The Cold Turkey Chronicles

Friday, March 2, 12:20 a.m.
Cold turkey since 8 a.m. yesterday. Hour 16.

I know what this feels like. For months on end, this is what it felt like virtually all day, every day, in 1994-95. It had been creeping up on me, becoming a more frequent visitor, ever since Iraq.

Back then it was a feeling of certain doom, and an agitation that made me clench every muscle, sometimes thrash in helplessness, sometimes bite into the back of my fingers as hard as I could, just to distract from the physical feeling of tension like the feeling of onrushing destruction.

This is what's called "dysphoria." It's a major effect of opiate withdrawals. It's the monkey on the back of the addict. I've felt it before but I've always retreated from it because it's awful.

This isn't quite as bad as the last time, when I was coming off 60mg of morphine each eight hours and 40mg of percocet each four. That was nasty. That was unbearable.

Well, this isn't what I'd have called bearable. It's just that I know what it is. I'm so well acquainted with it now, it no longer frightens me. That feeling of doom doesn't mean anything. It's just a feeling.

It hurts. There's no difference between emotional and physical pain; that's been proven. They affect the same nerves, they manifest in the same way. It's just that certain pain is associated with emotions. That's a good thing; a properly functioning body is supposed to manifest neural perceptions that way. It warns us. It cautions us. It chastens us.

Then there are things that take the nervous system and turn it upside down, disconnecting it from reality, artificially punishing or artificially rewarding. It's not a good thing. It's not the way it's supposed to be.

The first thing that did that for me was the nerve agent "blocking" pills I took in Saudi Arabia and Iraq for a month and a half. I trusted the leaders who told me to take it. It was experimental poison and even in theory it was a crazy treatment. The pills were nerve agent. In an average healthy body they were supposed to block a third of the neural synapses. Supposedly this would block the "real" nerve agent from working its way between the synapses. The pill poison was supposed to cause less damage, to work its way out of the system faster.

Whatta buncha crap.

The second thing was the actual nerve agent, cycloserin. On March 2, 1991, we were sitting in the sun in Iraq, resting up after an exhausting four days of dash and smash. The Republican Guards had fled, bloodied, abandoning miles of bunkers filled with chemical weapons. The brass in Riyadh sent down orders for the engineers of the 18th Airborne Corps to blow it all up.

I lay on a cot next to my still mostly loaded ammunition truck and watched the small, gray mushroom clouds billow up as engineers set off demo charges all around us. The explosions were sharp and loud, smacking the ears and shaking the ground, but not with a rumble. With a single, hard wham. And unbeknownst to every fighting man watching, enjoying the show of Saddam's war machinery going up in smoke, that smoke was laced with nerve agent, and pretty soon we were all breathing it.

To be continued. I feel like crap, and I gotta pop some Ambien and ride this out for a while.