What Combat PTSD Actually Feels Like
And What Nobody Tells You About Living With It
Not the clinical checklist. Not the VA pamphlet. The actual daily texture of a rewired nervous system, from someone still inside it.
The produce section at Kroger is the most dangerous place in Nashville.
Not objectively.
Objectively it’s fluorescent lights and wet lettuce and a woman comparing avocados like she’s defusing a bomb. But my nervous system doesn’t deal in objectivity. My nervous system is still in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait, and more.
And it has been for years, and no amount of therapy or medication or rational self-talk has fully convinced it that the war is over.
So I’m standing next to the bell peppers and my heart rate is 110 because someone dropped a watermelon three aisles over. The sound was wrong. Not dangerous-wrong. Just wrong enough to trigger the subroutine, the one that was installed in a place where wrong sounds meant someone was about to die, possibly you.
The adrenaline hits before the thought does. That’s the part nobody tells you. By the time your conscious mind says “that was a watermelon, you’re fine,” your body has already flooded with cortisol, your vision has tunneled, your hands have gone cold, and you’ve mapped every exit in the building.
All of it in under two seconds. Faster than thinking. Faster than language.
Then you stand there, next to the bell peppers, breathing like you just sprinted a quarter mile, and you wait for your body to believe what your brain already knows.
Sometimes it takes thirty seconds. Sometimes it takes an hour. Sometimes it takes the rest of the day.
The war ended. Your nervous system didn’t get the memo.
That’s what PTSD actually feels like. Not the flashbacks they show in movies, where the veteran stares into middle distance and the screen goes wavy and suddenly he’s back in the shit.
Those happen, sure. But they’re the dramatic version, the one that makes good cinema.
The daily reality is quieter than that. Uglier. More boring.
It’s a permanent state of low-grade combat readiness that you can’t shut off, running in the background like a program you never installed and can’t uninstall, eating your battery all day every day while you try to pass for normal in a world that has no idea what’s happening inside your skull.
The Hypervigilance.
Let me explain what hypervigilance actually is, because the clinical term doesn’t capture it.
You walk into a restaurant. Before you’ve thought about what you want to eat, before you’ve smiled at the hostess, before any conscious decision has been made, you’ve done the following:
counted the exits
noted which tables have clear sightlines to the door
identified every person in the room and assessed their threat level based on body language and positioning
clocked the kitchen entrance because that’s an uncontrolled access point
chosen a seat with your back to the wall.
You did all of this in the time it took to cross the threshold. You didn’t decide to do it. It happened the way breathing happens. Automatically. Constantly. Without permission.
This is not a skill you can turn off. I know because I’ve tried.
Meditation helps. Therapy helps. But “helps” is not “fixes.” Helps means the volume goes from a nine to a six, and you learn to function at six. You never get back to whatever number normal people operate at. You don’t even remember what that number was.
Every room is a tactical assessment. Every crowd is a threat matrix. Every unexpected sound is a potential contact. Your body doesn’t know you’re in Tennessee or Texas or Conneticut. Your body knows you’re in a place where things can happen, and things have happened before, and the only reason you’re still alive is because this system worked when it needed to.
Try explaining to your body that it doesn’t need to work anymore. Try reasoning with your adrenal glands.
Trigger happy.
People think triggers are dramatic. They think it’s fireworks and car backfires and helicopter sounds. And sure, those can do it. But the real triggers are smaller, stupider, more mundane than anyone who hasn’t lived this would believe.
A specific shade of light. Not all sunlight. A particular quality of it, the flat bright of early afternoon in a place with no trees, the way the light looked over there. That color of light and suddenly your chest is tight and you don’t know why until you do.
Diesel exhaust. The smell of it, specifically at idle, the way a truck smells when it’s sitting still. JP-8 has its own signature and it’s close enough to diesel that every loading dock and every bus stop is a low-grade time machine.
Heat rising off asphalt. The visual shimmer of it. Innocuous to everyone else. Not to you.
