The Stimulant and the Void, Part 2

Adventures in ADHD, Depression, and Artillery Fire

As a child and teenager, ADHD and depression are manageable in the way a hairline fracture is manageable – so long as you never have to put any real weight on it. You can drift, you can excuse yourself, you can rely on the convenient fiction that your scattered inattention and your sudden sadnesses are just a byproduct of youth, and that everyone feels this way. In adulthood, though, the fracture becomes a compound break. The situation becomes untenable almost overnight, as if someone has pulled a curtain and revealed the scale of your deficiencies.

All my life, I would experience these sudden, unbidden waves of sadness – like a rip current you didn’t see forming. They came when I thought about people I’d wronged or the soft, hollow ache of nostalgia. Like the memory of riding in the back seat of my father’s car on a fall afternoon, the sun pooling on the seats in pale, drifting sheets of light.

Often the sadness came for no reason at all. The hours of late afternoon were the worst – when the light was withdrawing itself, when the sky seemed to lean toward darkness – and I would ruminate, telling myself I was only tired. I didn’t know then that melancholy could be an ambient state, like humidity in the air. I believed it was normal. That everyone had to hold back tears at dusk.

When I entered the Army, I carried with me a near-constant dread in the pit of my stomach. It was a free-floating anxiety, diffuse and inarticulate, the sense that something bad was about to happen but you couldn’t say what. I lived in a perpetual fear of being discovered as incompetent. That I would be unmasked. That I was not up to the task. It was a sickening state, the kind of fear that colonizes your body. And still, I thought this was normal.

Being an Army officer was good for me in ways I did not expect. There is a humility you acquire when you stand beside blue-collar men whose technical skill is so far beyond you that it might as well be magic. You learn quickly that your authority is, at best, provisional, and that your survival often depends on their competence.

It was also good – vital, really – to be in close contact with people who grew up in poverty, people whose choices had been so stark they barely counted as choices at all. You cannot spend years in that company without understanding something essential about America – about what it demands of some people and what it spares others.

One of the first conversations I ever had with a private went like this: I was trying to make casual conversation, in the way officers are told to do to seem approachable, and I asked him why he joined the Army. He didn’t hesitate.

“It was either this or be homeless.”

That’s about as real as it gets. (I sometimes forget what poor people have to live through – how much of their life is simply trying to avoid falling through the floor everyone else assumes is solid.)

An NCO, or Non-Commissioned Officer, is the creature that emerges when technical mastery, experience, and a ferocious skepticism toward incompetence are combined in a single human body. They are sergeants and staff sergeants and sergeants first class and so on – the men and women who make sure the whole unwieldy machine of an Army unit does not collapse under the collective illusions of its officers.

One of the oldest platitudes is that “NCOs are the backbone of the Army,” and it’s a platitude precisely because it is so manifestly true that it cannot be improved by more original phrasing.

I must have looked like a child to them. I was not a very good officer when I was twenty-two or twenty-three. But my NCOs kept me out of trouble because I got the simple things right. I was respectful. I valued their insights. I brought them into every room where a decision was made, because their practical knowledge was, frankly, the only thing preventing disaster. There is no substitute for experience. I allowed myself to be mentored.

One memory of “getting the simple things right” stays with me. I was the officer in charge of a machine gun range. That meant I had to orchestrate the whole dreary ballet: crunch ammunition numbers, coordinate trucks and radios, publish timelines, stand around looking officious while everyone else did the real work. By early afternoon, it began to pour – the kind of cold, early spring Texas rain that sounds like a cliché until you feel it yourself, a rain that makes you think the sky has decided to pick a fight. I’d been up in the tower with the senior NCOs, dry and removed. But when the storm started, I went down to the firing line and stood with them.

I turned to the NCO next to me and said, “This sucks.”

He smiled, cracked open a can of Copenhagen, and offered me some. I packed it into my cheek. For five hours, we sat there, spitting into the mud while the machine guns rattled. We didn’t speak. When it was over and we were both drenched, he said, “It was good that you came down from the tower. Good shit today, sir.”

When we got back to Battery headquarters, a soldier said, “It was good having you out there today, sir. Good shit today.” And as I was leaving, the First Sergeant called from his office: “Hey sir – good shit today.” (Which is the closest thing you’ll ever get to a collective hug in the Army.)

But here’s where the ADHD became something more than a private embarrassment – and where I finally understood why it was disqualifying. When I was a kid, my parents sent me to a shrink because I could never focus on my homework. I downplayed everything to him. I insisted they were overreacting. I knew that if I were diagnosed, it could keep me out of the Army, and I loved America. So much that I decided the risk of friendly fire from my own brain was preferable to not serving at all.

We were a 155mm self-propelled howitzer battalion, the kind of organization whose name alone suggests elaborate procedures and spectacular disasters. My first job was Fire Direction Officer. Being an FDO was my personal nightmare: a job that required me to do math under the psychological conditions of a hostage situation, in an armored oven, while six different radios screamed at me – and the penalty for screwing up wasn’t getting a C-minus, but accidentally turning someone into a red mist and a pile of unrecognizable limbs.