foreign language. I wondered how Robyn would get through the next year. Would she find strength looking into the stars the way we had the night before? Would I ever see her again?

Would this be the end?

On Arizona and Cocktails

We were somewhere around Coolidge on the top shelf of some high desert oven rack when Robyn said the Hotel we’re going to serves complimentary cocktails from five to six-thirty.

My eyes burned from driving several hundred miles of twisty canyon-carved highway, racing like a slot car through the Tonto National Forest, a god-sized garden of dirt and saguaro’s and trailer park villages proclaiming it was “Where the West Still LIVES!” And I remember squinting and yawning and swallowing to pop my ear—only the left one—to see if I heard right, that maybe the droning whine of a turbocharged Daddy Wagon barreling down the empty highway (and the screaming kids in the backseat) had somehow influenced what I heard with what I wanted to hear.

Every bump on the road and every slight change in elevation seemed to squeeze on my eyes and ears. Water tasted like water, the sick-bland mud puddle of warm that wet my tongue but wouldn’t quench the idea in my mind of free booze, something I’m never too ashamed to enjoy.

And that’s how the trip began, late one night when I should have been sleeping or reading. I was sloshing back Margarita’s in the living room when Robyn says, “Let’s go to Spring Training for Spring Break.”

Then somehow we got onto the topic of stamps and cancellations for the 394 sites in the United States National Park System, a lifelong goal of ours to visit and photograph each. So I set a few markers on Google Maps through central Arizona that would lead us through the living rooms of mysteriously empty cliff dwellings and ended with an afternoon at Tempe Diablo Stadium of Anaheim.

I felt the pinch late the first night—El Patron at the Little America Hotel in Flagstaff set me back $9. Too sweet and too weak, so I had two more delivered to the room later that night while Frosty dumped nine inches on the parking lot.

Sunset Crater, now a National Historic Monument, erupted 950 years ago, but we only saw black and white. Snow whipped sideways onto our necks and I couldn’t even see through my camera lens. I saw enough in not seeing anything, so we left. Thirty miles up the road, Wupatki National Historic Monument, a 100-room Pueblo-mansion of the Sinagua peoples, glistened under the Arizona sun.

“FUCK YOU, Arizona,” I thought, for making me wear five layers in twenty-eight degree weather, when thirty-miles later and 1500 feet lower, it was fifty-degrees and hot as shit. Then back into the snow and wind in Flagstaff for Walnut Canyon National Historic Monument, a tit in the middle of a mini Grand Canyon with a 185-foot descent around an areola trail of carved-in cliff homes.

I got through Tuesday’s drive to Tuzigoot National Historic Monument and Montezuma Castle National Historic Monument by listening to Plastic Beach, In Rainbows, and the Violin Concerto. Good thing, too, because the landscape looked more like Temecula or Bakersfield than an area of National Historic interest.

To pass time, we collected more than just stamps and cancellations, but license plates. In all, we found every state west of the Missus Giant, except Hawaii and Louisiana.

We saw water on Wednesday driving next to Roosevelt Lake, past billboards denouncing Global Warming as a mathematical hoax and anti-Obama slogans from Tea Partying cowboys driving Dodge Ram’s.

You stay classy, Tonto Basin.

After hiking the Tonto National Historic Monument and Casa Grande National Historic Monument, a giant structure of caliche shadowed beneath an iron blanket, we set sail for Scottsdale, a smug Phoenix suburb with yuppies and Bentley’s celebrating Lincecum’s October triumph.

That’s when Robyn mentioned the free cocktails, probably for the fourth time but the first that I remembered… it was about 3:30PM with 60 miles to go and no line of speed limit underachievers would set me back.

<Blinker ON>

<Blinker OFF>

Fuck you and goodbye and Hello Tempe!

Now where’s the bar?

We hit the parking lot at 4:26. By the time we signed for the room, downloaded our bags, the portable crib, our lunch food and cameras and all the other overpacked bullshit, and after a rush-hour visit to Trader Joes, it was 6:24 by the time I was finally free.

