Last weekend, I attended national speaker (and former Marine) Silouan Green’s talk about overcoming PTSD. This talk was paid for and arranged by my boyfriend’s family, using funds earned from the memorial golf tournaments we hold each year in honor of his son, Trever, who died by suicide in April of 2019. PTSD led to Trever’s death, and we are determined to help prevent other PTSD-driven suicides, so this was one of our first grand-scale attempts to do so. Silouan Green came to a V.F.W. post in Omaha, and a small crowd of people attended; we are certain that it was beneficial to a few of the attendees.
As Silouan talked, he told a story about a guy he knew who had severe PTSD brought on not by something that happened to him in combat, but rather by something that happened to his buddy. While this particular guy was in the shower at the barracks overseas somewhere, someone outside the barracks and off in the distance a ways discharged a weapon skyward. The bullet traveled upwards, but what goes up must come down, and when that bullet came down, it went through the roof of the barracks and into the head of his buddy who was simply sitting on his bunk talking to other buddies.
He died instantly.
When the guy in the shower came out of the shower, he encountered chaos as people were attempting to revive his friend, etc. This one event led to that guy’s severe PTSD because he suddenly knew that he wasn’t safe anywhere. While he’d grown accustomed to knowing he wasn’t safe out on patrol, the barracks was the closest thing to home over there, and it was supposed to be the place where they were safe; yet his friend died while sitting on his bunk talking to other guys from a stray bullet that came from somewhere outside the barracks.
When Silouan told that story, I had goosebumps all over because something very similar happened to me as a child, and I’ve never fully recovered from it. I tend to tell the story — when I care to share it with others — with a touch of humor because that’s often how we deal with disturbing events that we survived to tell about.
When I was about five years old, a stray bullet punched through the side of our house’s garage, traveled through the one-car garage, punched another hole through the wall into our house, traveled across the small kitchen area, and landed on the carpet of our living room — exactly where I had been sitting and playing only moments before it hit.
The bullet left a small burn patch in the carpet, but it forever burned that memory and the impact of that bullet into my brain. I don’t mean the impact of the bullet hitting the carpet — I mean the impact of it coming into our house, the place that is supposed to be safe. Like that guy in Silouan’s story, I have always felt that no place is safe. While I do not believe I have PTSD from that experience, I do believe that it has guided some of my philosophy about life and the way we should live it — taking nothing for granted and doing our best to live each day to the fullest.
This happened in our small house in Papillion many years ago. My dad was stationed at Offutt Air Force base, and we only lived there for four or five years. It wasn’t long after the bullet incident that we moved to Norfolk, and since I was so young during those Papillion years, most of my memories of that time are fuzzy. It’s the bad, or traumatizing, ones that remain. There are only a couple, but the bullet landing on the carpet is the one that has stayed with me all these years — almost half a century now.
We never knew where it came from. My parents speculated that someone up the hill somewhere shot off a rifle and didn’t hit whatever they were shooting at, or that someone may have accidentally dislodged the gun, or some teenagers might have been jacking around and shot up into the air without considering that what goes up must come down. Papillion was much less populated back then, and there was an area not too far away from us that was still wooded, so more than likely that is where the shot came from, but this did happen in the late evening, and nobody should have been shooting at anything at that time of night.
If I hadn’t got up from the living room floor only moments before that bullet entered our house, my story might have ended that night, just as that guys’ buddy’s life ended on a bunk in the barracks of a base somewhere overseas. Or I might have only been injured. Fortunately, I wasn’t, but that bullet did harm me, and I totally understand that fear that comes from knowing that you’re not safe, even in your own home.
We just can’t cave to that fear.
However, we’re also not ever truly safe anywhere. Twenty years ago, my cousin Evonne Tuttle entered a bank in Norfolk, Nebraska, to get some cash. A few minutes later she, and four employees of that bank, were dead. Her sister and I shared some messages the other day in memory of Evonne, and I finally shared with her sister a poem I’d written years ago about that tragic day in September of 2002.
I told Evonne’s sister that I wrote the poem to highlight the fact that Evonne was doing a very normal activity on a very normal day; yet, she was killed. I asked her sister if she’d like to read it, and she said she would. I will share it below for my paid readers.
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Tammy Marshall
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