Coming Down From Mission Mode

I was in that middle ground between frustration, fatigue, and anger… again. What’s worse is I couldn’t remember why I was there or how to fix it.

It was 0200 as I put my now one-year-old back in his crib. Technically speaking, he’d been a toddler for two hours. I got up to check the doors one more time and discovered that while I’d packed his and his older brother’s lunches and put them in the fridge, I’d forgotten the dirty dishes in the sink and the clean ones in the dishwasher. Somewhere in the process of moving plates and forks, my elbow hit the coffee maker and started it. The damn thing was two cups into a twelve-cup pot before I smelled it brewing.

That’s what I get for doing chores with my late ’90s to ’00s hard-alt-rock angry playlist going loud enough to drown out the mild tinnitus.

I should have been in bed and asleep hours prior. The newly minted toddler is a light sleeper due to his teeth coming in. He still wakes at least once a night for a bottle and some rocking. Then, without fail, he’s awake again before 0600 like he’s a Midwestern farmer with a field to harvest before the weather turns. I haven’t gotten a week of consistent sleep in a year.

Other contributing factors…

Two weeks prior I rediscovered my new allergy to poison ivy. I could roll around in it as a child with no effect. Around thirty-eight or thirty-nine I started reacting to it. This latest exposure swelled the right side of my head shut and made every place I’d scratched look like a radiation burn. Doc said I should probably get a prescription for an EpiPen. Aging is not for the weak.

I mention the allergy because I was given ten days’ worth of prednisone at 20 mg a day. A few days after I finished the meds, I mentioned to a coworker how relieved I was to be done with them and not hungry all the time. They remarked that I was “considerably less murdery” since I came off the drugs. So, I can roid rage off a piddling dose of prednisone while venlafaxine replaces depression with anxiety attacks.

I guess mood altering drugs are not my forte. Hell, I don’t do well with DayQuil.

Which is the point of this rambling admission. Mood. Emotional dysregulation.

I mentioned in an earlier article about leadership and setting examples that my older boy, now four, inherited his parents’ tempers. I’ve seen him get so angry he was vibrating like a pressure cooker. He once had a meltdown in our neighborhood park. As I carried him home, he alternated between pounding on my shoulders and trying to kick me. By the time we got home, I had him pinned across my torso while he screamed into my chest in frustration. His developmental dysregulation closely matched my chemically induced version.

The part of me that remembers corporal punishment (paddling) in elementary school 35 years ago and hearing sermons on “spare the rod, spoil the child” thought spanking was an excellent way to solve the problem. Modern medicine and exhaustive studies reminded me that once a child is in full meltdown, the prefrontal cortex region of their brain flatlines. They are biologically incapable of rational, logical thought. In an adult, it is called an “amygdala hijack” or “emotional flooding.” First responders, emergency medical trauma staff, combat-trained military members, and people in other high-stress professions get inoculated against the stress that sets off the amygdala hijack. Their brains get hardwired through exhaustive training and repetitive experience to automatically respond to stress.

You see it when a soldier gets blown up by an IED and they somehow bounce right back into the fight despite concussions, TBI, and shrapnel wounds. The hijack is still happening. They are melting down just like the average untrained human. However, it’s the training and the physical imprinting it leaves on the basal ganglia (procedural memory) and the cerebellum (muscle memory) that allow them to bypass the meltdown and keep functioning. Paramedics and ER teams dealing with a gunshot wound move like high-speed robots, and if they’ve trained long enough together, there is very little verbal communication as they go to work.

There are half a dozen biological processes that kick off when professionals lock in like that. It’s been described as acute compartmentalization, a “Command Box” mechanism, and functional grief. The common term for it, though, is Mission Mode.

“We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.”

– Archilochus, Greek poet

The heroic feats a human can achieve in mission mode are awesome. Even average people can do some truly amazing things. I used to think I wasn’t capable of that kind of response until I was at FLETC, where they pressed us harder than we were expecting. Weeks of holster drills: slowly drawing a rubber non-gun from my hip, then pressing it out with both hands to a firing stance, then going through the motions of a mag change. Ten reps to a set, ten sets a night, one hundred times a night for a month. Then, while being shot at, my partner and I drew our weapons, fired the six Simunition rounds we each had, and reloaded in about two seconds. Not an exaggeration: they timed us. We painted a baseball-sized blue spot right over our attacker’s diaphragm.

Which is great. The training obviously works. It let two reservists pass the double-reload-double drill under stress. But what about after?

I distinctly remember sitting against the outside of the shoot house listening to my classmates run through similar lethal force assessments. I wondered if the training I was going through was going to change me. I wrote about that one too, and it most certainly left its mark.

Years later, well after the fight-or-flight adrenaline dumps, I feel like my training is still half-finished.

Not once since boot camp has anyone offered me post-traumatic event training. You’d think with a term like PTSD being in vogue for well over twenty years now, someone with an advanced medical degree would have put together and implemented a military training program on what to do after you come out of Mission Mode. What the hell are you supposed to do after the adrenaline finally peters out and the fatigue toxins outweigh the fight-or-flight hormones?

Your prefrontal cortex has screamed itself hoarse, and when you can finally hear it, the sensation is like being hit with a tidal wave. Emotional regulation isn’t really an option at that point. The survivors, the ones who learn to healthily cope, have figured out what works through trial and error: heavy lifting, endurance cardio, hobbies that reinforce focus and calm. There are dozens of lists out there but not much in the way of guidance on figuring out what works best for you and your brand of trauma.

I bring all of this up because coming off the prednisone was like coming off a multi-day evolution on the cutter. The kind where I bounced from the OPCEN to the flight deck to the boarding team then back to the OPCEN to start the whole process over again, sometimes ending on detainee watch. Yeah, no one was shooting at me, but have you been around running helicopters on the flight deck, or gone skipping across the ocean at 35 knots with zero visibility towards potentially armed drug runners? Not exactly low stress.

I loved it.

Loved it like an addict loves their fix. I just didn’t recognize the crash for what it was. Looking back at the rage and frustration I felt at the service, my choices suddenly made sense. It was withdrawal. I wasn’t getting a hit on the regular and was staring down a future career in safe, windowless command centers. My current boredom with my safe job has me looking for the ones that will get me back to that emotionally dysregulated state where I felt alive. It has me awake at 0200 doing chores listening to music that ramps me up.

I am NOT the first person to experience this.

Not with twenty-plus years of GWOT behind us. So why hasn’t anyone set up soldiers, first responders, and trauma staff with the tools and training to deal with the utterly insane drive to be back in the thick of the shittiest situations? We run back into fire because it feels better than the aftermath. Some have done it for decades on end. We have all the training to put us in mission mode. Where is the training to deal with the aftermath? You don’t push an engine too hard and then ignore the warning lights on the dash, or the master alarm in an aircraft cockpit, without consequences.

More importantly:

Where is the training that will help me teach my sons to feel their emotions without being ruled by them? How do I build the hardwired pathways into their brains so they can fall into mission mode, then afterward feel and process those emotions in a way that will make them stronger? How do I teach them to do that without making them addicts to those emotions?

If I ever figure it out, I’ll let you know.

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K.C. Aud is a U.S. Coast Guard reservist and Navy civilian contractor in the Puget Sound region. He enlisted in the Coast Guard in 2010 as an Operations Specialist, later served aboard USCGC Active, left active duty after several years, and reenlisted in 2020 as a Maritime Law Enforcement Specialist. Before returning to the service, he worked a range of civilian jobs, including brewing, farm work, machining, and Navy contract support. For The Havok Journal, he writes from Coast Guard and veteran experience, with a focus on military life and maritime service.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.