A door slamming in a particular way. Not loud, necessarily. Just the specific weight and resonance of a heavy door in a concrete corridor. There’s a door at the post office that sounds exactly like something else, and every time I hear it I’m somewhere else for a half second before I’m back.
A specific kind of silence. Not quiet. Silence. The loaded kind, the kind that in another context meant something was about to happen because the absence of sound was the sound of people holding their breath.
These triggers don’t announce themselves. They don’t come with warning labels.
They’re woven into the ordinary fabric of civilian life, invisible mines in a landscape everyone else walks through without thinking. You step on one and the blast is internal and nobody around you sees it.
You just suddenly look distracted, or irritated, or distant, and the people who love you learn to recognize the change but never fully understand it because how do you explain that the smell of diesel at the gas station just sent you back to a place you can’t talk about.
Sleep is a negotiation. Every night.
The standard-issue version goes like this: you’re tired. Bone tired. The kind of tired that should knock you out in minutes.
But your body won’t let you sleep because sleep is vulnerability and vulnerability is death. That equation was true once, in a specific time and place, and your nervous system has generalized it to all times and all places permanently.
So you lie there.
Your body is exhausted and your brain is running threat assessments on the shadows in the room.
The house settles, makes that sound that houses make, and your eyes open and you’re scanning. Nothing there. You know nothing’s there. You knew nothing was there before you opened your eyes. Your body checked anyway.
When sleep comes, it’s shallow. Combat sleep. The kind where part of you stays on watch. You wake at every sound.
Every shift in the house. The dog moving in the hallway. Your wife turning over. The refrigerator cycling on.
Then the dreams.
I’m not going to describe the dreams. If you know, you know. If you don’t, the description won’t get you there anyway. What I’ll say is this: the dreams aren’t always accurate.
They’re not replays. They’re remixes. Your sleeping brain takes real events and warps them, combines them, gives them new endings that are worse than what actually happened, which is a hell of a trick considering what actually happened. You wake up and you’re not sure which version is real, the one you lived or the one you dreamed, and for a few seconds the distinction doesn’t exist.
Then you get up. You make coffee. You go to work. You do it again.
Here’s the part that doesn’t make it into the pamphlets.
Your wife asks you a simple question and you snap at her because your bandwidth was already maxed out from the hypervigilance and the question landed on an empty tank.
You don’t mean to. You’re not angry at her.
You’re angry at the watermelon in the produce section and the diesel at the gas station and the door at the post office and the fact that you can’t just be a normal person buying groceries without your body acting like it’s about to take indirect fire.
But she doesn’t know that. She just knows you snapped at her. Again.
Your friends stop inviting you to things because you always sit with your back to the wall and you’re always scanning the room and you can’t relax and it makes them uncomfortable.
They don’t say this. They just gradually stop calling. You notice. You understand. You’d stop calling too.
You cancel plans because the thought of being in a crowd, any crowd, fills you with a dread that you can’t justify rationally, and the gap between what you feel and what you can explain is so wide that you just say “something came up” and stay home.
Intimacy becomes complicated. Not just the physical kind. All of it.
Emotional closeness requires vulnerability, and vulnerability requires lowering your guard, and your guard has been welded into the up position. You want to let people in. The architecture won’t allow it.
And the loneliness. The specific loneliness of being surrounded by people who care about you and being unable to reach them because there’s a pane of glass between you and the world that you can see through but can’t break.
You’re right there. You’re a thousand miles away. Both are true simultaneously.
What “Thank You for Your Service” actually sounds like.
It sounds like nothing.
It sounds like a phrase someone memorized because they were told it was the right thing to say.
It’s the civilian equivalent of “thoughts and prayers,” a verbal gesture that costs nothing and means nothing and exists so the person saying it can feel like they did something without having to actually do anything.
I don’t say this with anger. I used to. I’m past the anger on this one. It’s just a fact, the way gravity is a fact.
Civilians don’t know what to say because there’s nothing to say. There’s no phrase in the English language that bridges the gap between “I went to war and it broke something in me that can’t be fully repaired” and “I went to Target and bought new towels.”
Those two experiences exist in different universes, and no five-word pleasantry spans the distance.
