Standby for Broadcast

Five years ago, when I returned from a deployment to Bastion Hospital, a British trauma unit just west of "The Most Dangerous Place in the World," I thought I could resume a normal life. But neither the Navy nor my nursing experience could have prepared me for the devastating injuries that had poured in from the Sangin Valley between 2010 and 2011. Then, one night, after rescuing the family dog from a painful, but otherwise insignificant, household accident, I ransacked the bedroom and screamed at the top of my lungs--forcing an unsettling question from my spouse: What's happening to you?

At the urging of a trusted colleague, I was transferred from my station as a hospital director to a locked psychiatric facility called The Willows with other convalescing service members in similar predicaments. There, I meet Riza, a no-nonsense social worker bent on demystifying man-made trauma, both at home and abroad. To pass the program, each patient must compose a combat timeline to be read aloud in The War Room: A place that means more than stories being told...the place where the strongest people in the world share their battles within themselves.

With fear and triggers mounting, I must be dying, I think, as Riza begs us to cut through our traumas to live. More sea story than PTSD clinical narrative, Standby follows the--sometimes humorous--cockeyed drama of my recovery at The Willows, and later at home, alerting everyone to the slow and not-so-obvious fallouts of war.