Where the Bullet Stayed

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It wasn’t the first time I shot someone,

but it was the first time it wasn’t the enemy.

The bullet hit my friend’s thigh and exited near the knee.

He lived. He even walked again. But in that moment, I thought I’d destroyed his life.

It happened fast – too fast for thought, too slow for forgetting.

The order. The movement. The shot.

Then everything slowed down, like a film that forgot how to end.

Dust in the air. His body collapsing.

The scream that wasn’t his, it was mine.

I ran to him.

There was blood everywhere, soaking through the torn fabric of his pants. His face was pale,

eyes open, whispering that it was okay, that I should calm down.

But all I saw was red,  his leg, my hands, the ground.

All the way to the hospital I prayed it was a mistake that could be undone.

That the bullet hadn’t shattered bone, hadn’t taken from him what can’t be given back.

And when we got there, when they said he’d be fine, I thought maybe I’d wake up.

But I didn’t.

Later that day, standing in front of my commander, I said the words that changed everything:

“It was me. I fired the shot.”

He looked at me, nodded once, wrote something down, and walked away.

No psychologist.

No debrief.

No one asked how I was sleeping, or whether I was sleeping at all.

The system doesn’t like gray areas.

It needs villains and victims, right and wrong.

I was neither.

So they made me invisible.

A few weeks later I was quietly removed from the team.

No one said it was because of the shooting, but everyone knew.

I waited for someone to talk to me.

To ask what it does to a nineteen-year-old to shoot his friend.

No one did.

In the army, therapy is reserved for the broken.

If you can stand, you’re fine.

If you can hold a gun, you’re functional.

If you say you’re okay, they believe you, because it’s easier.

So the body did what the system refused to do: it remembered.

It held the tremor in my hands, the sound of the shot, the smell of blood and dust.

Years later, when panic attacks started, I didn’t understand why.

But my body did.

Psychiatry likes to say trauma lives in the brain.

Maybe that’s true. But mine lived in the muscle that pulled the trigger.

When I finally reached a real therapist, years too late, he didn’t ask what diagnosis I had.

He asked where the pain was stored.

And when I told him it was in my arm, he said, “Then that’s where we’ll begin.”

The body remembers what institutions prefer to forget.

And until we build systems that listen, to the flesh, to the guilt, to the trembling that has no diagnostic code – we’ll keep mistaking survival for recovery.

Because sometimes, what breaks you isn’t the bullet.

It’s where it stayed.

soldier

 

They told me I’d heal.

They didn’t say from what, or when, or how. Just heal.

As if the word itself were a destination.

But healing isn’t a place you arrive at.

It’s a border you keep crossing,  forward, backward, sideways,  depending on the weather inside your chest.

After the war, after the addiction, after the therapy, people said things like:

“You look better.”

“You seem stronger.”

“You’ve healed.”

And maybe I did.

Or maybe I just learned how to hide the limp.

There’s a cruel kind of optimism built into the idea of healing – the promise that if you just try hard enough, take the right pills, say the right words, breathe deeply enough, you’ll become who you were before.

But what if you can’t?

What if healing isn’t about becoming who you were – but about learning to live with who you’ve become?

Because trauma doesn’t leave.

It changes shape.

It moves from the heart to the gut, from the dreams to the jaw.

You wake up one morning thinking it’s gone, and then it shows up in your voice, in your posture, in the way you flinch when someone closes a door too fast.

I used to think healing meant silence,  no flashbacks, no nightmares, no panic.

Now I know silence can also mean suppression.

Real healing is noisy.

It’s the trembling of a body remembering how to feel.

It’s the tears you thought had expired years ago suddenly showing up uninvited.

It’s laughter in the middle of grief, and grief in the middle of love.

There’s a story we like to tell: that time heals all wounds.

It doesn’t.

Time just teaches us to carry them differently.

Sometimes they shrink.

Sometimes they flare up.

Sometimes they turn into art.

When I was finally able to write again, it wasn’t because I was healed.

It was because I had stopped trying to be.

Writing became the space between pain and acceptance, the only place where both could coexist without one needing to kill the other.

Healing, I’ve come to realize, isn’t about erasing the scar.

It’s about touching it without fear.