I walked through the courtyard, a parking lot and into the next building’s courtyard where, in front of the lobby and pool, scores of geriatric retirees and drunks sat wasted in front of a makeshift grassy shack.

Inside, dude says, “Hey.”

And I say, “Hey.”

And he says, “Whatcha want?”

And I say, “What do you have?”

And he points at a chalkboard with names of watered-down fruity drinks for the throng of wrinkly, white-haired. Around me, the elders speak in gestures with flabby arms and pointy fingers, cackling and pushing and laughing, but loving, too.

And I say, “How about a rum and coke?”

And Bartender dude says, “You want two?”

And I say, “Yeah. Yeah, I want two.”

Aging

There's a billboard I see everyday on the way home from work. It's at the middle of a bend in the road as southbound traffic enters Long Beach, and it's high enough above the browning tree branches for a motorist to see at 70 mph.

The billboard reads, "The first person to live to 150 has already been born."

Roadside advertisements seldom capture my attention while driving, let alone impact me enough to recall it later. But it wasn't until I got home last night and heard about Grandpa's doctor appointment that I actually considered the impact of this statement:

Why the hell would anyone want to live that long?

I only needed to look at my blind, diabetic 89-year old roommate to see that old age is a bitch. Here's a man who lost his best friend four years ago, whose health declined so rapidly thereafter, that he could barely manage daily tasks like paying bills, taking (the correct) pills, and preparing food, despite (excellent) special training for the blind from Veterans Affairs.

Which brings me back to the doctor appointment. Grandpa's recovering from a small cold that led to pneumonia, which put off hernia surgery, and this appointment was a follow up. My wife attends all of his appointments and she made it a point to personally talk to the Doctor candidly, and alone, before leaving.

Aside from the cold, grandpa hasn't been his normal self this month. He's sad and grey looking and pale; he's falling asleep nearly every time he sits; he's forgetting things, misplacing things more often; and most of all, he just isn't interested in talking anymore.

Doc said that we're doing a tremendous job with Grandpa, that he hasn't seen him better at any point in the previous ten years. But also, Grandpa is just really old.

"But Doctor, at what point… when would you suggest that Grandpa's needs are more than what I can provide?"

The Doctor told my wife that Grandpa is as good as he's going to be. That's it. This right here--he's not going to be any better. He's 89 and deaf and blind and weak, he can barely breathe, and he has maybe a year remaining.

And so, if it were medically possible, would this frail old man even want to live another 61 years? Could science give him his eyes back? Could it give him his youthful swagger?

The only thing he wants now—and which science can’t give him—is his wife. She’s in a porcelain urn on a dresser in his bedroom.

The New York Times Warrior Voices

Somewhere in here, the piece I wrote yesterday has appeared on the New York Times' Warrior Voices blog. There are a lot of other posts there, too. This means a great deal to me. And I want to do this more often.

Barf Me Out, Gag Me with a Spoon

Nothing destroys a veteran’s confidence like a community college placement test. Or in my case, the sudden realization that although I was a kid at war, I was now a man in the classroom. Like many of the soldiers I’d served with, I chose the Army to escape home, my hometown, and another four years of school. But it took me five years in the Army—and multiple deployments—to realize that maybe college wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

In fact, college was a great idea, if not also a waste of time. Just like in the Army. I learned this on the very first day, before I had even registered for classes. Community college wanted to assess me. Put me on a chart and analyze whether I knew words, or abstract mathematical formulas. I told them I was good at calculating grid coordinates on a map, and that I was skilled at blowing stuff up.

But these placement tests don’t value the kind of experience I gained while serving my country. They don’t score a combat veteran favorably for reacting to fire, or for setting up a perimeter defense.

They’re not equipped to measure the intensity of his concentration while on dismounted patrol, or the proficiency with which he enters a building and clears a room. This valuable experience is contextually worthless.

I knew this would be the case, but did I really need a placement test to tell me that I was starting over? I was okay with placing my racecar on GO and rolling the dice. Just give me Dummy Math 101.

