Fireworks and veterans
I truly hate this crap with every fiber of my being. Veterans with PTS are like every other person in the country – they jump when they are startled by loud noises. We don’t huddle in the fetal position in a remote corner of our homes while the rest of the country celebrates the birth of our nation using those Chinese inventions. I have to question whether veterans who claim that is what they experience really do suffer from PTS. It sounds like a bunch of whiny bullshit to me.
The group behind this particular sign is the group run by that Jason Justin Gourley fellow who claims that he “caught the PTSD” from attending some security guard school in the Navy. The article appears in the Tampa Bay Times.
I’ll admit that PTS affects people differently, but, I’m pretty sure that this is just a bunch of folks who want sympathy. You don’t have to walk like you’re on eggshells around me, thank you very much.
Category: Who knows
This crap is rampant.
This is how social workers that council “Combat Vets” keep their paychecks rolling in.
My favorite is when these same folks fall all over themselves for a sound bite on the local news about readjustment, combat, etc.
Word
So, you’ve heard the local news on it like stink on shit too.
I’ll bet those signs aren’t free. If there is money to be made these posers and scam artists will find a way. At least that “pastor” in Norfolk just got convicted for filing 90 fake VA claims. Sooner or later these boneheads get really greedy and screw up.
I see rants about fireworks all the time from legit veterans who claim it sets off their PTS, so it may be whiny bullshit but it’s not coming from posers.
Ill admit I’m not a fan of any sudden bang or explosion, but on holidays celebrated with fire works, knowing the sound is coming is no problem at all. Its not from catching the ptsd, im pretty sure I got a vacination for that, I just dont like explosions. I’ve seen a few too many up. Lose and personal.
I hate fireworks when I don’t know they are going to be set off and I’m the same with loud noises. I knew an ATF agent once who had been the shield guy on a search warrant and took about four rounds out of many fired in the shield. He was a bit jittery about fireworks for a while after that, but only if he didn’t know they were going to be set off.
I never had a problem with loud noises or explosions but the one thing that used to get my attention was the sound of a commercial refrigerator/freezer door closing – sounded just like a mortar tube to me.
I have heard that the VA is coming out with a new vaccine to prevent one from “catching” the PTSD. Chuckle! No more whining and sniveling.
If you’re looking for sympathy, you can find it in the dictionary between “shit” and “syphilis”!
The DC-approved, PC-version today is “between manure and venereal disease”, Oldav8or.
Can’t speak that plainly these days. Might offend someone.
The right to be offended isn’t in my copy of the Bill of Rights, but my right to say what I like is.
According to Ricky Bobby in that cinematic masterpiece Talladega Nights, as long as you say “With all due respect” you can then say anything you want! haha
(sigh) I guess the sarcasm in my comment above wasn’t obvious enough and I should have added a “/sarc” tag. . . .
We need a big emoji for that apparently Hondo…
:sarcasm:
The only person in my house who gets upset by fireworks is my cat. To get lots of sympathy from me, he gets up on the table and whines. I tell him he can find sympathy in the cat box.
Ya gotta be shitting me.
Screw the Gourleys, Shawn and Justin. Just make a donation. I think it’s $10 gets you two signs, but they are free. (Yeah.)
Exactly how is one courteous with fireworks? My guess is that you address them as Mr. or Ms. Cracker and say something complementary about their cute little bottle rocket. Or perhaps, just before you put a match to an M80 you yell, “Sorry about the noise! Happy 4th!”
$10 plus $5 for shipping.
They have gotten donations from different sources for these signs but tell people that if they want a guaranteed sign delivery before the 4th, they need to purchase one.
It has also been said that Shawn paid for the shipping out of her own pocket but was also said that Shawn used monies from Military with PTSD to pay for shipping…so which one is true?
There is also a notice on the site saying the signs cannot be reproduced or distributed without permission.
To me that says “if you want to print the signs that we say help people, you have to pay us first.”
To me, that doesn’t seem to fit with the notion of “helping people” but rather “my 15 year old made a sign in a high school photoshop class and we are selling them.”
