Rambo and Me got PTSD

I was making fun of him, a fellow Marine I had fought with in Fallujah. I called him a “pussy”. I told the younger Marines to disregard him, my brother. When he left I became the only Marine in third platoon who had served in Fallujah with 3rd, “the dirty third”, or the “third herd”. I knew I could take it, if everyone was gone than I had become god, the only untouched. No Marine could tell me what to do regardless of rank because I had been there; Fallujah Iraq, biggest battle of the war, survived, and came back for seconds. My mind slipped in seconds after we landed in Afghanistan, I had made a MISTAKE, I should have declared myself for mental illness but the illness makes you want to die, to stand on the line, maybe kill the wrong person to show them what they had done. And if this reads like too much to handle, it is. The smart Marines raise their hands and tap out before more permanent damage is done. He was a good man, he was my brother and I cursed him when I should have hugged him.
I was ready for Afghanistan, ready to thrive in my old madness to give it another go and hope for the worst, corpses littering the street and the sun blacked out in the thick smoke we made like Vikings, when the bad guys know we mean business. I went and Rambo stayed and my paranoia ate at my brain…I had been too lucky to live through Fallujah, better men than me had died before me and I was not going to see my twenty first birthday. After I survived Afghanistan I went to war with my mind. My last year in the Marine Corps is a drunken haze of anger and confusion, and then I went home. There was no purpose at home even though I was productive. My discharge was honorable but I felt like a bad person and I waited to be recalled by the Marines. At some point I decided to join the National Guard, not because of patriotism or because I didn’t have a job, but because I was scared of getting recalled by the Marines and I had read that a local Guard unit was deploying back to Iraq. After I joined the National Guard in December 2007, the stress of the impending Iraq deployment sent me back to 19 when I had swore to myself that I would not go back to Iraq, that I had survived, that I would survive, my most recent memory of hope.
Somewhere back there was Rambo, early in the battle of Fallujah, casings falling from his automatic machine gun, he loaded another belt, he killed bad guys, helped me survive. He was never a pussy and I might have said such harsh words in his moments of glory and would have wished I didn’t like I do today. My brother a hug for you. Later on we caught a virus, it made us hate us and life. Happiness is a glass house when you have seen the world for what it is. I go up for a medical discharge on Monday and for the first time I get to tell a story that has been bothering me for too many years.