Spring Final Review

Read the next two selections and answer the questions that follow.

Thank You for Your Service
Excerpt by David Finkel

1 You could see it in his nervous eyes. You could see it in his shaking hands. You could see
it in the three prescription bottles in his room: one to steady his galloping heart rate, one
to reduce his anxiety, one to minimize his nightmares. You could see it in the screensaver
on his laptop—a nuclear fireball—and in the private journal he had been keeping since
he arrived.

2 His first entry, on February 22: Not much going on today. I turned my laundry in, and
we’re getting our TAT boxes. We got mortared last night at 2:30 a.m., none close. We’re
at FOB Rustamiyah, Iraq. It’s pretty nice, got a good chow hall and facilities. Still got a
bunch of dumb stuff to do though. Well, that’s about it for today.

3 His last entry, on October 18: I’ve lost all hope. I feel the end is near for me, very, very
near. Darkness is all I see anymore.

4 So he was finished. Down to his final hours, he was packed, weaponless, under escort,
and waiting for the helicopter that would take him away to a wife who had just told him
on the phone: “I’m scared of what you might do.”

5 “You know I’d never hurt you,” he’d said, and he’d hung up, wandered around the FOB,
gotten a haircut, and come back to his room, where he now said, “But what if she’s
right? What if I snap someday?”

6 It was a thought that made him feel sick. Just as every thought now made him feel sick.
“You spend a thousand days, it gets to the point where it’s Groundhog Day. Every day is
over and over. The heat. The smell. The language. There’s nothing sweet about it. It’s all
sour,” he said. He remembered the initial invasion, when it wasn’t that way. “I mean it
was a front seat to the greatest movie I’ve ever seen in my life.” He remembered the
firefights of his second deployment. “I loved it. Anytime I get shot at in a firefight, it’s the
most stimulating feeling there is.” He remembered how this deployment began to feel
bad early on. “I’d get in the Humvee and be driving down the road and I would feel my
heart pulsing up in my throat.” That was the start of it, he said, and then Emory
happened, and then Crow happened, and then he was in a succession of explosions,
and then a bullet was skimming across his thighs, and then Doster happened, and then
he was waking up thinking, “Wow, I’m still here, it’s misery, it’s hell,” which became, “Are
they going to kill me today?” which became, “I’ll take care of it myself,” which became,
“Why do that? I’ll go out killing as many of them as I can, until they kill me.” “I didn’t
care,” he said. “I wanted it to happen. Bottom line—I wanted it over as soon as possible,
whether they did it or I did it.”

7 The amazing thing was that no one knew. Here was all this stuff going on, pounding
heart, panicked breathing, sweating palms, electric eyes, and no one regarded him as
anything but the great soldier he’d always been, the one who never complained, who
hoisted bleeding soldiers onto his back, who’d suddenly begun insisting on being in the
right front seat of the lead Humvee on every mission, not because he wanted to be
dead but because that’s what selfless leaders would do.

8 He was the great soldier who one day walked to the aid station and went through the
door marked combat stress and asked for help and now was on his way home. Now he
was remembering what the psychologist had told him: “With your stature, maybe you’ve
opened the door for a lot of guys to come in.”

9 “That made me feel really good,” he said. And yet he had felt so awful the previous day
when he told one of his team leaders to round up everyone in his squad. “What’d we do
now?” “You didn’t do anything,” he said. “Just get them together.”

10 They came into his room, and he shut the door and told them he was leaving the
following day. He said the hard part: that it was a mental health evacuation. He said to
them, “I don’t even know what I’m going through. I know that I don’t feel right.” “Well,
how long?” one of his soldiers said, breaking the silence.

11 “I don’t know,” he said. “There’s a possibility I won’t be coming back.”

12 They had rallied around him then, shaking his hand, grabbing his arm, patting his back,
and saying whatever nineteen- and twenty-year-olds could think of to say. “Take care of
yourself,” one of them said. He had never felt so guilt-ridden in his life.

13 Early this morning, they had driven away on a mission, leaving him behind, and after
they’d disappeared, he had no idea what to do. He stood there for a while alone.
Eventually, he walked back to his room. He turned up his air conditioner to high. When
he got cold enough to shiver, he put on warmer clothes and stayed under the vents. He
packed his medication. He stacked some packages of beef jerky and mac ’n’ cheese
and smoked oysters, which he wouldn’t be able to take with him, for the soldiers he was
leaving behind and wrote a note that said: “Enjoy.”

14 Finally it was time to go to the helicopter, and he began walking down the hall. Word
had spread through the entire company by now, and when one of the soldiers saw him,
he came over. “Well, I’ll walk you as far as the bathrooms, because I have to go to the
bathroom,” the soldier said, and as last words, those would have to do, because those
were the last words he heard from any of the soldiers in his battalion as his deployment
came to an end.

15 His stomach hurt as he made his way across the FOB. He felt himself becoming
nauseated. At the landing area, other soldiers from other battalions were lined up, and
when the helicopter landed, everyone was allowed to board except him. He didn’t
understand.

16 “Next one’s yours, ”he was told, and when it came in a few minutes later, he realized
why he’d had to wait. It had a big red cross on the side. It was the helicopter for the
injured and the dead.

17 That was him, Adam Schumann. He was injured. He was dead. He was done.

Excerpt from Thank You for Your Service by David Finkel. Copyright © 2013 by David Finkel. This text was used under fair use.

The Post-Traumatic Stress Trap

by David Dobbs

1 In 2006, soon after returning from military service in Ramadi, Iraq, during the bloodiest
period of the war, Captain Matt Stevens of the Vermont National Guard began to have
a problem with PTSD or post-traumatic stress disorder. Stevens’s problem was not that he
had PTSD. It was that he began to have doubts about PTSD: The condition was real, he
knew, but as a diagnosis he saw it being dangerously overemphasized.

2 Stevens led the medics tending an armored brigade of 800 soldiers, and his team
patched together GIs and Iraqi citizens almost every day. He saw horrific things. Once
home, he had his share, he says, of “nights where I’d wake up and it would be clear I
wasn’t going to sleep again.”

3 He was not surprised: “I would expect people to have nightmares for a while when they
came back.” But as he kept track of his unit in the U.S., he saw troops greeted by both a
larger culture and a medical culture, especially in the Department of Veterans Affairs
(VA), that seemed reflexively to view bad memories, nightmares and any other sign of
distress as an indicator of PTSD.

4 “Clinicians aren’t separating the few who really have PTSD from those who are
experiencing things like depression or anxiety or social and reintegration problems, or
who are just taking some time getting over it,” says Stevens. He worries that many of
these men and women are being pulled into a treatment and disability regime that will
mire them in a self-fulfilling vision of a brain rewired, a psyche permanently haunted.

5 Stevens, now a major, and still on reserve duty while he works as a physician’s assistant, is
far from alone in worrying about the reach of PTSD. Over the last five years or so, a

long simmering academic debate over PTSD’s conceptual basis and rate of occurrence
have begun to boil over into the practice of trauma psychology and to mix military
culture as well.