(It is a butt ugly sign, IMHO)
Hey, a buck is a buck. Of course, they have no way of determining whether a sign is installed at the home of a Veteran at all, let alone a combat Vet. Doesn’t matter. A buck is a buck.
They are requiring people to upload documents to prove that they are Combat Veterans. I, myself, would not trust uploading any information to a organization that runs out of a home with a shared internet as their children with gaming systems and computers.
They also claim that the IRS required these documents to prove that they were serving and assisting the veteran community–not true. That is not a requirement for 501c3 organizations, but 501c19’s, which they are not!
Yeah, well, I’ll go right ahead and doubt that they are actually requiring any paperwork before issuing any signs and accepting any money. The more I think about it, the less likely it is. Besides, what I said was that they have no way of knowing whether the signs are planted on property belonging to combat Veterans.
Oh, don’t get me wrong 2/17 Air Cav–I am one that supports the page that is trying to expose them for fraud, scamming and Justin’s embellishments!! I was making a sarcastic remark about the excuse they are using this month about why they need the documents.
I totally agree that not all of those signs will be put in the yards of Combat Veterans since the signs that are purchased do not have to be verified.
So far, this is the third reason they require the documents to be uploaded.
I don’t like the commercial fireworks because they are annoying. We have laws that they are not to be used within city limits, which gets ignored on July 4th (of course). So it gets a little loud around here one night out of the year, when the parents run the kids out in the yard to play with the fireworks. Occasionally some kid will get bored and creative and end up destroying a mailbox or set one of the alley dumpsters on fire, so that gives the police and fire department something to do — as if they didn’t have enough to do already. Even more rarely (here, at any rate) somebody will have a really bad day and blow off some fingers or torch themselves with a defective firework, which gives the local hospital something to do (I’m sure they’re just sitting around, too). But, most of the time, it’s just loud. I could do without it, but put a sign up in the yard? Nah.
The best thing about having fireworks available starting in mid-June is the Crappie fishing with cherry bombs you get to do for the next two months.
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
A year or two ago a Marine Capt told me they couldn’t fire artillery during rush hours at Lejeune because it might cause drivers who had caught the PTS to have an accident.
I couldn’t believe it but he is a Mustang with 4 Iraq/Afghan deployments in the trenches and I’ve known him for years. I also noticed that there was no arty during the times of rush hour: fired like hell between 0900 and 1500 then quiet until about 1800 and 0600.
PTSD and the Pileated Woodpecker are much more important than a fire mission. Maybe they should move the impact area to Sneeds Ferry, you know a little incoming during qualification at the range might not be a bad thing.
A few years ago whislt staying at the Lejeune RV park I saw trees with a white band around them. My mind searched for a reason…maybe NVG training area?
I was standing near two grizzled Marine WO’s in the PX and asked proffering the NVG theory. Their reply: “Fucking Woodpeckers sir”.
LMAO Thanks, I needed that story. Semper Fi.
I see you’ve been there. You know I’m not making any of that exchange up. Hell, you couldn’t make that up.
I later learned that that fucking woodpecker impacts training everywhere. An ole Bud says Ft Stewart fights that too. And I know about the fucking tortoise at NTC.
Same deal for areas of the Pinon Canyon Maneuver Site used by Ft. Carson. Taped off areas that you are not allowed to get within 100 meters of. Why the white tape? Fossilized in the mud dinosaur tracks and petrified dino shit.
Speaking of the NTC tortoise, I wonder how he’s getting along. Wasn’t his bumper number either A-34 or B-34?
In remote areas of Camp Pendleton, you can find areas cordoned off with orange construction/safety fencing. Having asked the game warden why there were so many around the base, he replied they were protecting vernal pools in the area, which contained brine shrimp. Then the warden chuckled and admitted that “Sea Monkeys” are considered protected (and endangered) on that base.
Will someone please tell me how to catch the PTS?? I have been trying but it always gets away and ends up landing onto the stupid people like Bernutless, Witless, and Heavy Chevy???