What would actually help? Nothing you can do in passing.
What helps is sustained, patient presence. Someone who doesn’t flinch when you tell them the truth. Someone who doesn’t try to fix it, because it can’t be fixed, just witnessed. Someone who understands that you’re going to be weird sometimes, in the produce section and at dinner and at 3 AM, and who stays anyway.
That’s not something you can offer a stranger. So “thank you for your service” fills the gap, and both parties agree to pretend it was enough, and everyone moves on.
The VA and the System.
I’ll keep this short because the rage could fuel a separate essay.
The system designed to help veterans is also designed to make helping veterans as difficult as possible.
This is not a conspiracy. It’s bureaucratic reasoning. It’s what happens when an institution grows so large and so calcified that self-preservation becomes its primary function and the humans it was built to serve become obstacles to efficient processing.
You file a claim.
You prove your injuries.
You provide documentation.
You wait months.
You get denied.
You appeal.
You provide more documentation.
You wait more months.
The implicit message, never stated but always present, is: maybe if we make this hard enough, they’ll give up.
Many do.
The ones who give up sometimes end up in the statistic that nobody wants to talk about at the Fourth of July barbecue. Twenty-two a day was the old number. The newer data suggests it might be higher. Each one is a person who decided that navigating the system was harder than not being alive.
I’m not one of those. I want that on the record. But I understand the arithmetic.
When every day is a fight with your own nervous system and the system that’s supposed to help you is just another fight, the math gets dark.
What PTSD teaches you.
I didn’t plan to write a section with this title. It feels dangerously close to toxic positivity, and I’d rather eat glass than turn combat trauma into a “growth opportunity.”
But honesty demands it, because this is true too.
PTSD teaches you that you are not your thoughts. You learn this fast, because your thoughts are frequently lying to you.
They’re telling you the restaurant is dangerous and the parking lot is a kill zone and the shadow in the hallway is a threat.
If you believed every thought your brain generated, you’d never leave the house.
So you learn, through repetition and therapy and sheer stubbornness, to observe your thoughts without obeying them. That’s a skill. It took Buddhism two thousand years to articulate what PTSD teaches you in a month.
It teaches you what matters.
When your nervous system is consuming half your bandwidth just to get through a Tuesday, you stop wasting the remaining half on things that don’t matter. Petty office politics. Social media arguments. Status anxiety. None of that penetrates.
You have a limited supply of functional hours in a day and you learn to spend them on the things and people that actually mean something.
It teaches you that you’re tougher than you thought. Not in the macho sense. In a real sense.
You’ve been fighting a war inside your own body every day for years and you’re still here and you still made coffee this morning and you still went to work and you still kissed your wife goodnight.
That’s not nothing. That’s the hardest kind of endurance, the invisible kind that nobody gives you a medal for.
But you’re still here. Waking up. Making coffee. Learning to live in a body that thinks it’s still at war, suffers the scars of war, in a world that’s already forgotten there was one.
A note for civvies:
If someone you love has PTSD, here’s what I wish someone had told you:
Don’t try to fix it. You can’t. Neither can we.
What you can do is stay. Be patient. Don’t take the bad days personally. Learn their triggers, not so you can avoid them, because you can’t avoid all of them, but so you understand what’s happening when they go quiet or snap or leave the room suddenly.
Don’t ambush them with loud noises or surprise physical contact. Approach from where they can see you. Let them sit where they want to sit. These aren’t quirks. These are adaptations that kept them alive, and they deserve respect even when they seem irrational.
And ask. Not “are you okay,” because they’ll always say yes. Ask specific questions. “Was the store hard today?” “Did you sleep last night?” “What do you need right now?” Give them language for what’s happening inside them, because sometimes they don’t have the words and the silence fills with shame.
That’s the most useful thing I can tell you. More useful than “thank you for your service” by a factor of a thousand.
This piece discusses combat trauma and PTSD. If you’re a veteran in crisis, the Veterans Crisis Line is available at 988 (press 1). If you’re struggling, reaching out isn’t weakness. It’s an operation, and you’ve run harder ones.