A Commemoration – Three Years Post-Afghan

Today marks three years since I returned from my five-month deployment to Afghanistan.

In some ways, it feels like those three years have been a lifetime; in others, like it was only yesterday that I stepped out of one world, and back into another that I couldn’t quite recognise.

I left Afghanistan in mid-September with another junior officer and a number of the soldiers from our Shadow UAV contingent as part of the drawdown of Tarin Kot Multinational Base. The majority of my Troop, those soldiers under my direct command and my responsibility, remained behind. I also left behind my best friend, whom I had—unintentionally, and at that stage, completely unknowingly— foolishly fallen in love with. Devastated, I had begged to be allowed to stay; had agonised over the fate of my soldiers with a hierarchy I neither trusted nor believed in; had wept with frustration and guilt.

I was consumed.

We arrived at Brisbane International airport at about 1000 on the 19th of September and I was immediately swamped by my dad and my brothers, thrilled to have me safely home on Australian soil. I have never felt so false as when I smiled for them and I have never wanted more to be alone, or to return from where I’d come. I have never before felt like I was smiling while I crumbled inside.

It’s a challenging thing to define, and treading the fine line between understating and overstating your emotional response to a deployment can be tough. Certainly, I experienced nothing seriously traumatic during my trip, in that I was never exposed to a high risk of personal harm, or bore witness to anything particularly gruesome. Yet it would be a gross lie to say I was unaffected.

In those first two weeks back home I would creep outside in the dark to sit, alone, and cry where no one could hear me. I felt as though I was slowly, but surely, going crazy, disintegrating into something I neither understood nor recognised. In the Australian military, we’re required to do a Post-Operational Psychology Screen (or POPS, as it’s conveniently abbreviated to) within 6 months of returning from deployment. So in March of 2014, I sat down with a psychologist. I was told that during my RTAPS (Return To Australia Psychological Screen), I had been identified as high-risk, the reason I was seeing a psychologist rather than a lower level psychological support member, and I was told to consider getting ongoing psychological help and counselling in order to deal with everything more successfully.

Earlier that week, my dad had asked me to go and see someone. For his sake, if not of my own accord, and I had agreed. Around the same time, I decided to start blogging about how I was feeling; though I’ve since decided to relinquish that domain and take that content offline, I kept everything I wrote.

Looking back at it is sobering. Terrifying. The rage, the agony, the hate leaps from the page and threatens to strangle me. If I could ever think that maybe I wasn’t as bad as I thought I was, reading those words again reminds me just how much I was certain that this was going to be the end of everything I was. I’ve included an excerpt from my second post below, to illustrate what I was writing during that period:

I feel like I’m worthless and useless and I feel like I have to pretend not to be so that people don’t know, so they don’t feel like I’m too much effort, consuming too much of their time and their life. I feel like I have to pretend so that I don’t get removed. I feel like people who know who I really am and how I really feel just won’t want me anymore.

I hate myself. I hate myself so much that if I thought it would help, I’d cut myself deep down to the flesh and peel the skin away, leaving the rawness behind. I would rather be dead than feel this way. I hate every aspect of this squalling, stinking, miserable fucking excuse for a life and I want no part of it. Hating it makes me so angry that I want to hit someone, anyone. I want to hit them again and again and again until they’re just a messy, bloody pulp and all my anger is gone.

I don’t know how I’m going to get out of bed tomorrow. Or why: there doesn’t seem to be any good reason. I mean, people are right in that if you just keep putting one foot in front of the other, you’ll get there eventually. But I don’t want to. I don’t want to get there, or anywhere. I don’t want to go home for time off, or have time off or catch up with friends. I feel completely alone. I just want all of this to stop, so I don’t have to get up ever again, or put one foot in front of the other, or try. I’m so tired of trying and I’m so tired of this life. I wish I could just cease to be entirely, so that this would be over.

World, in case you’ve never felt this way, it feels like being crippled: it feel like there isn’t enough air to breathe, like every step you take hurts. Living like this makes you feel that there is nothing good, worthwhile or beautiful in the whole world and that you will never feel happy again. It means that you spend your Friday night alone, sitting on an empty, stormy beach, crying until there are no tears left and you feel completely hollow. It’s feeling like no one will ever love you or want you, because you’re not good enough; feeling like the people in the world you were once the closest to don’t understand and don’t really care, they just want this all to stop. Feeling like this means that you can look at everything in your life and wish you were dead because it means nothing to you… But not know what’s the next step to take.

The truth is, I just don’t know what to do anymore.

It was not until September that year that I feel like I finally started to normalise. Twelve months after I came home. Even then, some days I would be sideswiped by an overwhelming despair that seemed to come from nowhere and cut my legs out from under me. Now, three years later, I still struggle to read my Afghan journal or my blog posts without crying: in the words on the page, I can see that I was slowly dying, that I was terrified and felt completely alone, and it hurts to remember, even very distantly, how that felt.

So it seems right, as it always does, to pause and remember what happened afterward… But also what happened during. There were elements of our trip that was challenging: but they forced me to grow. There were elements that made me laugh so much I cried: they taught me how we can bond together in the face of adversity, holding one another up when it seems that there is nothing to do but collapse. I have had the incredible honour in life to work with, and to command, some kind, hilarious, resilient human beings. I have been humbled to share their griefs and their triumphs, to have had the opportunity to work for them as much as they worked for me, to learn from them, to discover that our humanity is what makes us truly beautiful.

I am fortunate because I have been privileged to lead people who made it easy to lead: who were passionate and intelligent and eager. I will always be grateful to them.

I want to leave you with something I wrote in the days when I was slowly beginning to rebuild myself. It’s not a work of literary brilliance, but I decided not to change it and rather just to throw it in here exactly as I once wrote it. It symbolises a time when, believing I was broken beyond all repair and lost in darkness, I discovered that strength comes in many forms, and that who I was did not need to dictate who I might become.

I am more than the sum of my parts.

Long legs and arms and eyelashes,

Blue eyes which crinkle when I laugh.

And that is often again of late, because the world holds beauty…

Right now, I am the girl who can see that beauty.

I am more than long dark hair and a wide-mouthed straight smile,

Because I am still the girl with braces and blonde hair, many years ago.

Coltish limbs, fearless stride, laughter resounding through corridors;

I am still that girl with the hunger for life, the need to love and live vibrantly.
But now, too, I am the girl woman who had to fight to find myself & my courage,

When I thought I had disappeared – and had none.

Who in the finding shattered not into pieces but razor-edged shards of agony,

Who must continue to rebuild until the end is reached… And some endings are never reached,

But in the rebuilding, flames will forge me stronger than steel.

Though I am the tears in the night & moments in the darkness when I almost let go,

Though I am the grief which spills over, and the feelings of worthlessness which can cripple…

I am yet the hungry heart beating hard and strong to take wing, break free from this cage.

I am the laughing, loving, forever-young dancer in the rain and in the sunshine.

I am the imperfections that make me unique,

And I am the moments when I am the sun – alight with everything that makes me rare and beyond belief.

I am more than the sum of my parts,

Long legs and arms and eyelashes.

I am more than any of this,

Regardless of what these parts may be,

And each day forms me anew, reshapes me, redefines me.

I am more than the sum of my parts,

More than any physical beauty,

Or moment of intelligence,

I am indefinable, under construction… But undeniable.

— Ana.