Catching PTS=Googling “Hillary Clinton nude”.
If that doesn’t do it, nothing will….
That’s ….anyone have some mind bleach??? Oh my God.
You already have it, obviously you are in denial. Try watching the 2 Girls 1 Cup video, that finally got me out of denial.
Semper Fi.
Try an earthquake. It might not give you PTS, but by god you WILL pay more attention to that big truck you think you hear rattling and banging up the road!
Biggest one for me (so far) was a 4.2 on the Richter scale. Made the house sway back and forth twice like it was in the world’s biggest hammock.
Been through 2. First one was pretty weak, and I slept through it. (smile)
During the second one I was on the top floor of a multi-story building. Didn’t sleep through that one.
The Rockies are famous for being an active seismic zone. We have dozens if not hundreds of ‘tremors’ each day. Most of those aren’t even felt. The strangest ones cause a phenomenon that is truly freaky. You won’t feel anything yourself, but if you lightly touch the surface of a hard object, like a table, you’ll feel it ‘shiver,’ exactly like a frightened dog will shiver.
Oklahoma has been having them pretty regularly around a 4 magnitude. They ain’t nothing, apparently the ground is just having an allergic reaction to fracing fluids, but no worries, its only in oklahoma. The rest of the earth doesn’t seem to be allergic
An author who was doing an article on Jimmy Cagney was having a drink with Jack Lemmon, and asked him “What do you think of Jimmy Cagney?” Right then a fairly mild earthquake hit – he said bottles were clinking, a few glasses fell over, a couple of women screamed – through it Lemmon just sat there, holding his drink and smiling. When it stopped Jack took a drink, and said “THAT’S what I think of Jimmy Cagney!”
Yup…I was living in the Santa Cruz Mtns, about 5 miles as a crows flies from the Loma Prieta epicenter in ’89. Besides sounding like a freight train coming through the house, watching the tops of redwood trees raining down from the whiplash was the cherry on top (or the new 10″ gap between my bedroom and the rest of the house). Incredible and terrifying experience. I need about a 5.0 or larger to hit the fight/flight button or sleeping in the RV and someone getting up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night.
Walk into the photolab at Great Lakes and find a humongous wolf spider sitting in the middle of my deskmat.
Then there was that time at Orlando whenI went into the head to take a shower and found two giant cockroaches – er, palmetto beetles duking it out to see who got to stay on the drain covers in the showers.
I guess all kinds of things could hurt the feelings of some veterans. Anything really could set them off. The smell of burning shitters could cause a total breakdown.
If I had a heart it would go out to them. Poor bastards. If they only would have known serving during a time of war might cause a few unpleasant memories. Somebody should have warned them.
Well, they can always take their puppy and go fishing, hunting, boating, painting, sculpting, on the dime of those who wish to help them with their menstrual cramps. (From what I have been told I doubt they could endure the torture.)
Your comments never cease to amaze me in that you always manage to come off sounding like a cocksucking faggot.
sj. I don’t think anyone doubts that some combat Veterans would prefer not to hear sounds reminiscent of battle, whether it’s an air burst from a fireworks show or small-arms fire during hunting season. That’s not the point.
This is the unfortunate combination of the liberal canard that combat veterans are “victims” and the small group of self-absorbed, entitled sparkle pony veterans who want the world to revolve around them.
Exactly Smaj! Hell, I’ve been shot at, where’s my sign? Bet I’ve seen way more mangled bodies than most of these “special” combat vets too. When do I get my PTSD check, I need a new fishing boat.
You get it when I walk into my bathroom and find you butt naked and covered with feathers. You’ll have some real serious ‘splainin’ to do about that.
EX: that reminds me of an old joke. Stop me if you have heard it.
What is the difference between Kinky and Twisted? Kinky is any sex act using a chicken feather. Twisted is the same act using the whole chicken!
It was the soju, yeah, that and HONDO MADE ME DO IT!!!
Well. There are a few things I find alarming, sometimes even disturbing. What I will NOT do is put a sign in the yard itemizing just what those things might be.
