...US Army, my deployment was from January 2011 to January 2012, I was tasked with providing route for our battalion in Afghanistan. I witnessed a lot of my friends get blown up in their trucks and on patrol of which still haunts me today. I myself was involved in a blast so strong it knocked me out for a bit and the only thing I remember was trying to go around the road because the middle of the road was blown out from previous IED strikes. After my explosion I had a horrible headache that made me sick and I couldn’t focus on anything because my eyes kept bouncing, so I had to be Medevac'd out for a CAT Scan and MRI. For two weeks my head wouldn’t stop hurting and my vision was off to were everything looked like I was in a haze. They had me do the maze tests and I had failed them all many times but as the days went on I knew the only way for me to get back on mission was to lie so when my next test came up I told them I was fine. They had me run for two miles on a treadmill to see if physical exertion caused my head to pound, I told them it didn’t; but in reality it hurt so bad I had to shed some pain tears. When I got back from Afghanistan I was not able to sleep unless I drank myself into a black out. That went on for months until I got tired of living on base and having someone tell me how to live. They always asked why I had so many empty whiskey bottles and all that. I reached out and I talked to a psychologist who told me the stuff I was going through was PTS. I had no idea what that was because no one ever talked about it so I had no idea, while I waited to find out what was going to happen that’s when suicidal thoughts started to creep in to my head. When I was almost out of the military I tried to kill myself with pills, my goal was to overdose and go in my sleep. I woke up the next morning covered in vomit and at that moment I had the thought in my mind that I had to live and make something with this life. My PTS effects my life every day as I can’t enjoy life as big crowds give me anxiety, driving I always look for IEDs and my wife can’t wake me normally, she has to yell and scream at me till I wake...
