The Lingering Dread of TDRL

Flash Post #3

It’s a standard trope in literature, be it horror or drama, fiction or non. The protagonist thinks he’s escaped, free and clear, but it turns out he hasn’t. Maybe it’s how the story begins; maybe it’s how it ends. It might just be a jump scare in the middle. The point is, whatever’s coming, it’s still coming. It hasn’t forgotten, it hasn’t given up. Whatever it is you think you’ve finally escaped… look behind you. Right now. Look behind you, and it’s there.

What is TDRL?

The Temporary Disability Retired List (TDRL) exists as an alternative to the Permanent Disability Retired List (PDRL). Both exist to handle–to categorize–those who have been medically retired from the military for some service connected disability. Unlike disability through the VA, which many more (perhaps even most) veterans will be familiar with, placement on one of these “disability retired lists” allows for one to be effectively retired, right down to “the blue ID,” and disability payments are calculated from a percentage of one’s active duty pay, rather than the table used by the VA that takes into account only the disability rating and dependent status. There’s a lot of nuance and references governing not only TDRL, but the process for getting onto it, the process for getting off of it, and its relationship to things like the VA disability system and concurrent receipt (or not), but that would take a documentary or similarly informative work to cover, and this is not that kind of the story.

No, as the prologue suggests, this is a horror story–but not of the jump scare variety. Rather, it is an overly long tale where the horror comes from the atmosphere, so thoroughly oppressive and unsettling that it cannot be exorcised from your mind. Ceaseless dread: rolling in and smothering you like a cloud of noxious gas. Even as the last line is read and you turn in for the night, you detect its vapors seeping into your deepest dreams so that they become nightmares, the details of which you can’t precisely recollect, but you’re sure you had when you awake in a pool of sweat and tears. That’s the kind of story TDRL is.

You know, the boring kind. Like Poe used to write. And it goes like this…

The Story

No sense beating around the bush: you have PTSD. You have it from something that happened to you while serving on active duty in the Navy. It is in all respects service connected and, if you want to get technical, combat-service related, too. But it doesn’t really keep you from doing your job right away. Just makes it a little harder. There’s that extra bit of emotional capital you have to expend to do the job. But over the years–give it a decade–the accumulated strain of multiple deployments and the persistent demands of “unusually arduous sea duty” finally wear you down to the point you have nothing left to give. The things that used to be just minor distractions have become a constant, buzzing noise, at times rising to a cacophony that drowns out all others, be they orders from your superiors or the pleas of your subordinates. You feel stabbing, phantom pains at night, and crushing pain in your chest during the day. It was hard enough trying to sleep when you were just standing watch 8 hours a day between your day job or running drills on a live nuclear reactor late into the night: now it’s so bad that you can barely handle routine paperwork—and sometimes not even. There are people that you are responsible for, too, and as you look into their eyes and see the pleading in them, you can tell that you’re failing. Every few seconds, it’s like someone is jabbing you in the chest with a pencil or grinding a first into your sternum. You might almost think it’s a heart attack, but you know it’s not: it’s been with you for ten years and counting, just growing more intense with time.

So, when you realize you can no longer do what is required of you, you do the responsible thing: you go to medical and start filling out the forms that will tell them you are unfit. And they agree: it’s bad. Eventually, after some months of evaluation, they put you off the ship to have someone with more time on their hands look after you. As part of this, they send you (or rather, the record of your treatment) before a board. This board, called a Medical Evaluation Board (MEB), determines that you should be classified as Limited Duty (LIMDU) for a period of six months to a year. Let’s say you do the full year, and at the end of that year your care provider concludes that you are still not fit for duty. This likely isn’t a surprise to you (you’d know if you were getting better), and they remind you that LIMDU is only supposed to last for a year. While there are certain narrow exceptions, none of those apply, and anyway you’d prefer to just be done with it—the Navy I mean (although you do at times wonder if it’s more than that, more than just the Navy that you’re ready to be “done” with). So the next step is… you’re out, right?

No. Not by a longshot. Indeed, you’d have gotten out sooner if you’d just submitted your resignation and stuck with it. That’s because even though it’s become clear to you and your psychologist that you’re not going to be fit for duty anytime soon (if ever), the military isn’t ready for you to move on. There’s still more tests to be done. More forms to be filled out in triplicate and submitted to higher authority for review. So, they sign you up to see another psychologist (a third one, with the psychologist on your ship being the first and the one managing you this past year on LIMDU being the second), and this third provider will get to have an input as you (or rather, again, your record) go before yet another board, called a Physical Evaluation Board (PEB). This third psychologist will, after a mere two hours of examination, get to weigh in on your diagnosis the same as the one who spent a year treating you on LIMDU, and if they arrive at a different conclusion (a different diagnosis or a different prognosis), well… it could mean anything.

The horror sets in, and your mind gets to racing through all the potential outcomes. What if they do come up with a different diagnosis? What they say might well influence the PEB. It could mean the difference between (a) being out on your ass with nothing, (b) getting a lifetime retirement, or (c) just about anything in between, to include being found fit for duty with an open ended service commitment and no end in sight (short of death, of course…). And if that’s not horrifying enough for you, you have months and months to fret over what the outcome may be as none of this happens fast. Indeed, you find yourself still in the military, but doing work of no real consequence, withering away for another year as this goes on: that’s two years from when you first reported to medical, and twelve or more since you developed PTSD.

