Erik Krikke (1976) is a husband, a father of two and a veteran. For over 13 years he served in the army as a medic and operating room nurse. In 'Surviving PTSD & moral injury - How an Afghanistan veteran breaks the silence on mental illness' he openly describes the impact of war in a raw and gripping way.
"Round the clock assisting in war surgery got to him. He went from
aid worker to victim when he was confronted by his PTSD some years
later. This realistic book shows his battle and how he got back up
after he hit rock bottom. I am proud of him." General Tom
Middendorp, Netherlands Chief of Defence (ret.)Surviving PTSD &
Moral Injury is a nonfiction memoir written by Erik Krikke. Krikke
had reluctantly come to terms with the likelihood that he would be
deployed as part of NATO's Multinational Medical Unit, Role 3.
Those at the hospital where he was currently assigned, who would
have been called up before him, had either retired or been
transferred. He was an operating room nurse who had been a member
of the Netherlands Army for almost fourteen years when the call
from the head of the surgery department reached him. Some
colleagues congratulated him on what some said would be an
adventure and a professionally rewarding experience, but Krikke
would far rather have stayed home with his wife and two small
sons.
His three months in Kandahar were everything he feared and much
more. Krikke soon realized that his group would not be given the
same amount of support with acclimation and adaptation as the
regular troops received. The adaptation program had for some reason
been dispensed with for their team, leaving them to experience
their frightening new world feeling more isolated than ever. The
plywood hovel they called a hospital leaked in streams when it
rained, and desert dust was an inevitable part of the very air they
breathed. Worse yet was the steady inrush of horribly injured
combatants, soldiers, and children. Krikke soon learned to both
expect and to dread the victims' urgent entreaties to let them die
rather than remove a leg. While his deployment was limited to a
three-month stretch, the ramifications of that time in Kandahar and
the resulting PTSD would affect him for many years to come. Krikke
had grown up valuing his strength and self-sufficiency, but he
nearly lost his life to PTSD, only finding it again through the
help of the Veteran's Institute and the friends, family and
therapists who worked so closely with him.
Erik Krikke's nonfiction health memoir is an intensely powerful and
honest account of one medic's struggles with a disease that still
remains closeted and denied by many. As I read this book, I would
occasionally remember watching the television series, MASH, which
was about a medical unit during the Korean War. While the show was
big on comedic touches and the antics of off-duty medics, it also
showed them constantly listening for, and instantly springing up,
whenever the distant noise of choppers began to filter in, and the
theme song, Suicide is Painless, struck a discordant and prophetic
tone. Krikke's story is harsh, gritty and real; he pulls no punches
in describing the awful insanity of trying to fit oddly heavy limbs
into plastic bags, and his growing discomfort at finding he cared
more about saving some patients' lives and limbs than others. He's
also infinitely generous in sharing the aftermath of that
deployment, and the steps he's been taking to survive his PTSD and
understand the moral injury which compounded it. This intense and
gripping memoir focuses well-deserved and overdue attention on the
medical personnel, whose own mental health issues as a result of
their service, are often overlooked. Surviving PTSD & Moral Injury
is most highly recommended. - Jack Magnus for Readers' Favorite
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