Many veterans cannot rest even when exhausted, and the guilt that follows often gets read as a personal flaw. This essay looks at how rest was structured in service, as rationed, interruptible, and dependent on someone else holding the watch, and why those terms can leave an open afternoon feeling like a post left unmanned.
Exhaustion is the easy part of hypervigilance to name. The harder part is that the scanning often feels like it is working. This essay looks at why an alert system keeps getting credit for the disasters that never arrive, how the cost gets attributed to everything except the vigilance, and what happens when the scanning starts to loosen.