This just seems like a terribly immature thing to do. And strange. Very strange.
Not to be rude, but if you live a neighborhood where fireworks are still legal and the sound causes you some issues why is it incumbent upon your neighbors to alter their behavior?
Buy some earplugs, listen to some soothing music and enjoy your evening…or go someplace quiet on the 4th….expecting the whole neighborhood to accommodate your unique personal situation isn’t a very realistic expectation.
That depends, VOV. If you’re part of the spoiled brat generation, EVERYONE is supposed to accommodate your needs.
Don’t have too much problem making an effort to assist others in meeting their needs – it that accommodating what others WANT that is unreasonable.
I see this in a local school OWB where one kid has a peanut allergy so no kids in his class are allowed to bring in peanuts or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
Why does my child’s diet have to change to suit the maladies of someone else’s sickly child. It would seem the fair thing to do is keep the kid who might die from peanut exposure away from the rest of the world rather than to expect the rest of the world to never again eat a peanut in front of that kid.
I don’t wish the kid any ill whatsoever, but their problem is not my problem. I don’t ask anyone to accommodate my dietary needs except me, that seems reasonable. I mind my business everyone else can mind theirs.
It’s not my job, nor the world’s to accommodate anyone’s special requirements. We’ve become such a nation of little wienie snowflakes that none of us can bear the responsibility for our own lives apparently.
I had the ‘pleasure’ of being on the receiving end of that attitude when I was a child, VOV. Long story, but the end result was aggravated adults who couldn’t be bothered to give a damn about a sick kid who DIDN’T ASK FOR HER ILLNESS. At school, I got dragged around by my arm by teachers who were pissed off that I couldn’t always be herded like all the other rug-rats, who demanded to see doctor’s notes that I didn’t have with me, who had my parents called to the school REPEATEDLY to verify my condition, who got ordered to go sit in an empty auditorium rather than the library for god only knows what reason…I could go on, but you get the point. There were days that if they’d offered to take me out and shoot me like a dog, I would have gone with them willingly.
I understand your point of view, it is a pain in the ass to deal with things like allergic kids, but just think for a moment how THEY feel. Because they do feel. And hurt. And hate what they are worse than you ever could.
I was eavesdropping on a smoke deck conversation once about somebody who tended to dive for the deck with fireworks, so I’m sure it happens. The thing is, after the first one goes off, I’d bet it’s more of an annoyance than anything–and even with a sign out front, good luck finding a spot where not even one firecracker goes off.
Wayyyy back in 93, when there was still an artillery range at Huachuca, I’d been back from Somalia for about an hour, sipping a nice cold beer and testing the new recliner… and BOOM! I rolled into the corner, beer in hand, didn’t spill a drop. Only time it ever happened.
Training always pays off!
Insert snarky comment here.
I’ll just leave that there so I don’t say something that could hurt someone’s feelings.
Perplexed and embarrassed.
I have nothing else.
It’s refreshing reading real combat vets calling BS. As I’m not one, I’ve always refrained from calling BS out loud.
OC
Once again, those who steal valor detract from those who have truly earned it.
(FWIW…I have ALWAYS hated fireworks. Just don’t see the attraction in blowing stuff up without actually blowing stuff up. Too loud and too dirty, and my dogs always get weirded out during displays, no matter how close they are.)
I don’t get it either. I mean all of my loud booms encountered in Iraq were either single IED’s or random lobbing of 2-3 mortar shells every blue moon. Although we did get hit with a bunch of rockets at FOB Hammer in 07 but that was the only real sustained firing I encountered and the rocket attack only lasted around 15 seconds.
So its not like I endured an artillery barrage by cowering for cover in a fox hole for hours on end so realistically, what stimulus did you encounter that sustained firing of fireworks bothers you??? I mean you know its going to happen so wouldn’t you try and calm yourself down and tell yourself its just fireworks?
militarywithptsd dot org.
Membership of one?
How did they make it through their semi-annual rifle qualification?
