MARINE 1/5, HELMAND 2011 — Seven months in Sangin and what it did to my sense of time

First battalion, fifth Marines. Sangin district, Helmand. February to October 2011. The pump compressed everything that ever happened to me before it into a small flat thing I can fit in a kitbag, and stretched everything that has happened to me since into a long thin thing I cannot finish. Casualties were heavy. I will not list names. The Marines who were there know what I mean. Anyone who was not there does not need the specific arithmetic. What I want to say is this: I came home and people kept asking me if I was glad to be back. I was not glad. I was not anything. My internal clock had stopped on March 14, 2011, and it did not start again for about two and a half years. I was functioning. I was at work. I was at the gym. I was eating. None of it registered. What started the clock again was a phone call from a corpsman who had been with us. He had been having the same problem. We talked for two hours. We talked the next week for two hours. We have talked every Sunday for almost fifteen years. Therapy helped. Medication helped. Mostly what helped was that phone call every Sunday for fifteen years.