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My heart would start racing.

David Carpentier, US Army 1977 - 2009, talks about how he knew he had PTSD.

Transcript

The area where I live, there's,

the community has gradually had some,

some folks from the Muslim community moved in.

I see them sometimes, and I see the women

wearing, there's a couple of women that wear

not the full burqa, but nevertheless,

they wear their traditional dress.

And it just, like, heck, you know?

I would get really nervous, and very vigilant,

and very, really alert, and,

you know, it, I get,

my heart would start racing,

that type of thing.

I'd start looking at their hands and their feet,

primarily because I had learned that

in Afghanistan the bad guys

would sometimes dress in burqas.

But they never changed their shoes,

and they always wore some kind of hiking boot,

and I was able to tell that that was not a woman.

Or their hands were not, you know,

feminine looking, so I started,

I would always start looking for that.

That was one of the things that would trigger.

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