This article appeared in the now defunct political newspaper, The Bullhorn, in 2005 or so. I am reprinting it on my blog (without anyone’s permission) because I’ve just been reading articles about the increasing numbers of vets returning from Afghanistan and Iraq with PTSD and the inadequate resources allotted to their plight. I thought this article might be informative, although it is slightly outdated. I particularly like this article because it addresses female instances of PTSD and how they are different from typical male experiences. I haven’t read or seen much out there addressing sexual harassment and rape that women in the military are often subjected to.
I also purposefully put a positive spin on this article because I have a tendency to want to see the positive side of things. However, I believe that things are potentially more dire than I report in this piece.
Soldier Mentality
One in six returning troops suffers from a mental disorder. Many say the military isn’t doing enough to help them cope.
New vets face Post Traumatic Stress and other mental disorders.
By Lizzy Scully
The main task assigned to Captain B. Diggs Brown Jr., a Green Beret in the Colorado National Guard, and his twelve-man team was to train 700 Afghan men to become future soldiers. It was 2003, and Brown was midway through a seven-month military tour on Bagram Air Force Base, Pol-E-Charki, Afghanistan. In addition to his militaristic duties, however, he also taught English to the town’s schoolchildren. The crew would travel to and from the village in armed trucks in order to conduct the classes, rebuild schools and deliver thousands of pounds of school supplies.
It was Brown who convinced the town members to allow a female soldier to teach the village’s girls. At first, education had been offered only to young boys.
“Farista, a little 11-year-old girl, came every Wednesday to stand in the window to listen to classes [offered only to boys at first],” Brown says, explaining why he supported local education by teaching and raising money to rebuild schools destroyed by the Taliban. “The kids in Afghanistan are wonderful.”
“Everywhere you go in Afghanistan they give you the thumbs up.”
That’s why Brown—and everyone else in his unit, he says—was shaken to the core when three of his male students and another youngster were killed by a blast on the base’s training range. Every day, patrols monitored the perimeter of the military’s training area and set off flares to warn troops and civilians of upcoming munitions tests.
On the day of the deadly explosion, patrollers had twice found the children hiding on the property—ostensibly to watch the thunderous and thrilling operations—and both times, warned them away. But the kids had found a niche in some rocks where troops passing by couldn’t see them, and were killed when practice procedures began. The public at home scrutinized the incident, and media outlets blamed Brown and his comrades
“You know, when you go into war you don’t go to kill kids,” Brown says. “To have something happen, even when it’s out of your control, you still have that overwhelming guilt. We all felt terrible; it was solemn on the base for a week or two.”
Stress came in other forms, as well. While on duty, Brown regularly watched mines explode and saw three-foot long rockets slam into the base, sometimes extremely close to where he stood.
“It was scary,” he says of the regular bombardment, “but they happened so many times, you just got used to it.”
After his tour had ended and he returned home to Fort Collins, where he works as an investment banker, he’d lay awake at night thinking about his experiences in Afghanistan. He slept fitfully for six months, despite spending two months with his unit at Fort Carson, undergoing counseling sessions meant to help him assimilate back into society.
“You can’t just pick up where you left off,” he explains. “It’s like starting all over again.”
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Brown had it good. He reunited with his family soon after leaving the base and was able to readjust well to everyday life. But for many soldiers, starting over is either difficult or impossible. Almost one in six troops arriving home from duty in Iraq shows symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), depression or anxiety, according to recent research published by Dr. Charles Hoge, chief of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Walter Reed Army Institute, in the New England Journal of Medicine. Given that badly injured troops removed from the field were unaccounted for in the study, the statistics are likely even higher.
PTSD is the term used to describe a severe anxiety or stress reaction resulting from an extreme and external event that is beyond the usual and tolerable experience of a person, and one that is also beyond the person’s control. Such experiences actually alter the chemistry of the brain, making sufferers more sensitive to adrenaline surges even decades later.
They end up experiencing normal events as repetitions of the original trauma. Thus, when a veteran hears a car backfiring, he or she might relive a mortar attack. Another example: If a woman was raped or brutalized by enemy combatants or even a fellow soldier, a man in uniform might trigger something in her brain and cause her to unintentionally conjure up the experience all over again.
Usually PTSD occurs when people have no control over the situation they encountered, and symptoms range from feeling guilty to wanting to commit suicide to self-destructive behavior, emotional unresponsiveness, anger, feelings of helplessness, a tendency to isolate themselves and an inability to be intimate with loved ones. Often, the condition adversely affects others, as well; it is sometimes so acute as to trigger PTSD in a soldier’s spouse or family members.
Despite this, more than 60 percent of returning soldiers will not seek help, according to Hoge’s analysis.
Like Diggs Brown, many soldiers believe they can deal with their problems on their own.
“I don’t know if mine was PTSD,” said Brown, but even if it had been, “it was something I wanted to work through on my own. A lot of men are hard-headed.”
According to Terrence Russell, a readjustment counselor for the Fort Collins Vet Center, the military instills in its enlistees a warrior-ethic. Soldiers are encouraged to be the “tough guy” and not complain.
“They aren’t supposed to have problems,” he says.
Military psychiatrist Captain Robert Cardona, who served with a combat stress-control team in southern Iraq, explained it this way in a July Seattle Times article: Troops are expected to “put those emotions and experiences away so they can go into battle the next day.”
