by Benjamin Inks
Somehow, I managed to develop a crush on my primary care provider at the Washington VA Medical Center. At first glance, this made little sense. She was a fifty-year-old Black woman paying for her daughter’s college—my alma mater, in fact. Her husband did something obscure and secretive with the Department of Treasury. I was a pasty and nervous veteran who burned calories just thinking the word exercise. I was closer to her daughter’s age and tried to find her picture online just to test my reaction to her younger likeness.
This was during one of my sad, introspective seasons, which enabled me to intuit the psychology behind my attraction to Dr. Styles. A self-awareness I hadn’t always known. I’d told my story so many times in VA hospitals it all felt so clinical and pat—and I no longer trembled doing so. It wasn’t that I was scared recalling true events, it was always the person’s reaction that unnerved me. Among other Infantrymen I told it sardonic and punctuated by feats of heroism in service to an empire. Among listeners of a more fragile disposition my tone expressed remorse at the unavoidable tragedies of war.
When I told Dr. Styles, she listened without judgment or expectation. I didn’t have to mask through narrative veneer or pander to a higher person’s more refined sensibilities. I just… told it. Her immediate concern for the physical and moral injuries I sustained were endearing. A twinkle in her eye but retracted bottom lip when she asked to examine my scars ten years after-the-fact. She asked for permission before touching a stethoscope to my back and apologized for it being cold. I kept thinking, she can’t possibly be this empathetic with everyone. How exhausting!
The Washington VA Medical Center was no joke. Certain wings felt more like a fallout shelter than hospital. On my way here I passed multiple amputees scootching along on wheelchairs or worn prosthetics, and many patients spent their days panhandling on traffic medians. I’d often questioned the correlation between serving our country and winding up homeless. The best I could do was this:
More than reactions to violence, the military instills a sort of learned helplessness amongst lower recruits. I suspect many veterans would go on to lead happy, successful lives if simply ordered to do so by a commanding officer.
Remember to get three squares a day, private… Sleep eight hours a night and apply to at least five jobs every morning… Take your meds and keep appointments with the psychologist.
Yes, drill sergeant!
***
I like to walk on weekends. Trails and cityscapes if the weather is nice but malls if wet and gloomy. Us millennials are a bridge between worlds and still remember retail culture before online stores put so many brick-and-mortars out of business. Malls are nostalgic places to find and study pockets of humanity in a natural environment. And things haven’t changed much since my adolescent heyday. The same fashion trends and archetypal packs of teenagers expressing their inner on the outer through outlandish wardrobe. Baggy pants, spiky jackets, colored hair. I myself had always been fond of wearing black, which might have earned me the label goth as a young adult but is sensible and refined now as a business-class professional.
While human nature doesn’t change, technology certainly does. And I appreciate the kids who make good use of their cellphones. Like the gang of four I spotted last week filming a food-court dance routine. Completely at ease in each other’s company, allowing themselves to laugh and to fail and to stumble all over themselves, unbothered by spectators like me who might resent their carefree existence. Part of me longed to reconnect with an inner child oblivious to the demands and opinions of others.
“What school do you go to?” I asked them between takes, expecting a local high school but also unsurprised when they uttered the three-letter acronym of a nearby college. These kids in all their bliss were the exact age as me when I deployed to Afghanistan. Equipped with plate carriers, a ballistic helmet, and 210 rounds of 5.56 with which to engage the enemy.
***
On another occasion I ran into Dr. Styles sampling perfume at Macy’s. Running into your patient, I imagined, is like a teacher encountering a student. You’re not supposed to see me doing boring stuff, so let’s just pretend this didn’t happen. Instead she called me over, as if greeting an old friend, asking my preference for one scent over another.
Dr. Styles had a taste for luxury and glamor when not hidden beneath her white lab coat and stethoscope. Her beige sweater was either brand new or often gone over with a fabric shaver, not a trace of pilling or pet hair. Long braids usually pulled back and out of the way were dangling loose around her face.
“What are you shopping for?” she asked.
“A blazer for work,” I lied, not wanting to admit I was here for no reason at all.
“Check Nordstrom at the other end,” she said. “I think they’re having a sale on menswear.”
Our brief interaction stayed with me as I continued onward and into the mall, a levity to my step and greater optimism had we not crossed paths. I realized then the Washington VA was also a sort of mall, where guests were treated with the warm regard of a family member or close friend visiting DC from out of town. From the guards checking IDs to the nurses checking blood pressure through pump-up cuffs, staff exuded a hospitality that didn’t exist in civilian clinics; where every visit is calculated into an itemized bill for every service rendered.
