When I got home I couldn’t sleep. I knew I was full of adrenaline. I was also full of doubt. I anguished over why I hadn’t been able to make a simple decision like the deputy had. Why had I frozen? Was I incompetent? When I talked to the deputy he said, “You’ll get used to it.” At least he didn’t call me kid, I was older than him. When I told the story of the accident later I would refer to it as , “The Night of the Three Legged Race”. Gotta be tough. Gotta be strong. Gotta be fearless. That’s when I became aware of the wall that I was building. Slowly but surely, brick by brick, I was walling myself off from the outside world. The wall was my defense and my prison because inside that wall was what I didn’t want anyone to see-my fear. As the wall got higher we got used to living together. Sometimes he stalked me, sometimes I stalked him but eventually we got comfortable with each other. Behind that wall I could examine my fears and shed my tears. I once read that “Fear is caused by what you know about yourself inside.” Man, was that ever true.
As time passed and the wall got higher and I got comfortable with my fears I found I could talk about them with those I trusted, a little at first to test the waters. Once that bond was established I could talk about some, but not all them and that helped. I found that my fellow officers had the same feelings that I had and that I wasn’t alone. If I reached out someone would be there but I had to pick carefully because some still chose to hide behind their wall.
But it wasn’t just with other cops. I had been lucky I had a smart wife and she made sure there was always a door through that wall for her. I was lucky that she spent her days working with Emotionally/Behaviorally Disturbed children because sometimes she had to deal with an Emotionally Behaviorally Disturbed husband.
Even with this breakthrough there were still problems. I didn’t understand a lot of what was going on inside me. So all I could do was react and deal with it the best I could. I knew that after a stressful incident I needed to exercise. What I didn’t know is the chemicals in my body would make me depressed and not want to exercise. So the stress would only build until the chemicals burned off. I remember one day driving down the road off duty and having to pull to the side of the road quickly so I could puke. The fruit salad I had just eaten made a lovely and brightly colored arch as I projectile vomited onto the sidewalk. Good times.
Another time I had responded to a barricaded subject with a gun as part of the SRT team. The suspect was holed up in a two story playhouse. We took up a position within 30 yards in a dense swamp. Each time he would come out of the house and into view I would put the scope crosshairs on his head. This went on for several hours. He didn’t know it but I was getting to know him very well through that scope. I got so I could predict which way he would move, when he would turn and go back into the house. I would read the expression on his face and I was close enough to hear him when he talked to himself. At the same time if he threatened me or my fellow officers I was going to kill him.
He finally surrendered “without incident”. I was jacked up on adrenaline but once again I didn’t know about the crash to come. My wife and I went and visited friends. I sat in a chair barely speaking as I ran the call through my head over and over again. I was worried. I was scared. My wife finally came over and told me we were leaving. On the way home she told me, in not very gentle terms, that I had been rude and impolite. I called back later and apologized to my friends for my behavior. He was a former cop so he understood.
The fear in my mind this time was that I had lost it, gone round the bend, I was psycho. I had spent several hours with the crosshairs on that guys head, ready to shoot him and I hadn’t had a moment of doubt or reservation. That scared me. There was something wrong with me. I called my instructor from SWAT school and I told him what had happened. He told me that I had reached a place in my training and confidence level that allowed me to block out those thoughts and focus on the mission. He said that is where I wanted be, where I needed to be to do that job. So I wasn’t crazy, just ready.