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I was sitting up in bed. I'm spitting out orders.

Damien Holmes, US Army, US Marine Corps 1993 - 2005, talks about how he knew he had PTSD.

Transcript

The first night I came home from my two weeks leave

and I was kind of against it but I love my wife so much,

I wanted to come home and be with her for a couple weeks.

That first night I came home, I woke up probably like two,

three o'clock in the morning, she was gone.

She wasn't there.

Well we're staying at her parent's house.

She was in the TV room.

And I go in there, I said, "What are you doing?

Come back to bed."

So I just laid down with her right there

on the big love sack and went to sleep.

What happened was, I guess,

while I was in my sleep we were cuddling and I had my arm

around her neck and I started squeezing tighter

and tighter and tighter.

I don't know what I was dreaming about but what she told me,

it was like, wow, I just shrugged it off

like I had a bad dream.

That didn't stop there.

When I got back home off of deployment, I got back home,

it was fine for probably like a month, two months,

but then it really started getting worse

to where I was sitting up in bed, I'm spitting out orders

like I'm in the middle of, in gunfire, just spitting

out orders, tearing off all my clothes, low crawling

down the hallway and sleepwalking.

Things I'd never done, never done before.

Making trips to the refrigerator, eating, drinking,

going to the toilet when I didn't need to,

talking through my sleep, waking up and noticing

that I have all the covers and the pillows

and she's sleeping with nothing.

Some of those things, it happened almost

on a nightly basis, almost on a nightly basis

for probably a good four months, five months.

And now it's like, I don't know, once in a blue moon.

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