The Curse
It is not what was done to you…
There’s a word many people reach for when they try to explain a veteran.
Trauma.
I’ve spent the first three pieces of this six-part series arguing it’s the wrong word, or at least a word doing the work of ten.
This is part four of a six-part series running from familiar misery to the events and the shoestring that taught me how to crack my own armor and let love in. Each piece stands alone. Together, they are the on-ramp to my book, The Armored Heart, out October 1.
Part 1 — King Kong Ain’t Got Nothin’ on Me · June 11
Part 2 — I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead · June 23
Part 3 — The Battery · July 7
Part 4 — The Curse · July 11 (Yes, it’s early…)
Part 5 — Contraband · August 4
Part 6 — Help · August 18
The thing itself.
What’s really going on, and is there a word for it?
Sure, it’s the normally unnamed word underneath all the others.
Curse.
The combat mind is a curse.
I know what you just read, and maybe what you thought. The fairy-tale version. A hex laid on someone from outside, a punishment, a doom imposed by a force with more power than you. That’s the trope, and the trope resonates because it gets close to something real, but it gets the direction wrong. The fairy-tale curse happens to you. The curse I am talking about was accepted, possibly even sought after.
Here is what it is. A tragic toll, accepted. A person trading away their own peace, their own quiet, the version of themselves that could have moved through the world without a weapon in their hands or a threat assessment running in the background, trading all of that, deliberately, to secure the future of someone or something they loved enough to pay that price for.
You don’t have this curse laid on you. You walk to the counter and pay for it because, in the moment when you get to decide, you decide the alternative is better than watching people die.
That’s the part of this unraveling of the combat mind that the word trauma can never hold.
Trauma is what was done to you. The curse is what you chose to become, because becoming it was the only way through. You went looking for it. You might have trained for years to earn it. And it worked.
The curse kept you alive, it kept other people alive, and the price of that magic was that you can never give it back.
The machinery
There is a chemical floor to this curse.
Under fire, the brain runs its most total reward sequence. It flags the threat and floods you with a focus civilian life will never replicate. It opens the cascade that makes you fast and sometimes briefly unkillable, that holds the pain at arm’s length until the work is done.
And when the threat breaks, when you are still standing, and the world goes quiet, the stress hormones crash while the reward chemistry lingers, and what’s left is something close to euphoria.
Mastery.
Being utterly, savagely alive.
The brain files that away as the highest thing it has ever felt.
Then you come home. And maybe your marriage doesn’t clear that bar. The promotion at work can’t touch it. The quiet Sunday ... none of them come within a thousand feet of it.
The cursed mind goes looking. Not because it’s broken. Because the chemistry has shown a new ceiling, that is the benchmark against which everything else is graded.
The speed. The needless fights at least spike something. The manufactured emergencies, because an emergency is the weather the engine knows how to run inside. It is optimized for emergencies.
That’s the machinery. But machinery isn’t meaning, and the dopamine and adrenaline and everything else were never the point. The curse is the older thing wearing the chemistry. Without combat, the curse is all dressed up with nowhere to go.
The shape of it.
Most people who love us see its shadow.
How to describe it is problematic.
Well, first, understand what was traded to build it. Not just years. Not just deployments. The person who could have existed quietly, who could have sat in a public place without running the exits in his mind, who could have held his daughter without part of his mind already positioned between her and the door. That person was the price. The original you.
You handed yourself over because the people on the other side of that trade were worth more than you were. Or at least that’s the accounting that took place, even if you weren’t checking the ledger. Most of us never even noticed we were paying. We were too busy doing the work that the payment made possible.
What came back from the other side of that trade is the thing we wrestle with.
The combat mind can do anything. Anything!
But it must want to. It will not fire for the grocery list, or the quarterly report, or the small civilian errands that might fill a normal life, because it was built for one altitude, and that altitude is life and death.
The combat veteran can look lazy. Checked out. Unreachable. They aren’t.
The engine is simply refusing to turn over for anything small. It is idling, waiting for something that matters at the level it was made for, and almost nothing in peacetime ever clears the bar.
Almost nothing.
My wife and my children are my exception, and they are the whole exception. They are the only force I have encountered in peacetime powerful enough to raise the mundane to the must-do. The grocery run becomes worth doing because they need to eat. The ordinary Tuesday becomes worth showing up for because they are in it. They don’t clear the bar for the combat mind. They move it. They make a new one, at a height that has nothing to do with survival and everything to do with love, and the engine (this engine that would not turn over for anything small) fires for them completely.
That’s what gets me off the couch. Not discipline. Not a mission. Them.
