The Bombs Bursting in Air

It’s that time of year again. Our streets, houses and TV screens will be decked out in stars and stripes. Everyone who even looks like they MIGHT be a Veteran will be thanked for their service. And every inch of our country will be within ear-shot of fireworks.

There is an irony in that. People will go out of their way to thank us for risking our lives to protect their independence, and a few hours later, they will do the one thing most likely to trigger the PTSD we got doing the thing they thanked us for.

In 2012, I’d taken my boys to see The Avengers on the afternoon of July 4th. My then-fiance had stayed home. I got a text, a few minutes into the movie. I normally don’t answer in a theater, but I’d forgotten to turn off my ringer. It was Kelli, telling me that the neighbors were shooting fireworks, and one had hit my dog. I grabbed the boys and we left.

I’m not sure where it happened between the movie theater, and my apartment, but in my head St. Louis suddenly became Ramadi. Churches became bombed out mosques. My Nissan Sentra became an armored Humvee, and neighbors I’d had a beer with 24 hours earlier, were now Iraqi insurgents. 

I got the kids into the house, and started to panic, because I couldn’t find my weapon. Finally, I gave up, grabbed a knife in one hand and a baseball bat in the other, and started to go outside.

Kelli had been yelling my name the whole time, but I couldn’t hear or see her. 

Finally, in an authoritative voice, she shouted “SERGEANT ROGERS, SIT YOUR ASS DOWN!”

I sat.

She handed me a cigarette, and lit it. She played a long with my delusion until I realized where I was and whom I was talking to.

We got the kids back to their mother’s house, and drove around listening to Metallica and Pearl Jam and Green Day, loudly enough to drown out the fireworks until about 4:00am. 

When I went back to work a few days later, I asked my supervisor (also a veteran) if fireworks bothered him. He confessed to me that he spent nearly 2 days in his truck, crying. 

In the years since, I’ve spoken to dozens, maybe hundreds of veterans who are triggered into various types of PTSD episode, by fireworks. Over and over, I’ve heard the same refrain I sing: “I love my country. I used to love fireworks, but the 4th of July is the worst day of the year for me.”

And it’s no wonder. After all, what are fireworks, if not a simulation of the bombs bursting in air? It’s one thing to sing about it, or to see harmless simulations of it. It’s different when you’ve seen the real thing. When you’ve been hurt by the real thing. When your friends were killed by the real thing. 

These memories never leave us. They haunt our dreams, and often our waking hours too. When we seem unbothered, or stable, it means we’ve found a way to live with it, or avoid the thoughts. 

But in the first week of July, every year, it is right back in our faces, and there is nowhere we can escape it. The most patriotic time of the year is the most painful time for some of the most patriotic Americans. 

So this year, my request to you is just don’t. Don’t buy or use fireworks. Go to a municipal display if you want, but don’t add to the problem. War is an awful thing. Please don’t make us relive it anymore than we have to.