Mike Campbell gets on the bus, finds a spot by the window. He’s finished his shift at Delta Metal Finishing Inc. in St. Petersburg where he works as chemical waste manager and is heading home for the long Independence Day weekend. But while others head out to celebrate freedom with fireworks, Campbell will stay home alone, or perhaps go sit on the Florida beach. He’ll do whatever he can to avoid the sound of fireworks — a sound that brings back images better left in his past, the images of war.
Campbell, 51, is a veteran of 20 years in the U.S. Navy. During his last deployment to Iraq in 2006, he suffered a head injury when an explosion rocked the vehicle he was riding in. He was honorably discharged from the Navy Intelligence Service with the rank of chief petty officer. He was also diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder.
Veterans refer to people with PTSD as “walking wounded” because of the effect of living through a traumatic experience over and over again. For Campbell, that effect meant the end to a career that “felt right” to him. Already disturbed by the horrors of war before the injury, he also was dealing with forced alienation from the camaraderie he had found in the military. He left the ranks of the Navy and joined the ranks of the 300,000 Iraq war veterans who suffer from some form of PTSD.
Individuals respond to negative events differently. Some remain stressed after the event longer than others. Those who display the posttraumatic reaction for longer than a month are diagnosed with PTSD, a mental disorder that develops after exposure or overexposure to a terrifying event.
According to Frank Ochberg, clinical professor of psychiatry at Michigan State University and expert on PTSD, not every event can be a source of PTSD. It has to be an event that has a strong impact on the mind of the person exposed to it.
“Losing a relative or losing a job will not count as sources of PTSD. For PTSD it has to be a certain kind of trauma that is hard to define. We define it as something that is beyond the realm of human experience,” Ochberg explains.
Basic symptoms of PTSD include hallucinations or nightmares mentally reliving the event. Those reactions can be triggered by a smell, an image or a sound similar to those experienced during the event.
“But it’s not a schizophrenia or a neurologic disease,” Ochberg says. “Your body remembers it, but you don’t want to remember. Your mind may help you by not taking you there, but a single smell, a single sensation can bring all the memories back.”
Other symptoms include feeling indifferent to the surrounding environment, or vice versa, feeling too agitated, anxious, depressed or neurotic.
War veterans, along with rape victims, are the demographic group most likely to suffer from PTSD. According to the RAND Center for Military Health Policy Research, of the 1.64 million veterans who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, approximately 300,000 suffer from PTSD or major depression. According to a 2003 report in the New England Journal of Medicine, one in six soldiers returning from Iraq suffered from PTSD. More than 60 percent of those with symptoms did not seek professional help.
Treatment of PTSD normally begins with a consultation with a psychiatrist. At some point, Ochberg says, an individual has to start talking about the traumatizing experience, and may even have to re-experience the event. Unfortunately, many war veterans are not willing to talk about their traumas because of the fear of stigmatization or loss of career advancement, he says.
Mike Campbell’s father was a career military man. During World War II, he was stationed in Korea. When Campbell was trying to decide what branch of service to join, his father said, “If you go the Army or Marines, you will sleep in the mud. With the Navy you will always have a clean cot.”
After a semester in the New Mexico Military Institute in Roswell, N.M., Campbell decided he had enough of school and joined the Navy. One the first places he was stationed was Denver. Friends teased him about serving in the Navy in the city with the highest elevation above sea level.
Campbell found camaraderie in the Navy that became the leitmotif of his life. Being the only child, he suddenly had brothers everywhere he went.
In 1986, he started working for the Intelligence Service. That’s where he learned that there is no place for sentiment in a firefight. He was given a week to learn how to type 40 words a minute. He learned to do what he was told — no questions asked, no time to worry, he just did it. He learned to take the pressure.
“While you are there, they work on your mindset. You can’t start feeling sorry when you are on duty. Otherwise you will get hurt,” he says.
Campbell’s first assignment in the Intelligence Service was at a base in Japan that was located in a tunnel where the Japanese manufactured torpedoes during WWII. His job was to collect information about foreign submarines in the area. He liked being the first to get the information, passing it on to his superiors and eventually seeing it reported in the news.