Which means the curse, for all its cost, carried something inside it the whole time. The capacity to love at that altitude. The problem was never the altitude. It was finding something in peace worth flying that high for. They are worth it. They will always be worth it.
The curse is only despair if you never find the thing. The thing that lights you up from the inside. The worthy target. Without it, the combat mind is a lit fuse in an empty room. All that intensity, all that capacity, burning with nowhere to go. That’s where the darkness lives. Not in the curse itself. In the aimlessness.
Find the thing. Everything else follows.
It has to be important, and you have to recognize it; you have to open the armor and let yourself love it. You have to receive love. All of those things. They can be hard.
The combat mind craves the weight. It needs the mission to mean something, or it won’t spend itself, and a world of conveniences and small talk reads to it like an insult. And you can’t reach it through the armor.
It hunts. It craves justice and righteousness, real, total, and here is the cruelty inside the gift. Those states don’t exist. Perfect justice is not a place you arrive at. So, a mind built to pursue it can never stand down, never report the mission complete, never come home even when the body has. The hunt has no end state, so the hunter never rests.
It loves like a devoted and maniacal father. The same circuit that would burn the world to the ground for its brothers does not have a dimmer switch at home. The devotion arrives as vigilance and control, as an intensity over the people you love most that they cannot always hold.
You are not too cold. You might be too much, aimed wrong, with no war to absorb it. You need help to understand it.
Because this cursed mind can bring death to whatever stands in the way. In combat, that was the enemy, and it was righteous, and it was clean. At home, with no enemy, the mind still looks for the thing to destroy.
It finds one. The man in the mirror at three in the morning. The death it was built to deliver has nowhere to go, so it turns inward and starts dismantling the only target left. This is why suicide is a problem.
I’m not writing a list of symptoms. I’m describing a person, a human. And the being has a mind that is magnificent in war and nearly unlivable in peace, and you cannot summon one without the other. That is the curse.
You don’t cure a curse.
The helpers often get it wrong, with all the goodwill in the world.
A curse is not a disease. You don’t cure it. A curse is not a sin, either. You don’t repent it, and you don’t get to feel guilty enough to make it lift. Both of those roads assume the goal is to make the thing go away, but it will not.
It is fused to you. It is part of how you love now, how you see, how you move through a room. Try to exorcise it, and you cut out half of yourself, and the half that’s left is the numb one. That’s covered with armor. We covered the armor already. Armored and numb aren’t free of the curse.
You don’t cure it. You learn to wield it.
The cursed man who hates what he is stays dangerous, mostly to himself. He spends his life trying to kill the very thing that kept him alive, and it makes him cruel and tired, and eventually it makes some of us disappear by our own hand.
The cursed man who receives it…and there’s that word again, the one this whole series keeps circling. The man who stops fighting what he is and picks it up on purpose. That man becomes something else. Not cured. Aimed.
Point the same death-bringing devotion at something worth it. Coach the under-six soccer team like it’s a hill that cannot fall, and watch what that intensity does for a five-year-old who’s never had a grown man care that hard about whether he’s okay.
Tie yourself to a blind brother and guide him across a desert that’s trying to kill you both, and feel the curse finally doing the exact thing it was forged for, in a direction that builds instead of buries. The hunt for justice that can never be satisfied? Aim it at the long, unwinnable, holy work of taking care of your fellow veterans. It will never be complete there either. But now the incompleteness is a calling instead of a wound.
The curse doesn’t lift. It gets a worthy target. And the love that was the origin story, the love you were carrying the whole time, under all that armor, behind all that violence, finally has somewhere to land.
The gift
Most people will keep calling it trauma and PTSD. Let them. The word and the diagnosis are a door most people can walk through, and I’d rather they walk through the wrong door than stand outside.
But a combat veteran knows what it really is. And I’ll tell you the part the diagnosis will never hold, the part that sounds like madness from the outside.
I wouldn’t give it back.
I won’t cut that part away.
Not because the price wasn’t real. The price was everything, and some of us are still paying it, and some of us didn’t make it to the part where it gets aimed. I don’t say this lightly, and I don’t say it to the ones still bleeding without offering help.
We can wonder about the cost and ask questions about the righteousness of it all, but those are questions for other places and times. On the human level, they both take valuable energy away from loving the people who carry the weight.
The man the curse made in me is the man my brothers needed in the worst place on earth. He’s also the man who can still do work that matters now, when I stop trying to bury what I am and start pointing my mind at something worth loving.
Lead with love.
— Doom
Maybe our nomenclature is worlds apart, Col., the sentiment, I'm sure, we have in common.
Wow
Supper deep