FLASHBACK: A Non-Clancy Essay

The War Back Home: A 2015 PTSD Piece for Men's Journal that never ran because Two Guys in Wingsuits Died in Yosemite

MEMORANDUM FOR THE RECORD

FROM: THE HUNT FOR TOM CLANCY

TO: CREW AND GUESTS OF THE USS TOM CLANCY

RE: THIS MONTH’S FIRST DISPATCH FROM IDAHO

My fellow sailors on the USS Tom Clancy,

I hope you’ll forgive the occasional intrusion by a non-Clancy related dispatch; this is one of those.

This piece, written before this Playboy piece called "The God Shot", was from Matt just five years out of the Army, when I was still on a bunch of pills from the VA.

It was one of the earliest solo pieces I ever had commissioned by a national magazine, in this case Men’s Journal, which was published by Wenner Media along with Rolling Stone.

I got my picture taken by a very nice guy and super-talented photographer from New Orleans named Daymon Gardner and was sent mockups of the July/August 2015 issue of Men’s Journal. The piece was then killed after two men in Wingsuits died in Yosemite, and Men’s Journal needed the issue space to print their obituary—hey, coulda been worse I still got paid a kill fee and I didn’t die in Yosemite, thank God—but it’s never been published.

The essay is from seven years ago, so certain things in my life have changed, and I would write certain things differently were I writing it now. Still, this is a good snapshot of a difficult time for a soldier returning from the war with PTSD; just because this is my story does not mean that is by any means unique to me.

I hope you’ll get something out of reading it—now some housekeeping.

The next “Hunt for Tom Clancy” post will not discuss “The Teeth of the Tiger” as I previously stated, mostly because ripping my face off and sliding across asphalt to jump in the Great Salt Lake sounds preferable to reading about Jack Ryan Junior driving a Yellow Hummer to a Hedge Fund Assassination Shop this summer.

Instead the next regular “The Hunt for Tom Clancy” essay will be on one of Tom Clancy’s Non-Fiction books: “Submarine.”

This will also let me write about a few tangential things that interest me, inlcluding:

-the Navy’s version of Area 51 in a deepwater north Idaho lake; what a middle aged bartender getting her hair done at a Southern Idaho Wal-Mart Salon told me about a Pacific Northwest underground riverine systems navigable by submarine

-the epic story of the Whittingtons, who were race car driving good ol’ boys from Lubbock, Texas, who became CIA affiliated cocaine smugglers and founding members of the Confederate Air Force before purchasing the deepest geothermal hotsprings in the world and donating a 33,300 tract of land in Raton, New Mexico to the National Rifle Association

-Tom Clancy’s relationship with the British Navy, British Royal Family, and with the Yeoman Warders at the Tower of London, and this strange interview in the Greek Islands.

Thanks again for reading and being out there; this project has been incredibly fulfilling for all the cool people I’ve met and talked to already, which reminds me;

We’ll also have another guest “The Hunt for Tom Clancy” post up soon, this one about a visit one of our comrades took to the Red Cross museum in the dreaded Switzerland, and his trenchant observations therein.

More news on ClancyCon2023: Red Rainbow Storm Vegas Six coming soon as well.

Exciting things happening, tell your friends, share and subscribe—if you like what I’m doing, throw some money in the digital tip jar if you have some to share, if not, just subscribe and enjoy everything for free from this point on; these are always free and open for a couple weeks after they come out and then they go behind a paywall.

Best,

Matt

The War Back Home: After 350 Combat Patrols in Afghanistan, A Soldier Returns to the US to an Even Fiercer Battle

Matt Farwell

Originally slated for Men's Journal July/August 2015

[Author's Note: This is a seven year old essay; stuff's going better for me now, but it was dicey there for a while, and this is a slice of one of the dicier portions]

OUR LUCK STARTED to run out after the war, when we got back stateside. Doc Campbell tried to commit suicide by pulling a gun on a cop. It didn’t work, and he wound up in a psych hospital. Staff Sergeant Mac succeeded where Campbell failed by drinking a bottle of vodka and pulling a gun on the military police. Cloutier, who’d saved my ass in Afghanistan and been booted from the Army for a drug problem, overdosed on heroin and booze in a friend’s mom’s basement in Alabama. He’d gone there to get clean. Gibbs redeployed to Kandahar and led a group of soldiers who shot civilians for sport. As leader of the “Kill Team,” he’s now locked up in Leavenworth for life. In the past year, another three friends have lost their struggle with life after the war. Some days I worry that I will, too.

