Aloha, ILML
thank you for your service. I'm sorry for everything you faced and nothing I say can express how sorry I am for the loss of your buddies. Feeling guilty is common when we lose our fellow brothers and sisters in uniform because we feel responsible for saving them and sometimes we tell ourselves it should have been me. But, your team did what you had to do over there in those terrible places. You followed orders. I wish I could take the pain away of your loss.... all I can do for my buddies who are gone is light some candles every memorial day and think of the good memories. Reaching out to their family members helps too. I've become good friends with one of the widows. I hope you have a PTSD counselor. Sending support and quiet dreams your way.

I wasn't a Marine, far from it. I was just a missionary kid overseas when I lived through 6 years of combat in my city. Most of it in my neighborhood, because in the civil war going on in our little developing country abroad, the rebel headquarters was 4 blocks from my house. At one point, government soldiers fighting them took over my bedroom in my house for a day.

Trigger Warning

There were only 2 families of US citizens in my neighborhood. The other family had a boy my age, and we were friends both in the neighborhood and at school, too. I stayed over on sleep overs and his house and played with Matchbox cars at his dad's feet. The rebels kidnapped his dad, then, and when the US didn't pay his ransom, they shot him and left his body to be found in a car in our neighborhood.

I was in my family car when we were car bombed. The guy that threw the IED was close enough that he looked into my eyes before the toss. My head snapped back in the explosion. I've got a little horizontal crease in the crown of my skull from the concussion when my head hit the back of the car where the back glass met the metal frame.

When my American pal and I went to go bowling the morning after a sleepover, the bowling alley was blown up as a protest against American culture's presence in the little country. To make their point the janitor, a local native, was killed in the IED's blast, trapped under a slab of concrete from which he couldn't be rescued.

When university students rioted while I waited in the car for my dad to return from inside a bank, I was caught between the rioters and the police charge response. I saw them gun down the lead student. They shot him in the groin. He died.

When I was 11 my friends and I were playing soccer on the sidewalk in front of my house when a passing car exploded right there in the street as the curb by my house. It was a rebel delivering an IED to headquarters 4 blocks away who didn't make it.

And on and on for 6 years. Then after the 6 year civil war ended, a dictatorship followed for 12 years. They rounded up youths regularly, sifting through them for past rebel sympathizers. I got picked up 3 times, the third time being saved from an execution when an officer's sidearm jammed twice up pulling the trigger when I was forced to kneel in front of a group of young guys being interrogated in the street. So the peace after the war wasn't, really.

I'm sorry for your memories, but I'm glad you're here to voice them in a safe way. I'm glad I can voice mine in a safe way here, too, to someone who has seen IED's. They're with me every day, and I wasn't even a soldier serving his country like you were. I was just a kid in the wrong place at the wrong time for years.

A take away for me from all of those years in combat is that, unlike on tv shows, it's not so easy to trace neat lines of cause effect in the midst of the fog of war. My experience of combat was that there was a lot of randomness and chaos. Like the landing craft scene in the opening of the movie Saving Private Ryan, where bullets seem to buzz by like bees and deliver deadly stings at random.

So I don't know, maybe what happened to your friend was less your fault and what you feel is somewhat a matter of survivor's guilt. It is for me. Much support to you, my friend.

Much, much support to you.

Hello IMLM. Welcome to the forum. Thank you for your service and apology for the deep price you are still paying for it.

I am a Viet Nam Era veteran who carried her PTSD into the service with her. I was Signal Corps and never saw any combat during my service. I started my therapy in earnest during my stint in Germany. At the time, combat PTSD was still being called, "Shell Shock." My shrink had served several tours in the M.A.S.H. units of Viet Nam where he developed an unofficial sideline in "Civilian Shell Shock." He declared me a victim of "The other undeclared war on the US streets" and put me in a support group with his official shell shock patients and magic happened. We discovered that "Shell Shock" symptoms have a great deal in common, despite the direct differences in the source trauma.

Hope you find relief for some of those symptoms here. Welcome aboard.

ILML, not a veteran. Child of two veterans. (Yes, Mom too. Army Reserve nurse, Vietnam era, and only didn't go b/c as it happened she turned up pregnant at the physical before shipping out. My older sister, not me. Dad, Navy, what he did/saw was not declassified till... well, not all of it is yet, actually.) Military service is a tradition in my family going back to the mid-1700s. PTSD is essentially part of family "culture" for us. You know the moods, the dark cloud look, etc., and the tpoics that you simply don't discuss. "We dont' talk about rice around Uncle A," for example, b/c the Chinese had him as a POW. You never even mention the word "pineapple" around a certain cousin. It's accepted that they're carrying memories we don't have. Short version: Respect to you for your service, and support to you.

So sorry the trauma affects us this way. Feelings just don't have any IQ sometimes and the brain does what it does. I know it really sucks and it is hard. Thank you for your service and I hope with treatment things get easier. I have found EMDR works really well and it is not to hard either.

Thanks everyone, I'll have to try EDMR sounds like it'll help with the trauma.

My heart goes out to you! My sons in the military and I understand your trauma.

His death is not your fault. You were all doing what needed to be done. He would not want you to hold this against yourself. He is at peace now.

Please seek help for your traumatic experience. You will be surprised how many other military men and women feel the same as you do.

I will be praying for you! God bless you for serving our country!

I haven't done EMDR, ILML. Let us know how it works for you. I did exposure therapy with a VA doc. It involved going back to the places the above things happened. On the first try it didn't work out, but on the second and third it did, and it really turned things around for me for the better after that.

TY for your service; post as much as you need to.

I forgot to mention....The therapy that helped me with my PTSD is called Accelerated Resolution Therapy. It changed my life!

Wow, cassi, I looked it up, and it sounds like an improvement on EMDR. Promising stuff!

The exposure therapy what worked for me's cognitive behavioral therapy. You re-experience the traumatic event through remembering it and engaging with, rather than avoiding, reminders of the trauma such as triggers. It was the opposite of what my other therapists had done, but after years and years I gave it a try and it worked. It's not for everybody, but I tried everything else for 12 years until my VA doc helped me with it.