American Sniper - Boekje Pienter

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Things seemed to go downhill in the few days after we got back
from our border patrol. I couldn’t sleep. I felt very jumpy. Extremely
jumpy. And my blood pressure shot up again, even higher than before.
I felt like I was going to explode.
Physically, I was beat up. Four long combat deployments had
taken their toll. My knees felt better, but my back hurt, my ankle hurt,
my hearing was screwed up. My ears rang. My neck had been injured,
my ribs cracked. My fingers and knuckles had been broken. I had
floaters and decreased vision in my right eye. There were dozens of
deep bruises and an assortment of aches and pains. I was a doctor’s
wet dream.
But the thing that really bothered me was my blood pressure. I
sweated buckets and my hands would even shake. My face, pretty
white to begin with, became pale.
The more I tried to relax, the worse things got. It was as if my body
had started to vibrate, and thinking about it only made it buzz more.
Imagine climbing a tall ladder out over a river, a thousand miles
up, and there you’re struck by lightning. Your body becomes electric,
but you’re still alive. In fact, you’re not only aware of everything that’s
happening, but you know you can deal with it. You know what you
have to do to get down.
So you do. You climb down. But when you’re back on the ground,
the electricity won’t go away. You try to find a way to discharge the
electricity, to ground yourself, but you can’t find the damn lightning
rod to take the electricity away.