With such a cozy atmosphere, veterans often hung out on hospital grounds, even without a scheduled appointment. There were numerous lounges, waiting areas, and even a café where mostly older veterans would hide away and relax, making small talk with bona fide patients while keeping an eye out for security—who mostly turned a blind eye to interlopers who likely didn’t have very many places to be. Even I found myself lingering after visits with Dr. Styles, perusing the gift shop for postcards or challenge coins and inquiring at the information desk about volunteer opportunities I would never follow up on. In the military you’re never without company, surrounded daily by competent men and women of a common banner. All dangers, and there are many, are confronted together, which seems to satisfy a deep-rooted understanding of safety in numbers. The Washington VA felt like a return to base, before you discharged from service into a fractured nation and are left to either re-assimilate home or Frankenstein together a peer group of disparate tribal identities. The latter is particularly challenging. In DC, a transplant city, any friends you make are not likely to stay: here on orders, disillusioned after only a few years of government service, or drawn by larger paychecks to the private sector elsewhere. Materialism also abounds. Where a person isn’t interested in you so much as what you do. Who you work for. What sort of super-secret clearances you may or may not hold. Barriers to authentic connection that has you constantly worrying if the person fawning across from you is genuine or just networking. A cognitive dissonance I imagine any pretty woman experiences when approached for a date.
Dr. Styles had no reason to be fake. Elevated in the social hierarchy by earning an MD yet cuing through tone and body language an approachability most abandon after achieving a certain status. I booked appointments for the flimsiest of excuses. Seasonal allergies, a rolled ankle, things easily treated over the counter became a pretext to bask in the sparkle of a secure person invested in my wellbeing. A privilege as someone with limitless and free healthcare at this beloved hospital. Each successive visit, Dr. Styles grew even more concerned and hospitable—as if appeasing my budding worry that I was annoying her with such frequent encounters.
“Have you ever taken a psych assessment,” she asked.
In truth I hadn’t considered psychiatry as an avenue of care before—despite pervasive marketing to do so in the veteran community. I complied out of intrigue. She asked about sleep, mood swings, big-ticket items such as thoughts of harm to myself or to others. She seemed unsurprised when the computer spat out a colored bar graph indicating mild depression.
“I’m going to refer you to behavioral health,” she said, ensuring I knew to dial 988 for emergency support.
***
Now the VA doesn’t play when it comes to mental health. Someone called in less than an hour inquiring about my exact needs.
“I’m not sure,” I said on speakerphone driving home. “I didn’t even know I was depressed, sir.”
It felt dangerous to admit depression, especially as a veteran. Society might view me as a liability. Would this affect work prospects? Go on my permanent record and follow me around like a felony conviction?
Sensing my reluctance, “Why don’t you come into our clinic so we can get to know you better,” the man said as if luring a wild cat with a saucer of milk.
“Let me think about it,” I said but then called back after parking in my driveway.
I couldn’t think of any good reason to say no.
***
Inpatient mental health intimidated me. Veterans huddled around daytime TV as if drawing warmth from a campfire. Some bored, some chatty, others zonked out on narcotics in a perpetual haze. Fortunately, I came for outpatient services.
Ned, a peer support coach—social butterflies trained at making people comfortable in their own skin—typed up my intake paperwork and asked about my service. It stood to reason my nexus for being here was Afghanistan.
Ned himself had a Bronze Star and wore memorial bracelets on each wrist honoring two friends killed in action.
“Do you still have nightmares?” he asked. Not a formal question but more as a casual topic of conversation; a litmus test, I suspected, for gauging PTSD.
“Umm. . .”
I once had this reoccurring dream where I’m surrounded by enemy but unable to squeeze the trigger. No matter how hard I pull, the rifle just won’t break. At present moment, however, I suffered from the opposite:
“In my dreams I’m invincible,” I said with all sincerity. “Bullets ricochet around me while I work my way through warzones.”
Ned’s smirk suggested I was lying or being facetious, like he was ready to call bullshit but wasn’t sure if I was emotionally stable. I imagine a fair amount of tiptoeing occurs inside mental wards, punctuated by some of the realest conversations ever had on planet Earth. Our conversation halted, neither of us able to reconcile how such a confident subconscious could lurk beneath the surface of someone diagnosed as depressed. Yet here I was: emotionally starved by day; John Wick by night.
It was strange I failed to form a connection with Ned, despite his best intentions. We were practically the same person. Both combat arms. Both the first in our family to earn a college degree—courtesy of the GI Bill. He invited me to open up, but I didn’t feel as comfortable with him as I did with Dr. Styles.
The psychologist I met next was even worse. Rapid-fire questions in a fifteen-minute session to determine what sort of meds to place me under. SSRIs sounded fine in theory, but I figured there were more natural ways of moving serotonin around the brain. Cannabis intrigued me but felt too great a risk with randomized drug tests at work. Yet even cannabis felt like a hack, a skeleton key for a grander reality designed by God or nature. A rabbit-hole of late-night videos had taught me about the endocannabinoid system. Vital for regulating mood, sleep, appetite, and more, the human body produces its own cannabis-like molecules that binds to receptors throughout the brain and body. Marijuana introduces these exogenously rather than endogenously—hence the endo in endocannabinoids. But like a buffed-up fifty-year-old shooting testosterone into their ass, what you introduce from without halts production from within. Your masculine identity becomes dependent on an industry and a product only made available to you by science.
