I wasn't quite sure what to expect as I sat down in the brown vinyl booth at the Village Inn that Tuesday afternoon. I'd never talked in any depth with someone suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). But as Sgt. Dale Cage began talking, I realized just how much I didn't know — and how difficult it was going to be for me to learn.
Cage is stocky, 44 years old, with a short moustache and receding gray-blonde hair. A sergeant in the Army Reserves, Cage was a member of the 196th Transportation Company, a group out of Orlando made up mostly of truck drivers, cargo handlers and police officers. During the year the 196th was in Iraq, they spent most of their time driving supplies to troops on the front lines, often through hostile territory.
Dale Cage saw two things as he crossed the Kuwaiti border into Iraq in April 2003: sand and cars. Lining the road on either side were blown-out automobiles, remnants of earlier wars half buried in the desert. "It was like a graveyard," he says.
These were the earliest days of the war, and Cage remembers them vividly. He can describe the grit of the sand between his teeth as he chewed his dehydrated meals, the makeshift turrets his men fashioned for their trucks, and the worn-out smell of his Vietnam era flak jacket. But get him talking about the rest of his time in Iraq, and Dale Cage will have trouble recalling much of anything.
"I remember the first few months," he said to me early on in our conversation at the Village Inn. "And I remember the last few. But the time in the middle is a blur."
Yet not everything during that time has been lost.
Cage remembers having to outfit his trucks with scrap metal — a widespread equipment problem that has only recently made headlines. Cage had to deal with the shortage throughout his tour, and says the latest uproar has come too late. But as he talked about his trucks, Cage veered off topic just for a moment and slipped into one of his countless nights in Iraq.
"Some nights it seemed like you were at Disney World," he told me. "Other nights it was like being at Fourth of July with incoming — shit dropping on top of you. There were several nights I remember when we were sleeping on the top of the trucks and all hell broke loose in the compound we were sleeping in. Everybody was rolling off the back of the trucks, off the top of the trucks, hitting the ground because in-coming rounds were coming at us."
Even if it was just for a second, Sgt. Cage was back on the battlefield. His eyes started to blink a little faster, his words — usually well thought-out and slowly spoken — started to spew from his mouth. But then he paused, took a sip of his coffee.
"It was weird. It really was," he said. It was as close as we would come to the horrors of war.
As the conversation moved out of Iraq and into its second hour, Sgt. Cage described his struggle since getting home. He had a choice when he got back to Ft. Stewart, Ga.: stay there for treatment for his injuries (he says he came home with a bad back, knee trouble and rapid tooth decay) or head to Tampa and contact the VA. "Most people wanted to get the hell away from the military," Cage says. That's what he wanted, too.
The anxiety attacks first hit when Cage was in England for his cousin's wedding a few weeks later. "You'd be sitting there — I'd be sitting there — and all of sudden tense up for no reason," he says. "I could feel it coming on. Then all of a sudden the tears would start coming out."
I should've pressed — should've asked him what makes him cry.
But I didn't. I was humbled by what he was telling me, and I was engrossed. So I shut up and listened.
"Not knowing when it was going to do it was probably the most nerve-racking thing," he said of the anxiety attacks. "You're used to driving so many miles like I was doing, but now I have problems even driving to the store."
"Is there something specific about driving that triggers those memories?" I asked, interjecting a difficult question for the first time all afternoon.
"I have no idea," he said, snapping a sugar packet against his mug before pouring it in his third cup of the afternoon. I walked out of the Village Inn sure I'd gotten exactly what I had come looking for. If nothing in my notebook proved it immediately, my conversation with Sgt. Cage had at least sufficiently shaken me up, which I think is part of what I was hoping for. I'd spent enough time talking to counselors at VA hospitals and Vet Centers before I met Cage that I had a pretty good handle on the clinical definition of PTSD. But this was the first time I'd seen it face to face — "straight from the horse's mouth," as Cage had said — and it was raw. The man was suffering.Yet in the days following our conversation, as I pored endlessly over the tape I'd made, I couldn't find the specific words that had affected me so much. I listened to the recording, all two and half hours of it, over and over again — in the car, at work, even just before I fell asleep — hoping that somehow that one quote would magically appear. It had to be there — he must have explained to me at some point exactly what it was like to go to war, to fight, and to come home.
But I couldn't find it.
Even when I had pushed, or when he had stumbled into a particularly intense topic — the survival mentality a soldier must adopt, for example — Cage wouldn't go too deep. Instead he'd use an analogy. "I don't know how to make it make sense," he would say. "It's kind of like a playoff game or a Super Bowl game or something like that. You're playing football; you're on a team. You know how those guys play even when they're hurt, broken arm or something like that? Because, no matter what's wrong with you, you wanna win the game, so to say."