We don’t move on from our wounds.

We move with them.

And maybe that’s enough.

Maybe the myth isn’t that healing exists.

Maybe the myth is that it ever ends.

***

Mad in America hosts blogs by a diverse group of writers. These posts are designed to serve as a public forum for a discussion—broadly speaking—of psychiatry and its treatments. The opinions expressed are the writers’ own.

36 COMMENTS

  1. I’m troubled by MIA publishing stories of an Israeli soldier who seemingly lacks remorse about the Palestinians they shot or the role they played in genocide/apartheid/colonization/ethnic cleansing/oppression/whatever term you want to use to describe the horrors. Publishing this article is not advancing social justice — quite the opposite.

    Yishay, you’re a beautiful writer. I read one of your previous pieces and loved what you had to say about therapy. Your trauma is real. And yet… Referring to your Palestinian victims merely as “the enemy” is cold. What you did to Palestinians during your military service was wrong and you absolutely have an obligation to reflect on that and acknowledge it and speak out about it. Most of the world does not want to hear stories of the trauma of Israeli soldiers right now when the scale of suffering has been so much greater on the other side. It seems you want to make your writing very personal rather than political, but that is not an option given who you are and what you have done. It’s inherently political. Keep writing, but please, please write about the wrongs committed against Palestinians and perhaps join Breaking the Silence. I have no doubt you have caused much more significant harm to Palestinians than to your friend, and the pain of those people matters too.

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    • The writer can write from and about what ever he or she wants to write about, it doesn’t matter where and what they did…
      Although I disagree with you harshly on the subject.
      Speech should be free.
      Wonderful writing…
      Thank you for publishing this amazing piece.

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      • I’m always confused when people reference free speech in spaces that obviously aren’t public forums. You do understand that the First Amendment doesn’t apply here, right? MIA isn’t the government. Are you saying everywhere should be treated like a public forum? Are you saying MIA should publish everything that’s submitted? Should Nazis and White Supremecists be given a platform here? Should psychiatrists? Of course people can write what they want, but MIA doesn’t have to publish it. They pick and choose based on the theme, the quality of writing, their own preferences, whatever they want. This site is their creation. They’re the publishers. Please explain further what you mean by “speech should be free” in reference to this site.

        Actually, I just realized that MIA’s right to control and choose their content is protected under the First Amendment. What I’m suggesting is that MIA use their constitutionally protected editorial discretion to not publish Israeli propaganda, and I’m suggesting that Yishay use his freedom and platform to speak out. Obviously, neither of them have to listen to me and most likely won’t.

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        • POSTING AS MODERATOR:

          I am holding any further comments on this thread for now. That may change later.

          It seems like this is a much larger discussion than can be held in the comments section. I encourage people who have concerns to address them directly to Bob Whitaker rather than continuing to try and resolve this by making comments back and forth here. I totally understand the issues being raised and simply don’t see there being a productive way to continue this discussion through the commenting format. That’s all I can say for the moment.

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          • I posted a comment on Yishay’s My PTSD is Mine Only, and would like to reiterate some of that comment here.

            As we are a site focused on psychiatry and its impact on society, we have tried to be diligent in not getting involved in politics that divide people . . . whether it be in the U.S., or in this case, the Israeli-Palestinian/Gaza conflict. We have, just for the record, published journal articles related to the horrors suffered by the people in Gaza, and whether their suffering should be seen through the lens of “mental illness.” You can search on this site for Palestinians or Gaza and those articles will be listed. And we would of course readily publish blogs and personal stories from Palestinians that in any way intersected with our overall theme of investigating psychiatry and its conceptions.

            We have published Yishay’s pieces precisely because they speak to the “trauma” that individual soldiers may experience, and with the understanding that it is not individual soldiers who wage wars, but governments and their leaders.

            I am old enough to have had friends who served in Viet Nam, and did so while I was protesting that war (think of Agent Orange as a form of societal genocide), and nearly all of my friends who saw combat came back from that war traumatized in some way. I of course listened to them, and their stories were a formative part of my growing up, as their stories told of decent human beings, good human beings, thrust into an inhuman environment. And finally there is this: I see MIA, and hopefully the comments section, as a place where people can discover their “common humanity.” Although there are some comments that tell of that discovery here, there are others that are seeing our publishing of his writings through that political context, and it is easy to understand why Yishay’s blog has provoked both responeses.

