Until 2007, I focused on the 1st 2 out of 3 of my traumas that gave me PTSD. Healing by talking about surviving sexual assault and domestic violence as a kid seemed to be a more reasonable expectation. Talking about surviving torture at the hands of a dictator's soldiers seemed to be hopeless.

Both therapists and psychiatrists here in the USA often got distracted into political discussions if I told them about it. Conservative ones argued against my facts, demanding I confess what I'd really been guilt of. Liberal ones used my experience to reinforce their own political opinions. But what happened to me as a 15 year old boy in 1973 had nothing to do with conservative or liberal politics. At age 15 I had no politics. I had trauma, but since that part went ignored, I just clammed up.

Then even though democracy was restored on the mission field overseas where I grew up, I kept quiet even then because soldiers seemed to be getting away with what they'd done before democracy. So what was the point?

I was wrong. In 2007 I found a VA therapist who just dealt with traumatized Iraq veteran soldiers without political editorializing. He treated me the same way he treated them, so I started talking to him about what happened.

I told him how my third random (and I mean random) arrest happened on a summer Sunday afternoon at around 4pm. The dictator had just overthrown democracy and had banned the constitution's right of assembly. He announced an order that no more than 3 people were ever to gather in public. We weren't used to following the dictator's orders yet, so that Sunday there were 4 of us kids walking down the street 4 blocks from my house. We were out in the suburbs, too, on a quiet street, so we lost track of how many of us boys were walking together. But an army patrol got us.

TW

I was picked out of the group of four boys at random to be tortured in front of them while they were forced to watch and were blamed for my suffering. My torture session that day ended with me on my knees and the officer pulling his sidearm to execute me by shooting me in the head. I've mentioned before here, because it will play over and over forever in my mind, that his gun jammed twice when he pulled the trigger. My bladder gushed as I wet my pants in terror when I heard the gun's hammer fall loudly and drily with that metallic "chink" sound on the gun barrel at my temple next to my ear. He laughed when it didn't fire and I wet myself. I will never forget how hard he laughed. He actually thought scaring the pee out of me threatening my life was good, hilarious fun, so he let me go.

TW
That event left me with mental scars that returned in nightmares in which the gun worked. The mental scars led to self esteem lows in which I figured maybe I wasn't worthy of life, that the gun should have worked. What he did got into my head. The mocking laughter got to me. As a young man, after my nightmares sometimes I woke up in the night and battled an awful idea alone in the dark again and again. The idea was that he was right. My life or death was a joke, a laughing matter, and maybe I should just give it up and finish the job for him.

QUESTION:
Has anyone here ever had that weird thought that should finish your abuser's job? I'd like to know, because I was very ashamed of that thought for many years. But I hear others have had that thought, too.
Is that true or am I the only one?

Today, though, the laugh was on him and his buddies. The head officer in charge over the one who nearly killed me and all of his henchmen got sentenced at trial to life in prison. I know, it's been many years now since his crimes against me and lots of others. He'd been hiding under a false name in Brazil for many years. But it still matters to me that this man who hurt kids like me like it was nothing just got exposed to the world as the criminal he is in a court of law.

I'm not just happy for me. A baby he had taken from a young mom he had killed back then is a grown young woman now. After killing her mom, he had just given her away to be raised by one of his officers. Today in court she found out who her birth mom was and got justice for how he killed her.

I'm glad I didn't "finish the job" for him so I could live to see the day he would be declared guilty and be sent to prison for what he did, even if it took this long.

Finally. Thank goodness. Look who's laughing now.