ACE Report: Green, Green, Green

Part of my mobilization paperwork was delayed last week because there apparently was a red flag in my medical file pertaining to panic attacks related to PTSD. No big deal. In the vast majority of cases, this is certainly not a show-stopper. Thousands of soldiers deploy and re-deploy with associated PTSD diagnoses on their records. As a consequence of the flag, however, I was designated a “no go” until I had found my way across base to the behavior health clinic and been given a clean bill of health. The next day I found myself in a small office being interviewed by a full-bird colonel who was hunched over a computer battling in vain to keep it from randomly powering down. She asked questions, I answered questions, and she punched those answers into her temperamental computer. It was all very mundane, and she spent more time and attention focused on that computer than on me. Until, that is, she asked me what triggered the last panic attack. I told her that in May of last year I had seen a headline from a news article about a shooting that had taken place on Camp Liberty in Baghdad, where I had been stationed. (On May 11, 2009 a troubled sergeant had stolen a weapon and killed five soldiers at a counseling clinic on the base.) The headline and the first couple of sentences triggered the attack. At that point, the colonel stopped typing, slowly pushed herself away from her computer, and took off her glasses. She turned to me and said, “That was my clinic.” She hadn’t been there at the time, but was intimately familiar with everything about it. She said that she had trouble dealing with it at the time as well, and had to call upon her own colleagues to help her through that period.

I got my paperwork signed off, and we're good-to-go.