Interview

                I would like to start out this essay by saying that my two people that I interviewed would like to stay anonymous, so I will not be using names.  They insisted on remaining anonymous and I am going to respect their privacy, so I can share their story.  I did not know either of these two people very well, but I feel that I really understand what they went through now that I have talked to them.  I learned a lot indeed about mental illness and how it affects two different people in two different ways.  Here are their stories.

                Both of these people were and are affected by Post Dramatic Stress Disorder or PTSD.  Both have this same mental illness but suffered in different ways.  Person A was in the war in Iraq and was in many gun fights which has made him hard of hearing and very wary or loud noises or flashes of light in at night.  Person A used to hide and think that he was back in Iraq fighting every time there was a really loud noise.  Even though he is hard of hearing because of all the gun fire that he experienced, he can hear those loud noises that restart those terrible memories.  Person A, with lots of theory has learned to over come this phenomenon in some instances.  There are still times that he relapses in which case his therapy dog jumps into action and snaps him out of it.  “My dog really helps me to snap out of these visions and helps me to stay in the ‘here and now’.” -Person A.  Person A is still going to therapy and is hoping to one day reach the end of this mental disease called PTSD.

                Person B was in Korea right after the war and experiences PTSD, but at a much milder level than person A.  Person B was stationed in South Korea after most of the other soldiers were pulled out.  His job, along with others, was to watch over fuel drums and ammunition that was not used in the war and was to be stored in South Korea or transported back to the United States.  There was not much fighting going on, but there was a few deaths and thefts that were going on.  So, basically how he told me, was that every once in a while, North Korea sent a single man across the boarder and his job was to steal fuel or ammunition from South Korea or the Americans.  They had orders to shot on site and if they did not they could be putting their life and the lives of others in danger because the North Korean soldiers were always armed and did not like to surrender if indeed they were caught.  North Korean soldiers would not just surrender, but instead die honorably by taking as many enemies with him as possible.  Person B said that him and his fellow soldiers had to shoot and kill a number of North Korean troops that had snuck in and tried to steal those fifty-gallon drums of fuel.  He also said that since they were technically not at war that they would have to go to trial after killing an enemy soldier.  “If you shoot a North Korean, like you had been ordered to do, they would take you before an army judge and charge you with murder.  The consequence? A fine or five dollars.” -Person B.  They had to do this so that they could show that the person that shot a soldier from a different country, in which the U.S. was no longer at war with, was punished for his crime.  Person B said that when he got back to the United States, things just felt different.  As though he did not have as much responsibility and that there was a empty space in himself that he could not seem to fill.  He said that the empty space got there when he had to shoot a young soldier trying to steal from the warehouse on his shift.  He said that he still remembers how he looked and that it was like the part of him that felt empathy for human life was gone.  Like it was not a big deal to shot and kill someone.  He masked these feelings and tried to fill the emptiness with alcohol.  For the first fifteen years that he was back, alcohol was the only thing that made him forget.  He was not always drunk, but there were many many times that he was.  As time passed, the feeling of guilt dissolved, and the empathy returned.  Person B has now been sober for twenty-seven years and is not looking to ever go back to the bottle.

                As you can tell, Person B was much more willing and able to talk about his condition and how it has affected his life.  This is not to say that Person A was unwilling, but it was very hard for him to talk about his time in Iraq and how it affects him to this day.  It might be because it was more recent or that there was more fighting going on in his story.  Both of these people suffer from PTSD and deal with it in their own way.  This is something that we need to be aware of and know that we never know what someone is dealing with.