Jonn, Number 2 pencil entries on the qual cards at 0230 hrs while on CQ or Staff Duty doesn’t make much noise.
But that type of stuff never happened, right?
shhh you’ll ruin it for the young’uns
Stay away from the National Infantry Museum and Soldier Center on July 4th. The insensitive, discourteous, and callous bastards will be firing musket and cannon and are encouraging visitors (including Veterans, presumably!) to enjoy a fireworks display after dark. Yeah, they call it Freedom Fest, but we know better, the rats.
You know, unlike in the US during WW II, London got hit by rockets and bombs and many thousands of civilians died. In other words, it wasn’t merely combat Vets whose sensitivity to booms and bright blasts might have been at issue. With the war ended, formal victory celebrations were in order and the London Victory Celebrations of 1946 led the way. The party was held on June 8th and military parades were the order of the day. Want to guess what they did to celebrate at night? Here are your choices: fireworks, fireworks, or fireworks. (Okay, I’m done. I exceeded the comment max on this thread.)
Fireworks are illegal in my city. But if I saw one of these I would be tempted to head over to the reservation and buy some M-80s and give the squirrel something to make him put out 2 signs next year.
I’ll admit to not being a huge fan of home fireworks displays, but it’s less about my ears and more about the fire risk. We’re under a statewide burn ban right now but for some reason the powers what is didn’t see fit to extend it to fireworks sales and use this year. Normally I’m all for commerce and the freedom to make even some pretty stupid decisions – but I’d like to not literally bet my farm on the outcome.
Just curious, how many of the Vietnam vets on this site came home hating rice? The reason I ask is because my uncle hated rice until the day he died and he blamed it on his time in the RVN. He never put a sign up about it though.
Not me. I love it !! No, wait, that’s wrong.
Never ate very much rice growing up. Beans and taters were staples on the farm, so whether I had rice or not made no difference.
My time in RVN was not spent in a position to be running around in the vills and sampling the local cuisine. We were pretty well locked down at Phu Bai and as far as I knew the vill was off limits.
About the only time I eat any rice now is when the wife makes up the green peppers stuffed with Spanish rice/hamburger/tomatoes meal.
So as far as hating it, no.
Claw! You never sampled the F’ing Phu Bai cuisine? I’m shocked :-). I actually ate great there for about a week. I was on an advance party after Tet when they moved the 1/101 (Sep) there to liberate Hue. The Seabees had been there forever and lived GOOD. They fed us and we traded for plywood, bulldozers, etc. They wanted LRRP rations (but not WiTlEsS) and sundries packs for some reason. But then Division came in and inflation set in.
sj, that’s correct. I never once ate any of the nuoc mam, fish heads and rice from the local Phu Bai Mickey D’s. That stuff never had any appeal to me.
I ate the regular meals from the mess hall, supplemented by C-Rats or Lurps when we could get them, as well as all the good PX pogie bait.
I guess if it really boiled down to having a choice between nuoc mam or Ham & MF’ers, I would take the Ham every time.
CLAW131, Were you with the Marines up there or the RRU?
ASA all the way. Fore warned is cheating!
I was at Phu Bia,HMM-362(Marine). I never even to the vil, much less ate there. I will not on wading thru those shit filled rice patties on why your Uncle would not eat rice. When I first came back each time,fireworks would cause a sudden head turning to locate the direction of fire. Only hit the ground oncr. Some clown set off a whole big package of Blackcats. Joe
Roger, I was neither.
My outfit was 1st Flight Platoon, of C Company (Black Widows) 101st Aviation Battalion (Assault Helicopter) of the 101st Airborne Division.
I was a flight qualified 67N UH-1 Helicopter Repairman and was a Crew Chief/Door Gunner on slicks.
CLAW131, small world. When I failed my ARWOB flight physical I signed up for Helicopter repair myswlf. It was going to take six months to get into the course and the ASA recruiter saw my qual scores and talked me into becoming an electronic warfare repairman. I spent four years during the height of the war and never got closer than Japan. The only 26 K’s in theater went with the 1st aviation co. flying P-3 Neptunes. I tried to wrangle a slot with them but with combat and flight pay the money was just too good and no one would swap with me.