In the 1990s, Campbell went to Bosnia to record scenes of “ethnic cleansing” as proof of genocide for the United Nations. He later served in Panama, the Persian Gulf, Iraq and Afghanistan.
“I can’t believe some of the things I got in, some of the things I saw, things that human beings do to each other,” he says.
He was on assignment in Iraq when the violence he had long witnessed caught up with him. There was an explosion that shook his vehicle. He fell out of it and slammed his head against a building. At first he wasn’t sure what happened. He remembers he felt very hot. He wiped the sweat off his neck. When he looked at his hand it turned out that the sweat was blood. That’s when he remembered the only advice his father gave him before he left for Iraq:
“If you ever get hurt, get on your ass and check yourself to make sure you have everything.”
So Campbell got up and moved toward his companions. The next thing he remembered was waking up in Germany. His memory was patchy. Disconnected memories slowly started coming back as he was recovering in James A. Haley Veterans Hospital in Tampa.
But looking back, Campbell said he was suffering symptoms of PTSD even before the injury. He used to jump on the edge of his seat if someone in the room dropped a book. He would sometimes go without sleep for four days.
“My body was like an open blister,” he says.
Even after several months of therapy at the Bay Pines Veterans Hospital in St. Petersburg, he still jumps on his seat if someone at work makes a loud noise. Every night before going to bed, Campbell checks the perimeter of the building he lives in. And in a restaurant he will only take the table that is close to the entrance.
“You have to be the first to get out of the building if there is something going on,” he says. “Once you are overexposed to this, you got it.”
He takes medication to sleep and keeps the TV on through the night.
He never dreams, he says.
But he still has flashbacks.
He says they aren’t like the flashbacks shown in the movies, when a person experiences an event for a minute.
“It’s something that lasts for a millisecond, and that’s what it does to you when you shake, when you have your heart pounding, when you don’t want anybody close,” Campbell says. “You lose everything. You have to extract yourself from where you are. Everything you do, everyone you talk to just has to go away. I just need a space. I don’t know, maybe it’s different for everybody.”
Psychiatrists are still not sure why some people exposed to a traumatizing event experience only stress, while others suffer from a stress disorder.
“Some people just have a closer connection between thoughts and feelings,” Ochberg says.
Another explanation might be the proximity of a person to the trauma. Research on posttraumatic behavior done after Sept. 11 shows the closer an individual was to a traumatizing event, the deeper the impact of the trauma was.
PTSD connected to the violence of war is far different from the normal stresses that come with life, says Mary Ellen Salzano, a California-based independent advocate for military families.
“It’s a normal reaction to an abnormal stress. Most people are not trained to kill, to carry dead friends, to see parts of a dead body.”
The stress becomes a disorder when it inhibits the ability to maintain a normal lifestyle, she says.
Campbell is building his life around his PTSD. His experience of meticulous record-keeping in the service has proved valuable in his job at Delta Metal Finishing Inc. He says he has never been late for work. He is a news junkie and devotes significant time on Fridays to reading newspapers. He likes watching the news because he is curious about what is going on in the world. He does not like watching dramas on TV, preferring comedies.
“You have enough drama in your life,” he says.
He no longer drives because of his head injury, so he has learned to get anywhere he wants by bus.
Too much silence is difficult for him because of the wandering thoughts it brings to mind. That’s why he likes the “forced adventure” of riding a bus. On weekends, he takes a bus to the museums downtown or goes to the beach — water puts his mind at ease.
“I would go stare at the water for hours on end,” he says. “It’s beautiful. It’s very hypnotic. When the sun hits just the right way with a little bit of a current on it, it looks just like little diamonds dancing on top of it.”
He has never married and lives alone. His immediate family is also gone. His father died on Memorial Day in 2006 when Campbell was in Iraq. His mother died on Veterans Day in 2007.
He feels lonely sometimes, but he tries not to let the feeling bother him.
“You just have to be strong enough and wait till it’s passed,” he says. “It’s not the way you are, it’s something that is passing through.
“I’ve seen bodies left around for somebody else to take care, dozens of dead children. What is lonely compared to that?”