            However, it’s not an issue of freedom of speech. We have no obligation to publish any particular submission. We have published Yishay’s pieces because they do tell of an individual trying to reckon with the horrors of war.

            I am going to close these comments now, as I think the comments already published tell of the dual responses to his piece; the responses to him as an individual and then responses to Israel’s military/political actions over the past two years.

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  2. My dad watches CNN. A while ago, they published a story about an Israeli soldier who was “traumatized” as a result of his experience running Palestinians over with a bulldozer. I was disgusted and sent it to my dad as an example of CNN’s biased reporting. Why, I asked him, are we talking about the trauma of the people committing war crimes instead of the trauma of the victims? You know, the people actually being run over by the bulldozers!

    Now I feel like the biggest hypocrit, because here I am, supporting a site that’s doing the exact same thing. MIA has just lost my financial support over this. But can I even feel good about visiting this site anymore? Maybe I’ll increase my support of a pro-Palestine organization and call it even. I’m so disgusted.

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  3. Gee, I wonder why we don’t have essays by Palestinians in Gaza around the theme of “rethinking psychiatry and the mental health system.” Maybe because there is no mental health system to speak of in Gaza? Maybe because those people are too busy trying to find food and create shelter out of rubble? Maybe if we want to talk about problems with mental healthcare outside of the US, we should start by talking about why some nations, that we support, receive extensive mental healthcare through nationalized health insurance, while others receive very little or no mental healthcare at all, despite suffering unimaginable traumas.

    MIA should seek out pieces from Palestinian writers, even if those pieces simply say, “I think we should rethink the mental health system by actually creating one where I live.” Or maybe they’ll say that they don’t want a Westernized system of care! Really, the entire framing of MIA’s theme is very ethnocentric, if you think about it. It assumes there’s a single mental health system around the world that we can all join together to critique.

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  4. Let me try, from an American perspective:

    I saw a 19 yr old Palestinian civilian get burned alive in a hospital in Gaza on social media, and it really affected me. I don’t want to be political and say the young man didn’t deserve to die. I just want better mental health care to cope with my trauma from watching people be burned alive. It’s been so, so hard for me. That is the real problem here — poor mental healthcare in the US. With better mental healthcare, we would be more equipped to watch children be massacred year after year. I want to be able to watch the killings without being affected emotionally. That’s what it means to be mentally healthy.

    Please, please do something to ease my suffering. I will never get the image out of my head. The pain in my soul is deep. I may never heal. It’s not fair that I should have to live in America as a middle-class white lady and watch other people be burned alive and starved. I am the real victim here, because I have to watch, and the mental health system isn’t sophisticated enough to make me feel good about it.

    *Did I get it right? Frame everything appropriately for MIA?

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  5. I’m not a political person, and this piece was never meant to be political. PTSD is a global issue. In the United States alone, thousands of veterans die by suicide every year, and many more end up homeless. That is the context of my writing, and the reason my work appears in Mad in America.

    There is no connection between this article and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Every conflict has two sides, and I would encourage you to read about what happened on October 7th as part of the wider picture. But this essay was about trauma, guilt, and the long-term impact of a single moment in a young soldier’s life.

    My intention was simply to speak honestly about PTSD, not to make a political statement.

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  6. The comments above remind me of returning Vietnam vets being spat on and harassed when returning home. I know nothing about the author of this piece but I don’t jump immediately to an assumption that he is involved in the current Israeli horrors being committed against the Palestinian peoples in response to a horror committed against them or that he even agrees with them. Spuying simplistic black and white, good/bad rhetoric does little good in a situation where thousands of shades of grey exist.

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    • Although it’s not much talked about , either then or now… remarkably there are no ( none ) documented accounts or reports from the 1970’s of returning Viet Nam vets being spat upon . That is, specifically there are no known newspaper, magazine or Television stories that describe any such claims.