Hell GD, I’ve never been anywhere since I left Vietnam that served better fried rice. Makes me drool just thinking about it.
Wait, maybe that’s just my age.
Yeah, I really never asked him why he hated it. I don’t think it was because he was eating the local cuisine. I suspect it was because of the nasty ass stinking rice paddies he had to wade through (emphasis on nasty and ass and stinking, if you know what I mean). I am friends on FB with someone who served with him so maybe I will ask.
I have no problem with rice or fireworks, but with fireworks real close, I just want to know about them first. We have a Vietnam Vet get together twice a year and when we had a larger place, we would have fireworks. Almost all of us have the PTS but have no problem with fireworks unless you don’t know it’s coming, then you just jump and yell obscenities, then go back to whatever it was you were doing. I see no fetal positions assumed. I’ve been seeing these signs on the internet and just think it’s a way to draw attention to yourself as a veteran. There is some sort of secondary gain involved.
I knew a guy the same way from Navy service during World War II, GDContractor. But his reason was probably a bit different.
On one of his ships, for a period of in excess of 30 days they could get no other starch whatsoever – only rice. No potatoes, no cereals, no flour, no corn meal, nada. Rice was all they had.
It was served every meal, including breakfast. The man came to hate rice, and swore then if he had a choice in the future he’d never eat it again.
As far as I know, he never did before he passed in the early 2000s.
My uncle went over on the USNS Upshur. Maybe something similar happened to him.
That sounds like the fall of 1987 REFORGER T-Ration Lasagna fiasco we endured.
The MKT set-up wasn’t named “Papa Guido’s Lasagna Parlor” just for shits and grins.
What I see here is fairly similar to what I’ve experienced too.
In July 06 after I came back from Iraq, I didn’t prepare myself or think about it and the 4th of July I was actually pretty wrecked.
Granted, I had a downstairs neighbor shooting fireworks right past my window for about 10 hours straight so I was freaked the hell out. When I thought he was done, it would start back up again.
However, after that I drilled into my brain to expect this on New Years, etc., and after that I really didn’t have an issue with it.
I still get tweaked a bit here n’ there, but not enough to drop to the ground and setup a fighting position.
As well, like others here, I don’t want a sign on my front lawn saying what this sign says. I’ll deal just fine without it.
Eric, I had a similar experience my second evening home. A friend of my fathers, a non-veteran, thought it would be funny to throw a real, in those days, M-80 on the patio roof right next to the family room window. We were seated at a table talking. Then next thing I knew I was on the ground yelling. It was an immediate reaction. I got up saying cuss words I’ve never said in front of my father and mother. (Dad was a sailor in the Pacific in WWII. He’d certainly heard them before.) I had instant rage, seriously. Dad had to go to the door and cut off the neighbor explaining why, never to do it again, and come back in a few days when I’d cooled down. Again I’d only been home for a day and a half. Like you, if I don’t know it’s coming it’s a problem but not like it used to be.
Reading threads like this has given me PTSD…
Just the thought of seeing any of you nekkid does that to me. That’s worse than a cracker full of fish eggs.
Geeze, that’s kind of mean. Not all us guys are 70…
ExPh2,I AM OFFENDED.I have a good looking body. Joe
I have a perfect body. Problem is, it’s in the trunk of the car and starting to stink, anybody got a shovel?
When the Boston Marathon “victims” claim PTS…it is rampant. I guess it is like the pandemic flu of 1918. A weak society getting weaker…
The only sound that ever gave me any problems was the wop, wop, wop of Huey blades and I heard a lot of them since I went to college in El Paso with Fort Bliss nearby. And my response wasn’t a startle response like the guys with the fireworks. It was more of chill down the spine or the hair standing up on the back of my neck.
But I got over that fairly quickly and later that sound came to please me, as it does to this day, making me remember that I was a soldier once, young and proud.
