I’ve been back in the United States for exactly forty-eight hours, and the hardest part of readjustment isn’t what most people think. It’s not the silence, though the absence of constant radio chatter and diesel engines does create an eerie void. It’s not the softness of a real mattress after years of cots and sleeping bags, though my back appreciates the upgrade.
It’s not even the overwhelming abundance of choices in a grocery store after months of MREs, though I did stand paralyzed in the cereal aisle yesterday for a solid ten minutes. No, the hardest part is the noise. The chaotic, meaningless, utterly civilian noise of suburban America—car horns honking for no tactical reason, teenagers shrieking about nothing, the general chaos of people who have never had to worry about whether the pile of trash on the roadside might explode.
The sheer volume of insignificant sound in a world where nothing is actually threatening creates a dissonance in my brain that I’m still learning to process. Right now, I’m sitting in my beat-up Ford F-150 in the pick-up line of Crestview High School at three o’clock on a Friday afternoon, and the sensory overload is testing every coping mechanism the Army therapist tried to teach me during out-processing. The truck is a 2008 model with rust eating through the wheel wells and a passenger door that sticks in humid weather, but it’s mine—the only possession I kept from my pre-deployment life.
It drinks gas like a dehydrated soldier drinks water, rattles when it idles, and the air conditioning works only when it feels like cooperating, but it’s safe. It’s familiar. It’s a piece of home that I can control.
I know I look out of place here among the parade of luxury SUVs and pristine minivans piloted by stay-at-home moms in yoga pants and designer sunglasses. I’m a twenty-six-year-old man with a jagged scar cutting through my left eyebrow—courtesy of shrapnel from an IED that was a foot closer to ending my life than I like to think about—eyes that constantly scan for threats that don’t exist here, and hands that grip the steering wheel at ten and two like I’m expecting an ambush on Main Street. My head is shaved close, military regulation even though I’m technically a civilian now, and I’m wearing a faded Army t-shirt that’s seen better days.