And often, in the second half of our conversation when he was talking about his battle with PTSD, Cage would distance himself from what he was going through. He could easily describe his anxiety attacks, the heaving chest, the paranoia, the unbearable feeling that he didn't know when they would strike. But when I'd ask him what caused these reactions, Cage would switch pronouns. It was no longer 'I', but 'you.'
And so, more than a week after we first spoke, I called Dale Cage and asked if he'd sit down with me again. I was determined not to leave any questions on the table.
And one thing he'd said at The Village Inn, as we were walking to the door after I'd turned off the recorder, had been rattling around in my head since he'd said it. "It feels like yesterday," he'd told me. "But yesterday, a whole year went by."
Dale Cage lives in a cream-colored ranch house in North Tampa. On the afternoon I went to see him, his garage door was open, revealing the unsold clutter of a recent yard sale. His red SUV, with its U.S. Reserve license plate and terrorist hunting permit on the back, sat in the driveway. Inside, Sgt. Cage was watching the news. The soldier that questioned Donald Rumsfeld last week was on the screen. I waited until later to ask him if he'd seen it live — there were other questions to ask first.
We spent the first 10 minutes of the conversation talking more about his anxiety attacks. He went through the same descriptions he had before, but this time he was able to tell me a bit more about what brought them on.
Part of it was driving, he had decided. When he was in Iraq, he had soldiers looking out every window, watching his back. But now, driving around the neighborhood or down to Orlando for meetings with his company, he was alone in the car. He was usually OK if there were other cars on the road, he said, but if traffic was light he'd have to stop three or four times because the paranoia would take over and his breathing would get heavy.
I asked him if he'd had any anxiety attacks in Iraq. "No," he said. "They only started when I got back."
"Why do you think that is?"
"I don't know, to tell you the truth," he said. "I wish I did know — maybe it would ease things or make things better." He paused. "No idea."
From there we started to talk about what it had been like to come home. Cage summed it up quickly: "it was like hitting a brick wall," he said. But as he continued to talk, a fuller picture emerged. He had hoped Tampa would stay the same, that his friends would stay the same. But they hadn't.
I wanted him to tell me what all the counselors had — that when he got back it wasn't the people who had changed, it was he. I wanted him to describe what it was like not to be able to talk to your friends about what you'd just done. But he didn't. All he could say was, "Life keeps going on whether you're there or not. And that's pretty scary."
He paused again. "It really is."
The word scary came up often. Late in the conversation, when I asked Sgt. Cage to tell me exactly how it felt coming home with PTSD, he said this: "It's a scary feeling. It's hard to explain. I guess if you ever knew anybody who's done drugs, or anything that made them real paranoid, that's as close as I can put it. It gives you a real paranoid sense that every little thing around you, when you're by yourself, any noise or anything like that — it intensifies five times."
He went on. "It's just a real uneasy feeling. Like with a cat, you can tell when he's at ease when his tail's up, and when he's not his tail stays down. It's kind of the same way with people who have the same problem I do — there's never an easy feeling. There's never a total relaxation."
It was the best description he could give me. "I hope you can understand," he said. "It's really hard to explain."
Before I left, I had one more question. What had he meant when he said that "yesterday a whole year had gone by?"
"It's like one of those déja vu things," he answered. "You knew you'd been there before, but here I am sitting back in my chair again. It's like a disconnected feeling, you're seeing soldiers and brothers you still have there, but you're sitting back here now. It's like the movie Groundhog Day, you're watching it all on TV again."
And with that, I flipped off the recorder and got up to leave.As he walked me to my car, Sgt. Cage and I talked briefly about our conversations. I told him I'd come back to ask the questions I'd been too scared to ask the first time, and he said he hoped he'd answered them well. "Like I said," he told me, "it's hard to explain."
And then, just before I opened the car door, Dale Cage thanked me. This was a guy who had given up four hours of his time to talk about the pain he was in, and he was thanking me.
"For what?" I asked.
"It's nice just to talk for a while," he said. "It's nice just to have someone pick your brain."
I think that both of us knew I hadn't come close to picking it clean. There is a lot up there that even Sgt. Cage can't reach. But that's what makes war war, and it's what makes PTSD PTSD. Unless you were there — unless you went to some distant country, fought and came home — you simply can't understand what it's like to do any of it.
And Sgt. Dale Cage explained that perfectly.
This article appears in Dec 15-21, 2004.