      I was an active anti-war person for years , knew lots of vets and never heard of anything like that . We reviled the U.S. government not the soldiers ! ( Even a dumb kid like me knew that soldiers weren’t responsible for starting wars…)

      Nonetheless , there WERE many ‘ spitting on returning vets ‘ claims ( none substantiated ) that circulated later on, during the 1980’s in the wake of the general public revulsion that had developed against the war in the intervening years since its final conclusion.

      It is THESE later dubious reports of such incidents that have become mistaken for original eye-witness or participant’s accounts . This is kind of understandable since the bogus ‘spitting’ reports tended to portray returning soldiers as semi-heroic, victims of ungratefully crazed ( or at least cruelly unsympathetic ) states-side , anti-war protesters… at a time when many U.S. politicians were getting very tired of ANY post-war critique of the U.S. assault on Viet Nam. Most of them had cheered on the slaughter.

      Actually, I remember returning U.S. vets as the main source of actual good info on what was really happening in VietNam! They were never demonized because everybody ( at least young anti-war people ) knew 19 or 21 year-olds like themselves who HAD been there & lived to tell the tale . Hell… returning vets were the HEART & SOUL of the anti-VietNam movement !
      We were grateful to the returning vets who encouraged us to amplify their resistance . We were fueled by their anger & disgust.

      Anyway, if anyone is STILL interested … during the 1980’s , the ‘spitting myth’ became so widespread a substantial cash reward ( $ 50,000 bucks ) @ the time was raised & offered to anyone who could provide a lead to an actual instance of this occurring ( … not, of course merely to a fervently believed claim that had been passed around for years , gaining assumed credibility solely due to dogged repetition… ) . Not only was the money never claimed, but a notable ( semi-famous in 80’s & 90’s ) book was written about the ‘spitting myth’, the unsuccessful search for even ONE such episode, as well as the unclaimed reward along w/ the historical context & speculative analysis about why such an unfounded myth has persevered. ( please search GOOGLE for the book, … I’m working right now and it’s not a coffee break !! )

      -thanks & suerté, JJ ( electrician in Detroit near Canada )

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  7. Dear Yishay,

    Your writing always brings me to tears, in a good way. Thank you for sharing it. I love how your style is poetic, yet minimalist. You never overexplain, you simply speak the truth.

    This entire piece — but especially the line “or maybe I just learned how to hide the limp” and then what you say about the “cruel optimism” of the “promise” of healing — reminded me of a song I wrote a couple years ago. I would like to share it with you (headphones recommended): https://youtu.be/ZVeOum6c6zs?si=mMHAXN6KSiPWw7IE

    Sincerely,
    Jasmine

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  8. To my fellow commenters:

    I am firmly pro-Palestine. I also resonate deeply with Yishay’s writing and believe he has a right to share his story. These two truths are not mutually exclusive.

    We must remember to be “soft on individuals, hard on institutions.” As Yishay said, we cannot always divide the world neatly into “villains” and “victims.” Maybe in a broad political sense, but not when it comes to individual human beings.

    We also can’t always divide the world into a binary of “privileged” and “oppressed.” What happens when a so-called “privilege” is its own form of oppression? It is my understanding that military service in Israel is compulsory.

    Furthermore, if you’re a non-indigenous American insisting that Yishay’s story shouldn’t get a “platform” on MIA because of who he is, then posting a comment on MIA yourself is hypocritical. Do you publicly “reflect on” your relationship to colonialism & genocide every time you post here?

    Furthermore, how do you know he doesn’t feel remorse or reflect on these things offline? If he shared these reflections publicly, I’m sure he would then be accused of being “performative” or “centering his own feelings” instead.

    Lastly, what would be accomplished by such a “reflection” or by de-platforming Yishay altogether? What’s the goal here? Would it end the genocide? Meaningfully advance Palestinian rights? My guess is no. He’s just one person after all.

    -Jasmine

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    • You may not understand that there’s a war being fought in the media, but Yishay does. He says as much in a YouTube video published two months ago. Yishay says he worries that Israel is losing the war in the media. By publishing in America, he no doubt hopes to gain American sympathy and help maintain American support for Israel. He claims not to be political, but his YouTube videos suggest otherwise.

      Yishay knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s still fighting. I’ll respond to the rest of this later.

