Wolf update

~ I know, its wordless Wednesday ... this is me working on my OCPD for 2010 ~

I alluded to the fact the Wolf is not doing so good right now.  At least as far as I know; we haven't spoken in a few days now  (Although, yes, we are still playing on-line scrabble.  This relationship lately has been defined by scrabble)

A bit of background:

His childhood sucked.  Both of his parents were alcoholics.  The kind of alcoholics that would get drunk enough to pass out and not notice what the losers who hung out with them were doing to their little children.  The Wolf had been sexually abused by the time he was 5 years old.  When he got old enough to escape it got a bit better - he would spend most of his time at friends houses, but some of those friends had home lives that were only marginally better. (I love small, factory towns...)  In high school a large bunch of us used to spend a lot of time at my parent's house - as much as I can complain about my mother, our house was safe.  Whenever the gang was going anywhere together, the Wolf would be standing in the drive waiting when we got there, no matter the weather.  No one ever made it to the door, let alone inside.

We trained martial arts together.  For many of us, the dojo gave us the sense of family, community, respect, and trust we couldn't find anywhere else.   It became our family, and folks from many different walks of life became friends.  We crossed the boundaries of high school cliques and created our own bonds.


Like many young men from small towns across the country, the military promised escape and a better life.  The Wolf enlisted right out of high school.


He has seen active duty in many places, but Croatia in the mid 90's was the one that had the most impact on him.  In Croatia he was still in the infantry; in a recce platoon, a sniper.  I have only heard a few of the horror stories; some from him, some from others.  (I will not get into the politics of how that conflict was handled; leave it that I have some very strong opinions concerning the UN's ROE (Rules of Engagement) for that one.)


I know he has held friends and comrades while they died.  I know that he has held the tourniquets on the stumps of a friend's legs.  I know that he was slated for a mission and at the last minute a friend took his place; and that the vehicle they were in hit and IED and his friend came home in a box.


I have heard from a third party that some locals were torturing some children - dousing them with gas and then setting them on fire -  in front of the soldiers to try to draw them out into something that was against the ROE; they couldn't stand watching the children being tortured, so they shot the children/young women to put them out of their misery (also against the ROE...) .  I don't know who the actual shooters were, and I am not sure I want to. 

He also has a history of women reinforcing his childhood belief that love hurts and is about misery; that he is not worth loyalty.  That the only thing he can count on is the "Band of Brothers" he has found in the military.  This also contributed to the pre-deployment bomb that he dropped on me in September.



The Wolf admits he has PTSD.  He thinks, at the moment, that sleeping pills, whiskey (which his family, helpful that they are, is smuggling to him where he is), and shutting off the emotional parts of him are the right way to deal with it.


He had been doing really, really well.  He was relaxing, getting back to his old self a bit.  Now, the recent Canadian casualties have flared up his "survivor guilt".  In our last conversation he was calling himself old and weak; gutless; he should be out there with his friends not "safe" behind the wire. It doesn't help that the infantry unit that is there with him now is his old unit; and at least one of the guys who is a combat driver there now was a combat driver with him in Croatia. The Wolf says he wants to find a way to stay in country for his second HTLA and "go hunting" outside the wire.  That was the last "real" conversation I had with him, 4 days ago.


I am worried about him.  I made a couple of the other guys in his unit aware of my concerns pre-deployment and they promised to watch him.  These are not guys I am in regular contact with, but guys I have met through him, and who I thought had a good head on their shoulders; but not people I get feedback from.  I also made the base social worker aware of my concerns; I like to think that went somewhere.  I have to trust that the system will work; that he will get the support he needs.  That at some point he will realize that what he does now is just as important, that it is not just a platitude when someone says that to him.  That he will realize that where he is now is not Croatia all over again.

I hope he realizes that he does need to come home.  For those of you "new" to the story, there was a cancer scare this summer, and the Wolf's way of dealing with his tentative diagnoses was to hide the results from the military, deploy anyway, and make sure he didn't come home.  He didn't want to waste away and be pitied; he wanted to die doing what he was trained for.   He told me that the test showed no cancer after all ... but in my darker moments I wonder.



I hope he realizes that he is worth loving, and worth being loyal to.  That I am not the past women in his life, that I am built on a solid foundation of 24 years of friendship, and that I will be here when he comes home.