Good Bye - Carl Prine: Line of Departure Blog

A possible glimpse into the future which awaits far too many Iraq/Afghanistan vets . . . a damn shame . . . -Lunar Spook

For the past 17 days, I’ve been incarcerated inside a headache.

From the moment my lids flutter open until the last languished nod of my eyes into slumber all I know is the strum of pain.

I’m dizzy. I lurch. I’ve learned that the seventh step down from the bedroom is something of an enemy of mine.

My up and down eye movements are all wrong. The initial round of testing more than a week after the two accidents found that eight men pulled off the street have a firmer grasp on verbal and symbolic recollection and reasoning than I have. Obviously, for a soul who makes his adult living with words and analysis I’ve reached an existential moment.

For much of my days, I’m holed up in a cool, dark room surrounded, ironically enough, by many thousands of my books, all of them glaring at me much as I do the Carl I vaguely remember, a hazy figure in the distance of weeks who always was quick with a phrase he turned as if on a lathe.

I’m no longer that man. I’m a diminished, pathetic and stupid creature who now looks forward only to the reassuring clucks of doctors in an antiseptic room overlooking a river, a man who pointlessly rubs at his skull to get to the headache that might never leave.

This is what happens when a brain that got bludgeoned by overblast in Iraq suffers two quite different, really maudlin, spills in Pennsylvania. It’s also why at 1139 on Saturday I begged Ward Carroll to do the right thing for my readers and fire me.

This morning he did. This week shall be my last at Line of Departure, a swell site I inherited from Jamie McIntyre and grew into a curmudgeonly – and very successful — oasis of sanity in the milblogosphere.


Read more HERE

This is a hard read . . . a harder suck for the guy going through this personal Hell of course . . . War is Hell, and only the Dead have seen the End of War . . . -S.L.