Didn’t matter. Community college gave me a test date anyway. I showed up with my #2 and stood in line with a bunch of stoner high school kids. One slacker in particular. He was bronzed, and had wavy, sandy hair. He carried a pencil and a skateboard, and talked like Jeff Spicoli. The cute girl in front of him. She was buried in her phone when he asked her, “Hey, what test are you taking?”

And she said, “Uhm, like, just the math one.”

“Oh—no way. Me too.”

“I totally shouldn’t have to be here. I got, like, a C in Algebra 2 last semester.”

“Oh—no way. That totally blows. What school did you go to?”

“Uhm, just like, ________________ High School.”

“Oh—no way, me too! So, like, do you know ___________?”

“I think so. Is she, like, friends with ________________?”

“Oh, yeah, I know that dude. Is he still dating _______________?”

“I dunno. I think they like, broke up.”

“Oh—no way. So, like… what are you doing tonight?”

“Uhm, I dunno, probably, just like, hanging out.”

“Oh… you want to go to a party?”

“Uhm, sure. Okay. Do you drive?”

“Yeah, I’ve got a Wrangler. What’s your number?”

That’s a verbatim conversation. Between two barely-legal adults, and they were going to be my classmates. That continued on for several minutes. All I could think was, Thank god they weren’t going to have my back in combat.

Your Retroactive Stop loss Special Pay (RSLSP) claims summary

September 26, 2011 12:37:12 PM PDT

This is a final summary of your Retroactive Stop Loss claims.

Those listed as "Paid" or "Denied" have been fully adjudicated.

Those listed as "Duplicate" and "Abandoned by Claimant" will receive no further action.

This summary does not include claims pending reconsideration.

First Name  Jason 

Middle Name  -----

Last Name  -----

SSN  XXXXXXXXX

Life Status  Living

Duty Status  Separated

Associated RSL:

RSL 230-1 - PAID

Losing Ground

One morning in late June, I received a phone call from Vondran. I couldn’t answer, and he left a voicemail, frantic and shaken.

“Dude,” he said, “what… what the hell happened to Vance?”

It had been my second week on the job, in the new career, and in an environment where my past was virtually unknown. It seemed like a fresh start, that finally, I could be someone other than what I had been. And so I continued working, bothered by the voicemail, but determined to be that hard worker, that rule follower—the new member of the team.

A few minutes later, I stepped out of the office and called him back, remembering the old team and the old days.

For as long as I’ve known him, Vondran has always been the cool head, the witty and snarky sham-shielder that always knew how to brighten the mood. But in that moment, on the phone, he was restless and scared, and I could tell that something had hit him a little too close to home.

“Hey—hey man,” he stuttered. “Have you seen Vance’s Facebook page? Did something happen?”

When I returned to my desk, I logged into Facebook and stalked Vance’s wall. Several dozen friends and family had left condolences and well-wishings for his family, and my heart sank. It sank like it did when I heard about Brian, and I remembered all the family drama that Vance had recently posted.

He was frustrated, and hurt, and tired of all the usual bullshit, and I wondered, had the support network, the brothers—had I—had we failed again?

I knew Jason Jermi Vance as SGT Vance, along with SGT Bazaldua and SGT Brantley, the first NCO’s I met in the real Army. As the quiet private in the platoon, it was fun for me to watch the other guys rag on Vance. He was a little goofy, most of the time broken down, but always, he took a beating and dished ‘em out with the best of ‘em. But aside from that, he was loved, and respected by all who knew him.

One of the last and best memories I have of Vance is the time we were racing in some abandoned and unfinished business area off Exit 1 (Tiny Town Road) near the Tennessee and Kentucky border at Interstate 24. I was driving around one day, looking for new roads, with the windows down and radio blasting. The area was private, but with open gates, no guards, and nothing around for miles, and my curiosity got the best of me. So, I called up Dex and Wiley and Stupid Kory and Mac and Ray, and they all brought their cars down for some quarter-mile fun.

