Dan Pronk knew he had a problem.
When his friend and colleague died in front of him, Pronk was emotionless. The death simply presented "a logistic problem", he says.
Later, when his father was dying in hospital, Pronk was so absorbed with work he didn't leave to go and see him.
His stunted reactions to the deaths of people close to him were telling him something was not right.
A few years earlier, he'd have responded to both incidents with grief and tears.
But after years working as a special forces combat doctor, something had shifted in Pronk.
He wasn't feeling "a normal range of human emotions", he tells ABC RN's Life Matters.
It made reintegrating into civilian life tough.
Pronk also felt angry for reasons he couldn't understand. He was stressed, distracted by a pull back to combat.
He was taking sleeping pills at night, but setting a regular alarm to prevent him from entering deep sleep and encountering the nightmares that lingered there.
He was vomiting spontaneously.
He'd hit rock bottom.
Pronk needed to find a way back to the person he once was.
He needed to figure out how to feel again.
'Naive' idea of war as 'exciting'
Pronk grew up in an army family, which moved every couple of years to a different part of Australia.
His dad and brother both served. But early on, Pronk chose a different path.
"I was carving out my own identity. I had long hair and dreadlocks and earrings, and my schooling was sub-stellar, to put it nicely," he says.
"[But] it's funny how the stars align … and I found my straps academically."
That star alignment took the form of a military scholarship to study medicine.
Pronk completed his medical training, and became an army doctor just as Australia was beginning to send troops to Afghanistan after the 2001 attacks on the US World Trade Centre.
He'd joined the army with no aspirations to work with special forces. But as Australia became involved in the war in Afghanistan, Pronk says that "it became more and more clear that that was where my career was going to head".
By the time of his first mission to Afghanistan in 2007, he was motivated by a desire to prove himself and the allure of a clear sense of purpose. And he was attracted by the idea of a team to belong to.
He says he also had "naive impressions" of what working in a war zone would entail.
Theoretically, Pronk knew the risks: that people died at war, and that his friends and even he might be killed.
"But until you've experienced it, you just can't get it," he says.
"It seemed all exciting … I thought, wow, what a great opportunity to try and ... make a life-or-death difference in these really complex and challenging environments.
"It just seemed like the ultimate test."
A 'necessary desensitisation'
Pronk served in numerous combat missions in Afghanistan. Being a doctor didn't shield him from the brutal realities of front-line battle.
"To be functional, as a doctor, I needed to be close enough to the casualties in the field ... in the thick of it," he says.
Pronk witnessed horrific violence, including the deaths of several close colleagues.
It started to change him.
In his memoir, The Combat Doctor: a Story of Battlefield Medicine and Resilience, Pronk says he'd metamorphosed into a "monster".
But the full impact of Pronk's time in the army, and his exposure to death and violence, only became clear when he left the job for good in 2014, and came home.
Pronk was among the estimated eight per cent of defence force members to experience post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It's significantly higher than in the general Australian community.
In his book, he details the physical and mental repercussions of his PTSD.
He was drinking too much. He had bursts of anger, sleeplessness, vomiting. He was highly anxious and finding it difficult to interact with people.
And he felt robbed of his ability to feel.
"I had been desensitised," he says.
"I'd become something completely different to who I was before."
Pronk simply wasn't feeling things as he says a "normal person" should have been.
"Cumulative exposures to these unusual, critical incidents cause this necessary desensitisation to allow people to remain functional at the level that they need to operate at in the acute situation, but also to allow them to keep turning up to work," he says.
"I think if you weren't desensitised or somewhat emotionally blunted ... then you'd break down."
It's an experience he believes others can relate to.
"I don't think this is exclusive to me. This is all of us in that military situation, but also ... this is our first responders across the board: our police, our emergency services, ambulance officers," he says.
A slow process of rebuilding
Several months after leaving the army, he faced significant work to rebuild his sense of self and his ability to feel.
Accepting that the process would be slow helped.
Rather than ignore the horrors he'd experienced at war, he had to face them. He had to "revisit them and process them", he says.
Pronk started practising meditation and mindfulness, using techniques and tools to wind down his body's stress response.
He says it's helped a lot.
So has his new professional focus. He now works in the emergency department of a regional South Australian hospital, and after studying an MBA, he has taken up entrepreneurial interests.
In contrast to his experience with his dying father, Pronk responded in a more understandable way when his son had to go to hospital with a finger injury recently.
This time, Pronk did leave work and went to be with him, a move more characteristic of his former self.
Pronk says writing his book has been "hugely cathartic".
It was an attempt to reckon with the "human emotional experience" of serving in a war, but it's also provided other benefits.
He's been able to engage with readers with "similar exposures" – including members of the military and police force, and other first responders – with whom he's been able to share his experiences.
"To use some of these profoundly negative experiences and traumatic exposures for something positive has been really helpful for me," he says.
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