Endocannabinoids are naturally produced by shared activities such as music, singing, poetry, and dance. True to my own experience whenever immersed in a crowd. A single person or group can trigger anxiety, but there’s anonymity in large numbers, which is why I feel a pleasant release walking the streets of New York—where you’re one in eight million.
Prescription in hand, Ned asked if I wanted to join group. The veterans circled up on fold-out chairs were a mixed bag of young and old, officers and enlisted. One thing I always loathed about the military was its classist hierarchy. A simple thing such as a college degree meant twenty-percent of the Army were beyond approach, which felt all the sillier after earning my own education. Could I now sit at their table, be included in their club? Or having served as enlisted was I forever branded with the rank of sergeant and unable to advance further in the eyes of my peers? Many of whom peaked in Afghanistan and could not converse or reminisce beyond our days in combat together. A prophet is not without honor, except in his own town. Once perceived as one thing, how does one reinvent themselves? I’d been to VFWs and drank with veterans hiding behind tragic war stories. The annoying thing is the assertion of rank remains. “Can I top you off, colonel?” the bartender will say, and everyone within earshot now knows the codger at the end with the pale eyes and feathered hair was vastly more important to the war effort than themselves.
Ned’s group, however, was on a first-name basis. Each took a moment to introduce themselves. An anti-Thanksgiving, where instead of gratitude we all shared sorrows and laments. One guy had taken to drink. One was recently cheated on. Another with the scattered attention of a traumatized animal.
“I wish I could believe in ridiculous dreams again,” I said when it was my turn.
Patient faces and blinking eyes stared back at me.
“In a warzone, every smart soldier concedes his death in advance. It’s a defense against anxiety—to die before you die.”
I paused just to ensure I wasn’t weirding them out.
“In Afghanistan, I genuinely believed I was invincible and felt zero fear. It didn’t hurt I was only eighteen. But now I’m afraid of everything. Losing my job, speeding tickets, public humiliation. The legal system, the medical system, the system system. But beneath all that, there’s still a huge part of me who wishes I could die doing something heroic. Saving a kid from drowning, tackling a mass shooter, wrestling a bear cornering a pregnant woman. But opportunities like that do not exist like they do in war. What’s the point in deluding myself if the stakes are not life and death? I will get this promotion I could say to myself in the mirror before bursting out laughing at the triviality of my civilian pursuits—”
Ned cut me off. Apparently I had gone over my allotted time. I realized driving home, I hadn’t spoken so many words out loud in a very long time.
***
Next group was on post-traumatic growth, or PTG. An acronym I’d never heard but found intriguing. The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves define who we are. Up until very recently the predominate veteran narrative gripping public imagination was that of a scared, broken, and reactionary people. PTG flipped that script. Instead of how were you wounded, PTG asks how have those wounds made you stronger?
After embracing the gift of PTG, many have discovered within themselves a greater capacity for warmth and connection and even an enhanced sense of spirituality and compassion.
This group I sat silent, listening to Ned’s remarks. I thought of Dr. Styles, whose own warmth and compassion had nudged me in here, and my mind began to drift. I wasn’t sure if heaven and hell were real places or conditions of the human psyche in the here and the now. When taken too literally I found the concepts reductive, painting the outside world as locked in an eternal struggle of good versus evil. I know this struggle—this jihad—exists inside of us. But living in a city as diverse as DC, it’s become increasingly difficult to project that struggle onto others—despite my years seeking enemy combatants to maim and to kill. Or perhaps because of those years. Did we send those men to hell? Or, as my nervous system seems to intuit when immersed amongst many peoples—did we send them to the primordial source? A common energy or cosmic principle from which we all emerged—before spreading across the globe to change and evolve under disparate conditions, acquiring color and phenotypes and culture, establishing nations and states and armies to pit ourselves against ourselves over banal trivialities such as hoarding resources, ideology, or perceived external differences—
Ned interrupted me again—this time not for talking too long but for dreaming out loud.
“You good, bro?”
“Hm?”
“You look a little dazed.”
“Yeah, man,” I said coming to. “Never better.”
***
I stopped attending group after that but found a way to integrate myself into larger communities. We’re all small puzzle pieces looking to fit into a larger canvas. Some of us more difficult and jagged than others—I pray will one day find where they nevertheless belong.
Whether singing in church, dancing with friends at the mall, or standing in formation all those years ago—being around others makes me stronger. I only wished I’d learned it sooner.
***
Sometime later, I sent a thank-you message to Dr. Styles via the VA’s secure messaging system. Just a quick note of appreciation for being such a great doc. The person who responded was a new doctor who informed me that Dr. Styles had moved on, as primary care physicians working with veterans are often prone to do.
I asked this new person if she could please forward my message to Dr. Styles and thanked her also for caring for us veterans when more lucrative gigs existed beyond the VA healthcare system. Then, stepping away from my computer, I checked outside the window.
I was craving another long walk outside but was unsure if I needed an umbrella.
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Benjamin earned a Purple Heart in Afghanistan and an MFA at George Mason University. He combined these experiences by writing the military short story collection Soft Targets, which was named one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of 2023. He lives and works in Northern Virginia. Follow him on Instagram @Inks__Thinks
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