Vance was driving a second-generation Eclipse with a V6 and automatic; Ray had a new V6 Tiburon; Stupid Kory had an F-150; Wiley had an early 90’s Corvette, and Dex had a Celica GT-S. Good ole Wiley crashed into the fence at the end of the run, scratching the shit out of his hood and putting a damper on future runs. Ray’s Tiburon, even with the V6 and better 6-speed transmission, failed to pull on my non-VTEC Prelude, and Dex with his GT-S and 6-speed, started pulling on me as we up-shifted into third. But Vance, that fucker’s Eclipse was slow, and we never let him hear the end of it.

A few months later, when Vance medically retired, he blew his severance pay on a yellow Lancer Evolution with pink graphics. He swore it came that way from the dealership, proud that he finally had the car to blow us all away, but we just laughed. That was our Vance, that dumb big-eared fucker, and we loved him like a brother.

In the years that followed, through girl problems and custody battles, Vance drove his yellow and pink Evo through Tennessee and Kentucky and Louisiana, back and forth between home and family, visiting his children and others. I didn’t talk to him as often as I should, though I was trying to raise my own family while finishing school. But through all the Facebook drama, Vance endured and persisted. No matter how dramatic his status updates became, they always ended with determination.

He wasn’t dealt the best cards, but he’d be damned if he wasn’t going to better his situation.

(SGT) Jason Jermi Vance died on 27 June 2011 in a head-on collision. I never did get the details on passengers, or even what had happened. Since it was my second week of work, I couldn’t get time off for the memorial, held a few days later.

“You know, Vance was to me, what Brian was to you,” Vondran later told me.

I nodded, thinking that some unspeakable force was slowly having its way with my brothers. And I remembered telling Baz in a hotel room the night before Brian’s memorial how I felt like I didn’t think Brian’s death was going to be the last.

That morning at work, I contemplated walking out of the office. For three hours, I couldn’t concentrate on my work; I couldn’t think of anything but trying to hold in my emotions. I didn’t know Vance as close as Vondran did, but he was no less a brother, a man I fought with, and worked guard duty with, and walked with, humping rucksacks in the suck. In war, it doesn’t matter what each person carried; what matters is what they shared, and SGT Vance was among the best at taking care of his soldiers, of any soldier, brother, or friend.

I couldn’t leave work that morning. I felt like I couldn’t just walk into the new boss’ office and tell him that I was weak, that I had PTSD, or that because of it, that I was in and out of constant depression and mood swings triggered by flashbacks and sounds and smells. I wanted to curl into a ball; instead, I walked to the restroom and splashed water onto my face and eyes.

And so I grieved at my cubicle, silent and alone, staring at the blinking cursor on a blank Word document on my desktop.

Morning

I don’t do mornings. When I wake up and the ringer chirps like a dawn-shrieking rooster, the turquoise light seeps through the misty rose curtains. The dog pants, gets up, and settles in the corner, then harrumphs and pays me no other mind.

I hate the morning like I hate beginnings; I hate beginning because I’m never ready to end. I’ve grown accustomed to late nights and late drinks, the mellowed chill buzz that soothes me to sleep. But now the morning coos and I collapse into bed, dreaming and swearing and determined to end earlier, if just to feel more alive when frightened awake.

On most mornings, the sun is absent, and a monochromatic glow suffocates my driving space. I don't mind; I find the eighty-minute drive to be peaceful, except for when I am screaming at other cars. Yet even when it is clear outside, smokestacks and soul-less rolling behemoths bleed into the horizon, blurred by vaporous puffs of gaseous pollutants and gridlocked thoroughfares.

My primary route spans 41 miles along the 405, dividing southern California's Los Angeles and Orange County beaches and valley's. Each lane paces in blurry lines with amber-streaked walls closing on each side at seventy-miles per hour. There is never not traffic and the caffeine doesn’t hit soon enough.

Commuting is giving in. There is no alternative, no winning, no getting the best of, no taking the bull by its horns, either. When it's good, it's okay, but when it's bad, it's a day destroying mood killer.