Then one day, finally, after months of waiting, you get the call. The results are in, but they can’t tell you over the phone: you have to get up from your desk (the one they stuck you behind two years ago), hop in your car, and drive over the bridge and through the tunnel to the hospital where they can give you the results in person. It’s just the way things go. And when you get there, it’s…

Unfit.

Unfit for duty.

You are unfit duty.

Let that sink in: you are unfit.

It’s what you wanted, sure, but then you can’t help but feel a bit ashamed, like you’ve let the nation down. You were supposed to be able to give the Navy twenty years, but in the end it only took fourteen–well, thirteen years and ten months to be exact. You might at least take solace in the knowledge that it’s over. It’s finally over.

Except it’s not.

Not by any stretch of the imagination. Because while you might have been put straight onto the PDRL, the PEB thinks there’s a chance that your condition may not be stable. That is, while they’re pretty sure you won’t be healed any time soon (I mean, it took ten years and change to get to this point), your condition might improve (or get worse!) in the months after your separation. So they put you on the TDRL (what this story’s all about), and tell you that at some point in the future they will call you in (or rather send you a letter) for a reevaluation. When is that? Well, according to the documents you read, it should be about six months after you transition to the TDRL.

Six months pass, and no word comes.

You find the office that tracks this sort of thing and reach out with your contact information–phone, address, e-mail–and they thank you for it, but nothing is scheduled.

Two years pass.

Did they forget about you? Did they send the letter to your old address? You never told them you were going back to school, but then you weren’t sure where you would be going or what your address would be until the last minute—you still have a hard time planning for the future, after all.

Still, things are going okay. Mostly. I mean you do worry a little. Because while there is no small distinction between being responsible for people and supervising the operation of dangerous equipment on the one hand (as you did in the Navy) and being responsible only for yourself, with coursework, on the other, you do wonder if, doing well in school as you are (no one ever said you were stupid—just crazy), the Navy might use that as evidence that you’re somehow “cured.” Looking at it that way, you start to worry that every step you take with an eye towards progress might actually be along a path to your own undoing. So that’s one more thing to keep you up at night, on top of everything else—because it’s not like you really stopped having PTSD.

There’s that crushing pain again. You hold your breath, hoping that it will go away, but it never does. It never does and it seems it never will.

And at this point, that’s a good thing, right? If you ever really were cured, you’d lose everything—or at least your retirement. Maybe it would be better if you just gave up already? Or dropped out for a couple years? It kind of makes sense, from a financial perspective…

No. Fuck all that. You keep on pushing. The Navy can’t rule over you forever. You’ve got to keep on striving for… something else—anything at all apart from the Navy. So what if your success gets used against you? You’re smart, you can do things. The key is, you’ve got to—

Then, out of the blue, it’s in your inbox. No, the TDRL people didn’t forget about you. No, they didn’t lose track. They want to know what you’re up to and where you’re at so they can schedule the reevaluation they were supposed to have you do… eighteen months ago.

“Oh well,” you think, “at least it will all be over soon.”

Except…

What New Horrors the Dawn May Bring

The results of this reevaluation are in no way limited by what the PEB decided. Sure, they could acknowledge that your disability, which has been going on for almost fifteen years now, has reached steady state and transition you from the TDRL to the PDRL at your current disability rating, but then they might also change the rating (like, on a whim!) and decide you should spend more time (up to three years in all!) on the TDRL. Worse, they might decide you are still disabled, but not quite 30% disabled (the magic number for disability retirement benefits) and so rule you unfit for duty (as you have been since the PEB), but not disabled enough to rate a retirement. That means separation: out on your ass with nothing.

Or… they might decide that you’re fully healed. That you no longer have a disability and are thus “fit for full.” Does that mean you could end up being ordered back to active duty? You don’t know, and neither does anyone you’ve talked to. Some of the official literature suggests that it’s a possibility, but, well… you know from experience with the Navy that “what’s possible” often varies quite a lot from “what actually happens.” But the fact that it’s even a possibility that your options from this one exam are as wide-ranging as (a) out on your ass with nothing, (b) more time on the TDRL, with more uncertainty to follow, (c) a lifetime pension on the PDRL, or (d) “Here are your orders to a deployed staff, Lieutenant Commander…” Well, that’s where the lingering dread comes in, what makes this a true horror story.

You start to wonder if you will ever be free of this thing called the TDRL or, more broadly, the military’s disability evaluation system. The more you think about it, the more you remember why you’re tangled up in it. You think about the trauma—the trauma this system was supposed to help you move past—and you realize… It won’t stop. It just keeps on coming. You can’t get it off your chest. You can’t escape it. You have no control. Whatever agency you thought you had—the ability to set out a path for yourself and truly “recover”—it turns out it’s just an illusion, like that phantom pain that keeps on coming back and cutting deeper into you each time.

But the TDRL is no phantom, it is real. So very, very real.

Epilogue

Let me be clear: I do not want your sympathy or your pity. I do not need you to understand. But if you’re presently, or think you’re about to be, a member of the armed forces, I just want you to know…

…one day, it could be you.

Boo.

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