Section 17
1. Later, she reminds me that Lasagna Night can come apart in an instant, if Caleb has a “bad PTSD moment.”
- Lasagna Night has probably fallen apart many times before since she says that she is reminded.
- Caleb probably has PTSD moments a lot that causes problems at home.
2. These are supposed to be her easy months, she sighs, April and May and June, before the anniversaries of his worst firefights—many of them in Ramadi; a lot of bad things happened in Ramadi—exacerbate his flashbacks and nightmares.
- These months are supposed to be easier, Caleb hasn’t had many PTSD moments in these months in the past from what it seems.
- Caleb probably wasn’t deployed during these months when he was in war or he wasn’t in the fight.
- The worst of his firefights must happen in month after June.
3. That’s usually September through January, the “really bad” months, whereas in the spring, she gets a bit of “vacation,” time to clean up the house and catch up on work, rest.
- From September through January Caleb has a lot of bad PTSD moments.
- He probably has bad flashbacks of what happened during those months when he was in active duty.
- In spring Brannan gets time off from the PTSD moments. Caleb may not be home or he is more calm and doesn’t think about them that much then.
4. She used to ask Caleb what was wrong, why he was coiled so tight and poisonous, screaming and yelling at everybody. That just agitated him more.
- It is smart not to ask Caleb what was wrong when he was yelling. This made him more angry.
5. Haven’t you noticed I’m having a bad time? he’ll ask. And then she’ll just sit and listen while he says he cannot get it out of his head, about how if he had caught that fucking sniper, that enemy sniper he’d been trying to get, that’d been following them around, terrorizing their unit, if he’d have managed to kill him like he was supposed to, then the sniper wouldn’t have gotten off the shot that killed his buddy.
- This is something that he has thought about a lot, Caleb lost a friend from this and it haunts him a lot. He always thinks “what if” something else would have happened.
Rowan Counterintuitive 