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Post-Army Stress

LegacyUser · 2011-10-15 13:04:42

I would prefer to keep the specifics of my issue anonymous in case I make myself identifiable. After my leaving cert I decided to sign up for the army. During my time there, I was bullied a lot and the conditions were not good at all. I ended up in hospital basically from being run down with stress and lack of food. My…

15-10-2011 1:04pm

#1

LegacyUser

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I would prefer to keep the specifics of my issue anonymous in case I make myself identifiable.

After my leaving cert I decided to sign up for the army. During my time there, I was bullied a lot and the conditions were not good at all. I ended up in hospital basically from being run down with stress and lack of food. My commander had been acting very suggestive towards me since I first arrived and out of loneliness of being away from home, I ended up losing my virginity to him. He turned out to be an extremely selfish person and addicted to drugs, and on days off he was only interested in staying in bed and having sex in his disgustingly dirty apartment.

I grew to love him anyway, because we had sex very early in the time and I didn’t want to be someone who had sex outside of a ‘proper’ long term relationship, and felt that maybe this was a way of fixing my mistake by making it somewhat decent. He ended up being in a bad situation where he was forced to shoot dead a guy who had managed to breach the boundaries of the base, and it really messed him up mentally. He would go missing for weeks at a time, then turn up barely taking. One night he couldn’t be reached at his apartment and his superiors were worried that he had killed himself, so called the police who found him asleep with his phone off with drug paraphernalia. There were no actual drugs there at the time, so he was simply demoted and moved elsewhere. He tried to keep up contact, but we were just too broken to keep it up anymore.

I didn't realise how corrupt and basically fúcked up things were there until I went, and when I tried to speak to people there about it, reactions ranged from completely ignoring me to screaming at me. For the first few weeks the other soldiers would laugh at my group because whenever he heard a bang we would be startled, and they made a habit of running into our barracks during the night, screaming in our faces and dragging us out of bed to line us up and berate us, make us run around the base and finally letting us go back to bed. The men would also make suggestive remarks at us and ask disgusting intimate questions while we were working.

When I came home, I completely closed off from everyone and would burst into tears over what seemed like very trivial things. I had pictures of my time there, but I just had to delete them all. I simply couldn't take looking at them and it reminding me. I'm in college now, and am finding life back home extremely difficult. I don't feel as if I can relate to other people my age (early 20s) any more. I don't know what to do. Whenever I'm given an assignment for college (English) I just want to write about it and fit it in somehow, tell someone, because I can't tell family and friends about it. I feel like it's driving me crazy.

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