I don’t mind fireworks, except that my decrepit old dog used to freak out from them landing in our yard.
Now, when I lived in Houston, TX I sought shelter on 4 July and New Year’s eve, but that’s because the idiot neighbors used live gunfire. The condo walls were paper thin, so I would hang out in the stairwell for a while.
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Fireworks displays don’t bother me but every now and then random fireworks make me jumpy. I don’t need a sign in my front yard for sympathy. I have noise canceling headphones. That and the fact that because of all the wild fires up here there is a fireworks ban, that and it’s pretty much daylight all “night” right now.
My neighborhood uses an app called NextDoor, and I was already asked, by a female combat vet, to not shoot off fireworks so early (was celebrating with some close friends and their kids before I leave for vacation). Of course, one of the first posts was ‘Thank you for your service’.
Nothing bothers me more than veterans who are apparently only defined by the fact that they are veterans, and feel the need to get sympathy because of it (I’m a vet as well, but I don’t really ever tell anyone for the sake of it).
The comments here are really pissing me off. You guys throw all kinds of fits when people who never served stereotype PTSD, but a lot of you are doing it here. Most guys I was in Iraq with have trouble with sudden loud noises. Considering that we spent countless hours travelling down roads where a sudden loud noise was probably indicative of an IED which would leave us either dead or maimed, I’d say this is to be expected.
Like Twist says, a surprising loud noise, or anything startling in general usually leads to us becoming either keyed up, irritable, or outright angry. It doesn’t leave us weeping on the floor, or curled up in the fetal position. You guys all ought to know better than to say stupid shit like that. It makes you people sound like civilians who think that Rambo: First Blood was a documentary on veteran’s issues.
Yeah, well, I wouldn’t have written about the fetal position if I hadn’t seen it somewhere else on the internet where some dependa was claiming that her husband spent the whole 4th of July in that position. We all get startled when there are sudden loud noises that we didn’t expect. That’s not related to PTS, it’s related to being a human.
You are misreading what I wrote. I didn’t say that PTSD causes vets to be startled by loud noises, I said that PTSD affects how vets RESPOND to being startled by loud noises.
Ever since I’ve been back I react to loud noises by getting ready to defend myself. After the initial jump that everyone has when surprised, my muscles tense up, my fists clench, and I get angry. I tend to stayed keyed up for some time after, even though the rational part of my mind realizes that I’m not actually in danger. Prior to combat that sort of exaggerated response didn’t happen. Now it happens whenever I’m surprised by an unexpected loud noise. It’s a trained response I picked up from spending a year in combat conditions.
As for the guy you read about who curled up, I haven’t heard about anything like that, but I suppose it’s not entirely outside of the realm of possibility if loud noises cause the guy to flashback to an IED attack. But it would definitely be the exception and not the rule.
Of course, I do agree with you that the sign on the guy’s lawn is ridiculous.
Yeah, no fetal position here. That dependa is just looking for attention.
Word!
Can’t help but agree with you here. Loud noises bug me. I’ll do my part I volunteered for work on the 4th. Otherwise I’d go up in the mountains, I don’t want anyone to sacrifice anything for me but to be completely honest explosions remind me of things I want to forget. Sorry if my honesty makes me sound weak.
NTC doesn’t count as combat time former11b
Personally, I love fireworks. What freaks me out are the illegal ones, like M80 and those roman candle tubes that launch M80s and things. This is especially true when they are launched at 0500 and someone screams incoming at the same time.
Yes, I have an asshole neighbor who is in a property dispute with his neighbor who is a disabled vet.
I’ll agree that you don’t have to walk on eggshells around me. The 4th of July (or the month before/after) don’t really bother me either because I expect the loud noise. It get’s me the worst when I’m not expecting it…such as when I’m in the theater on a cruise ship watching a broadway-style show and they decide to use pyrotechnics with loud bangs. However, after the initial jump and adrenaline rush that leaves me slightly shaken, I return to normal. I deal with it. Most people deal with it like you said.