During my 16 months in Afghanistan, I ran more than 350 combat patrols, spending the majority of my deployment outside the wire, looking for trouble with the Army’s 10th Mountain Division. The first time I left the gate, driving a Humvee at 23, I was so scared that my hands shook and I wanted to vomit. But despite the omnipresent danger — firefights, ambushes, land mines, suicide bombers, and mortar attacks — I adapted. By the end of my tour, driving a two-ton gun truck with night-vision goggles or riding behind a machine gun on dirt roads through Taliban-infested areas seemed as normal as running to the corner store for cigarettes. In order to function without fear paralyz- ing every move, I had to accept that at any moment I might die or need to kill someone.

My body and brain had rewired themselves until war seemed normal — except, of course, there’s nothing normal about war.

There’s nothing normal about laughing at a man’s leg covered up with a cheap blanket in the back of a pickup truck after he’s been blown up, or in taking joy in killing another human being. There’s nothing normal about having to bury your 39-year-old brother after he’s been killed in a freak heli- copter accident after surviving four combat tours.

This intimate knowledge of death and killing — godlike power, in an Old Testament sort of way — skewed my perspective on life, replacing the simple pleasure of exis- tence, the highs and the lows, with a numb, muted anger. So much about war seemed so wrong that I still have a hard time reconciling the experience with my prior patriotic beliefs. The seeds had been planted for a more dangerous tour of duty — becoming a civilian again.

Since returning home in 2007, I have been arrested eight times, psychiatrically hospitalized four times, attempted suicide once, and blown up every serious relationship I’ve had until I met my girlfriend Sarabeth three years ago.

I’ve been diagnosed with chronic post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), attention deficit disorder, and related substance-abuse problems.

This isn’t just my problem. Since 9/11, more than 2.7 million Americans have served in uniform in Afghanistan and Iraq. Estimates of the number of troops with PTSD vary, but at least half of these veterans show some amount of post-traumatic stress ac- cording to surveys collected after combat. In units with more exposure to direct combat, like my infantry battalion, those numbers are even higher.

For something as common as PTSD, surprisingly little is known about the problem, and there is no consensus on how to treat it. A 2011 Pew study titled “The Difficult Transition from Military to Civilian Life” identified factors that predict how rocky the path out of uniform will be for a service member.

Four things help ease the passage: being a college graduate, understanding the mission, being an officer, and being religious. Six things make the passage harder: experiencing a traumatic event, being seriously injured, being married while serving, enlisting after 9/11, serving in combat, and knowing someone who was killed or injured. I hadn’t gotten married or wounded, but as an enlisted man with three years of college under my belt, lacking any religious feeling, and having no clue what the mission in Afghanistan was supposed to accomplish, it seems that statistics are against me.

Though there is no specific drug that treats PTSD, VA doctors prescribe cocktails of treatments without much evidence that they work. I’ve taken antidepressants (Well- butrin, Zoloft, Celexa), stimulants (Ritalin, Concerta, Adderall), anti-ADHDs (Strattera), antipsychotics (Seroquel), mood stabilizers (Depakote), and antianxiety medications (Klonopin, Ativan).

The antidepressants made me gain weight and lose the ability to orgasm. The stimulants made me hyper- focused on my work and sex, which didn’t gel so well with the antidepressants. The anti- psychotics and mood stabilizers made me feel like a zombie, and the antianxiety pills were a lot of fun, especially when I took too many of them, but not so helpful otherwise.

The only thing that seems to make a difference for both sleep and stress is still mostly illegal and not prescribed (though tacitly endorsed by every VA shrink I’ve seen) — marijuana.

After years of experimenting, the VA now considers cognitive processing therapy (CPT) and prolonged exposure therapy (PET) the only two “evidence based” treatments for PTSD, but there is a disagreement in the psychiatric community about how well they work, or if they should even be used.

CPT involves logically examining the behavioral changes experienced with PTSD and rationally working out with a therapist why these responses don’t make sense in a noncombat zone. PET attempts to solve the problem by looking at it through the other end of the telescope — by repeating the trauma itself through guided sessions with a therapist in which the patient recounts vivid details of the troubling incident over and over again until the trauma memory loses power.

