(5/5) “It’s the most embarrassing thing a grown man can...

(5/5) “It’s the most embarrassing thing a grown man can experience. It’s like having a nightmare while awake. It happened not long after I’d moved to New York City. I’d been isolating myself a lot after I came back from Iraq. I was on edge all the time and I got nervous in crowds. So one day I decided that I was going to try to step outside my comfort zone and drive to the Queens Center Mall. And I was parking my car in the lot, and this traditionally dressed Muslim man starts walking behind me, and suddenly I was back in Iraq, and I started to get nervous. So I walked quickly into the mall and I start hearing the sound of 50-caliber machine guns all around me, and it’s getting louder and louder, and I know that nobody else is hearing it but I swear to fucking God it’s real. And the voices around me grew louder and suddenly I can’t remember where I am. And I walked outside and started hugging this aluminum lamppost, and I tried to call my girlfriend because I didn’t know how to get home, and it felt like the world was closing in on me and I wanted to die. I wanted to kill myself. It was the only way I knew how to end this. I had to get help. I lost a whole line of mentors to suicide and I didn’t want it to be me too. Maybe some guys can come home from war and go back to mowing their lawn or fixing their gutters– good on them. But I had to get help. It took a lot of therapy to release this self-torment. It took a lot of therapy to stop hearing those 50-calibers. And therapy is the only reason I can talk about these things today. Because I’m finally starting to get through it.”