Yochi Dreazen War Correspondents Battle With PTSD

The path not taken: A war correspondent’s struggle with PTSD
Boston Globe
By Yochi Dreazen
OCTOBER 02, 2015

I had full-blown PTSD, but I couldn’t bring myself to admit it. I was a war correspondent; I was a tough guy. Tough guys, I believed, didn’t need help.

SCOTT NELSON/GETTY IMAGES

Journalists scrambled behind US Marines practicing squad rushes in northern Kuwait in 2003.

Yochi Dreazen is the managing editor of Foreign Policy. His book “The Invisible Front: Love and Loss in an Era of Endless War,” from which this essay is adapted, will be reissued in paperback on Oct. 6.

I WANTED TO be a war correspondent from the day I entered journalism. In 2003, with American troops massing in the Middle East, I got my chance. I left for Iraq that spring, drawn, like so many of my colleagues, by the excitement and danger of covering a war. I wrote about the invasion, flew back to the United States for a couple of months, and then went back to Baghdad in August to help open The Wall Street Journal’s bureau there. I lived in Iraq in 2003 and 2004 and, after that, went back every few months to do combat embeds with the troops fighting what had by that point become a full-on civil war.

I saw dead and dying Americans; I saw dead and dying Iraqis. I was interviewing a tribal sheikh in southern Iraq once when my translator stepped away to take a phone call, sat back down, and told me that there had just been a major suicide bombing in the nearby city of Karbalah that had killed dozens of Iranian pilgrims, including a large number of children. In Karbalah, I watched a chador-clad woman slowly make her way up and down each row of corpses, pulling back every sheet, until she found the shattered body of her son. At the sight, she let out a scream and then collapsed to the ground. I will never forget the sound of that mother’s grief.

I returned from that trip, and from all of my others to the war zones, far different than when I had left. The war was changing me, hardening me. I felt flashes of pure rage when someone ran into me on the basketball court or cut me off on the road. I chose tables at restaurants that were as far from the front doors and windows as possible, in case a bomb went off outside. I would wake up whenever there was a sound in my bedroom and then be unable to fall back asleep. In some of my dreams, loved ones died. In some, I did. I had full-blown PTSD, but I couldn’t bring myself to admit it. I was a war correspondent; I was a tough guy. Tough guys, I believed, didn’t need help.

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