After I was kicked out of one of the VA’s best PTSD treatment programs — a three-month regimen at an inpatient facility in Menlo Park, California — for coming back drunk from a weekend pass, I decided it was time to look for answers outside the wire.

Last year, I volunteered to be the guinea pig in a conference on trauma held in the island nation of Turks and Caicos. On the second day, Frank Ochberg — one of the world’s leading psychiatrists and the man who literally defined PTSD — brought me onto a stage in front of an audience to demonstrate a novel technique for reaching difficult patients. The Ochberg Counting Method, he explained, involves me reimagining a traumatic event while he counts from one to 100, and is designed to shift the memory from my lizard brain, near the brain stem, to the rational parts of my brain, in the prefrontal cortex.

Speaking quietly, he asked me to pick a particularly traumatic moment.

Instead of the firefights or rockets or blasts I witnessed, I focused on a shameful day I can’t forget — October 16, 2006, when two Afghan national policemen attached to our unit hit a mine just outside our patrol base.

The medevac was delayed for at least 30 minutes because I’d fiddled with the radios the night before, while listening in on a special ops raid, then forgot to change them back. I never learned if the policemen survived, but even if they did, their lives are certainly worse for my having messed with the radio than mine. The image of their mangled limbs and the guilt I feel from that day sticks with me.

The first time I told the story to my girlfriend I was stone drunk, and the words came out between massive sobs that racked my chest and left both of our shirts damp with tears before I punched the wall.

On stage, I relived that moment silently, eyes closed while Ochberg counted. The effect was hypnotic. I thought about how I looked away as they were loaded on the helicopter. I felt the way the dust rose up from the rotor blades as the medevac helicopters lifted off with those men hovering between life and death. I thought how I packaged that memory in a tiny box in my brain at the end of that day. When he reached 100, Ochberg told me to open my eyes, and I startled, unsure of where I was. The trained eyes in the room noticed.

Ochberg ceded the stage to Peter Levine, a wispy San Diego psychologist who eventu- ally asked me what I did when I saw the horror of those mangled limbs being lifted into the helicopter. I told him I looked at them and then looked away because I couldn’t bear to look anymore. Strangely enough, I told him my mind now felt wiped a little bit, like the experience was something I was looking at in a picture book.

Levine asked me to think back on looking away. “The natural reaction when we see something that is horrible is to turn away, but sometimes we have to look. It seems like this whole thing is a little more, like you said, in a book. In the past.” That evening, I realized what a huge small step I’d taken toward healing — if this memory could be sealed in the past, accessible but still imprisoned by time and context and not able to fuck with my present, then so could others. There was hope for the future, but earning that hope would be a bitch.

MY SHOOTING WAR IS OVER, and I’m still working to put the rest of those pages in the past before they put me in the ground. Progress is slow. I take a minimal dose of antidepressants (Celexa), anti-ADHDs (Strattera), and mood stabilizers (Depakote and Seroquel). I also smoke a lot of pot, which seems to help — and not because I’m a stoner looking for an excuse to smoke weed all day. I’m high right now. It mellows me out, eliminating a lot of my internal tension. [Author’s Note: I’m now off *all* these pills from the VA and have been for years]

A year after Turks and Caicos, my girlfriend and I fly to Los Angeles. Walking on the Venice Beach boardwalk, I see a homeless guy sitting with an Army combat uniform backpack. I pull out some money and ask if he is a veteran. He says yes. I ask where he served. Mosul. I ask what unit — I normally vet those who claim to be vets — and he says that he was an 88M, the Army’s code for truck driver. Now, 88Ms are generally known as the biggest shitbags in the Army, so I sort of believe his story because no one would claim to be an 88M if they weren’t.

I ask how he’s doing. He hasn’t gone to the VA.

I try to tell him I know how he feels and that he has a responsibility to himself and the guys he served with to get his stuff together. I don’t know if he gets the message. Then we walk to watch finalists compete in American Ninja Warrior on the beach. I let the absurdity of the situation wash over me and laugh as they try to get across the obstacle course and end up in the water, and I thank my lucky stars I can watch someone else come up wet and resolve to try again.