Huffington Magazine Issue 92-93 | Page 50

THE GRUNTS scribed sleeping pills and twice slept through morning formation, getting slapped with two unauthorized absences. All this added up to what the Marine Corps considers a “pattern of misconduct.” At war, he’d been exposed to IED blasts six times and shot once, while he was manning a machine gun in a firefight. He’d risked his life, led men he loved in combat and seen some of them die. And now that he’d come home sick at heart, the Marine Corps, which he also loved, meant to kick him out. Let’s pick him up now, a year or so later, in Philadelphia. Despite his earlier trouble, he’s been honorably discharged from the Marine Corps and is rooming with Paul Rivera, a Marine buddy from Afghanistan. Nick is working as a bodyguard for a security firm. His physical wounds have healed. Physically he is here. But the sounds and sensations and urgency of battle keep puncturing the peaceful civilian reality he’s trying to occupy. “Coming back, I didn’t know what could help, like ... how do I get those feelings to stop?” Nick said. He can be out in public and then comes something like a panic attack: He feels the HUFFINGTON 03.16-23.14 adrenaline rush of combat, the crazy excitement, the hyperalertness ... and watches again as the boy comes around the wall. “The feeling hits you and like ... I don’t want to be like that. “I just want to be normal.” ‘YOUR TRUST HAS BEEN RUINED AND BROKEN’   At the U.S. Naval Medical Center in San Diego, close by the sprawling Marine base at Camp Pendleton, staff psychologist Amy Amidon sees a stream of Marines like Nick Rudolph struggling with their combat experiences. “They have seen the darkness within them and within the world, and it weighs heavily upon them,” she said. Morally devastating experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan have been common. A study conducted early in the Iraq war, for instance, found that two-thirds of deployed Marines had killed an enemy combatant, more than half had handled human remains, and 28 percent felt responsible for the death of an Iraqi civilian. If the resulting moral injury is largely invisible to outsiders, its effects are more apparent. “I would bet anything,” said Nash, the retired Navy psychiatrist, “that if we had the wherewithal to do this kind of research we’d find that moral injury underlies