      “Wars today are not only fought on the ground. They are fought on Instagram and Tic Tok, and in this arena, we are losing. Israel has invested billions in the most advanced defense systems. We have fearless fighters, but for decades, our governments have neglected the most crucial battlefield: public diplomacy… One thing is clear: we have already lost Europe, and America is next, because we have left the most important battlefield to a few hundred brave private citizens doing hasbara on their own.” -Yishay

      https://youtube.com/shorts/MUTQN1nhpCY?si=1pUlqFakhqlxpCbZ

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  10. “We don’t move on from our wounds.

    We move with them.

    And maybe that’s enough.

    Maybe the myth is that it never ends.”

    So moving and so true, Yishay. Trauma isn’t something we move on from—it’s something we each find ways to integrate, a lifelong process.

    Thank you for sharing yours on MIA.

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  11. Wow! These comments got off the subject quickly!
    The being (not the brain, not the mind) holds on to certain experiences that seem very unresolved. With each experience is a package of stored sensations. They are stored in the mind (not the brain) but usually have a lot to do with the body (since that’s what the mind is built to control). Their power over the body is connected with the being’s decision to not take full responsibility for the experience. This is not a condemnation; this is normal behavior. That this man’s experience is from this lifetime and can be remembered is an advantage for healing. But if it continues to “stick,” there is probably an earlier similar incident, possibly from an earlier life. Hubbard discovered this many years ago. Steve Burgess rediscovered this more recently. Burgess is the only person besides Hubbard that I am aware of that has discovered a way to totally release a traumatic experience. There may be a few others that have their own approaches that have similar results.
    You are not going to see these theories in mainstream psychology. You are also not going to see the results of applying these theories correctly. Somebody out there doesn’t want these results. They should be ashamed of themselves.

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    • Arthur Janov, the originator of Primal Therapy, claimed to have discovered the sole effective way to totally eliminate what he called Primal Pain, i.e. trauma extending back to and even prior to birth. He flatly dismissed all other therapies, whose treatments he regarded as merely “abreactive ” and unable to fully dismantle neurotic defenses.
      Similarly, Wilhelm Reich and psychiatrists inspired by him, such as Alexander Lowen and John Pierakos, firmly believed that their own body-oriented methods–respectively Bioenergetics and Core Energetics–could effectively release vital energy blocked by pent-up trauma.
      So Hubbard and Burgess are by no means the only ones to have made this claim.

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  12. “Trauma doesn’t live in the event itself, but in the nervous system’s frozen response to it.” Peter Levine

    Trauma bypasses the conscious mind, moves through the vagus nerve, and lodges in fascia. Its release is somatic, not cerebral.

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    • Your understanding of mind is too materialistic. If something is “lodged” in the body, it is only because the body’s mind or the higher mind that is keeping it stuck. Both the body and the higher personality are operated by spiritual beings, which are totally immaterial.

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      • Larry, what exactly do you mean here by the body’s “higher mind?”
        Do you believe that somebody afflicted with what one generally calls mental illness is under the control of a malign entity, which can be expelled by a special Scientological procedure?
        To me, this seems analogous to a priest’s performance of an exorcism on a possessed person. Does a Scientologist who administers this treatment need to be perfectly “clear” and immune to the wiles of immaterial spiritual beings?

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        • Joel, if you are not willing to study the work of Hubbard or related researchers, then you doom yourself to remain ignorant of it.
          The “higher mind” that I refer to, sometimes called the “analytical mind,” is a mental structure created by a spiritual being and used for various purposes. A being can become corrupted in its thinking and attitude, and so its mind can become corrupted. Proper therapy seeks to reestablish the being’s control over its life and its mind by ridding it of those corrupting decisions and training it in good control.

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      • I’m sure this is true. But we do need to realize that this process of “calming things down” is mediated through the being and its mind. In other words, it is a being, listening to the sounds through its mind, that then reacts by making adjustments in the mind and body. If the being is unwilling to cooperate with this process, then it most likely will not occur.

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        • True, a receptive mind is vital, yet sound is mostly absorbed unconsciously—even in sleep—rewiring the nervous system beneath awareness, as the mind softly surrenders, like a newborn baby drifting into a lullaby… The deepest re-wiring unfolds precisely because the mind HAS surrendered.

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