The Writer's Crusade: Kurt Vonnegut and the Many Lives of Slaughterhouse-Five by Tom Roston

Author:Tom Roston [Roston, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Editors; Journalists; Publishers, history, General, Literary Criticism, Books & Reading
ISBN: 9781419744891
Google: ZPcvzgEACAAJ
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2021-11-09T23:58:03.551263+00:00

When Mellina left the military in 2007, he was diagnosed with PTSD at a 30 percent rating. Twelve years later, Mellina is at a 100 percent rating, thanks to the PTSD, TBI (traumatic brain injury), and a series of surgeries he’s been getting for his back and neck.

At the age of thirty-six, Mellina now lives in his parents’ home in Ronkonkoma, New York, the last train station on the Long Island Railroad. Mellina half-jokingly calls himself “retired.” He hasn’t been able to hold down a job. He has tried working on a screenplay and early on wrote a few essays, two of which were published on the New York Times website, and wants to write more, but the words haven’t come easily.

“I am going to be completely candid. I’ve been catatonic for ten years,” he says while sitting in the living room in his father’s armchair with a pack of Newports at his side. “I have barely done anything with my life. I have run from everything by standing very still,” a concept he has borrowed from a David Foster Wallace short story, “Forever Overhead,” about bees—that they have to move very fast to stay afloat.

For years, Mellina has been getting regular surgeries on his back and neck, for “living hard, fast and as destructive as possible,” he says, and a life of “abusing the crap out of myself,” which included enlisting in the military and being involved in several rollovers, experiencing a few IED attacks, and carrying a large squad automatic weapon, also known as a SAW machine gun, around Iraq, where he served one tour in 2006. “I definitely had my ass handed to me,” he says of his deployment.

Mellina does and doesn’t agree with his PTSD diagnosis. “I am not the poster child for PTSD,” he says. “I don’t have the battle flashbacks. I don’t suffer from it as others do.”

Mellina occasionally halts himself in mid-thought, pulling at his substantial beard. He takes off his baseball cap and rubs his bald head. He gets frustrated when he thinks he’s not being articulate, which is rare. He’s more well-spoken than most of us. But it’s true that, on the subject of PTSD, he gets muddled.

“I don’t believe soldiers get PTSD,” he says. “It is supposedly caused by a singular moment, a raping, a beating, sudden death. With soldiers, we are already prepared for that: the shock and awe of combat. We have been inoculated against it.”

Mellina spends most of his time reading, playing video games, sleeping, and just thinking himself into spirals. “My biggest struggle is boredom,” he says. “It’s my Achilles’ heel. It’s what’s probably most dragged down my life since returning home. Complete and utter boredom. Nothing will ever top what you did. You can never get that kind of experience again, or those endorphins back.”

With shame and pride, Mellina recalls lethal chicken fights on cement with his combat brothers, naked wrestling matches, popping off guns in burnt-out warehouses, and locker room behavior like a guy wrapping his penis around his wrist and then making a buddy look at what time it is.

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