“Our primary goal is to keep soldiers functional, so they can continue to fight,” he said. “Everything else, including feeling well, is second to that.”
Although mental-health technicians and chaplains are available for troops who request help, the focus is on getting them back into combat.
Thus, the result of intense military training, Russell says, is that soldiers often refuse to admit it if they have or develop mental or emotional problems, and they associate it with being crazy. This perception is only exacerbated by mainstream media coverage, which tends to focus on those suffering with extreme cases of PTSD, such as the four soldiers—three of whom were special-operations troops recently returned from Afghanistan—who killed their wives in 2002 at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. Two of the cases were murder-suicides.
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Vietnam Veteran W.J. Sturgeon understands the tough-minded stigma instilled by the military well. Although he suffers from severe PTSD, he didn’t even attempt to seek assistance until long after he returned from Vietnam in 1972.
“It’s pride, ego,” he says. “I stuck it out. I’m not going to admit I need help.”
But after flying in 380 combat sorties as an air refueler, and after seeing fellow soldiers die—including members of his unit, whose plane exploded “wall of flames”—Sturgeon struggled with major guilt and fear, as well as psychotic episodes.
He wasn’t diagnosed until almost 30 years later.
“I was in and out of Veteran’s hospitals,” he says. “Nobody ever acknowledged this was part of the Vietnam War.”
Sturgeon’s wife took their two daughters and left him, and he moved around constantly until his second wife, Kim, encouraged him to stay put and deal with his problems.
When the couple settled in Fort Collins and Sturgeon began to work regularly with a psychiatrist and with groups of vets who’d been through similar ordeals, he finally felt a change.
“I began to understand that I had to stop running and face the truth,” he says. “There’s no cure for PTSD. It just gets worse, but facing the truth set me free.”
According to Diana Stevens, a veteran service officer for the Larimer County Veteran Services Office, the truth can set many people free.
“Ninety-seven percent of people who come in for help are better off,” she says.
For the last thirteen years, Stevens has tried to dispel the myths about PTSD and other psychiatric troubles perpetuated in society, and she’s tried to alleviate the damage done to vets after the Vietnam War.
“Vietnam Vets were scapegoated,” she says. “Society came to disapprove of the Vietnam War, but rather than fault the president or Congress, they faulted the GI.”
Sturgeon agrees.
“When I came back, the country was highly divided. So many Americans were against the war. I didn’t come back a hero. People spit in my face and called me a baby killer.”
Studies have shown that Vietnam vets, taken as a whole, suffered some of the highest levels of psychological damage of any war veterans. Some researchers put the number of mentally injured Vietnam soldiers—most with PTSD—at more than 50 percent.
Such high numbers, along with the overwhelming affect on families of soldiers and on society, inspired the military to do more research on the subject, and subsequently motivated the government to become more active. The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) was established as a Cabinet-level position in 1989 and vet centers were created to help soldiers with problems such as PTSD, Russell says.
“It’s a medical problem that needs to be dealt with in a medical way,” adds Stevens. “We can’t ignore it until it’s a crisis.”
Still, until the most current Iraq War, soldiers did not receive much education on the subject. And some would argue the official response to the mental and emotional health of soldiers is still not adequate.
Although 32-year-old, Fort Collins-based former Marine Tim Marquart, who served one tour in the first Gulf War and one in Somalia, did not experience PTSD symptoms, he doesn’t recall the military extending any assistance to those who did suffer from the condition, except for the VA’s office, which only serves people when they come to the office. He believes more outreach needs to be done.
“When I got back I had no idea there was anything that could help,” he says, agreeing that some soldiers don’t look to external sources for help. Marines, especially, he adds, “tend to look toward other marines rather than outward.”
On the other hand, Marquart believes military higher-ups are striving to improve official response to stress-caused mental illness and to prevent the widespread PTSD that has plagued previous generations of vets. For example, during the Vietnam War, soldiers were brought home individually. Now, they usually return with their units. Marquart says this allowed him to readjust along with friends who understood and shared his emotions and experiences.
And although the military still doesn’t educate soldiers as well as it could, it has altered its training techniques.
“The military learned its lessons in Vietnam,” says Marquart. “The way they train guys is geared toward mentally preparing them for what they will see. We were told in blunt terms what to do and what to expect.”
By the second Gulf War, the military was more prepared. Now Lieutenant Colonel Lawrence Howard says that during the course of his 22-year military career, he has received numerous briefings on PTSD, including three in the last year. He also took various classes, both basic and advanced, pertaining to the subject during his infantry officer training.
“In fact,” he adds, “the Army's basic field manual on leadership has an entire chapter devoted to the subject. They haven't been very extensive for the most part, but I would say that there is an overall understanding that this is an issue that has to be understood and actively addressed.”
All soldiers, regardless of rank or position, receive at least two briefings (three for those who take mid-tour leave) specifically related to PTSD. The first occurs during premobilization training; the second happens prior to taking mid-tour leave; and the third, during the demobilization process before arriving home. The briefings focus on unique issues related to re-integration with family, friends and the community at home.
During the last decade, Howard says, the “Department of Defense has recognized that different soldiers are affected differently by stress, and that it is better to be open and up front about it, rather than having to react to problems that occur later.”
Overall, he says, “the briefings we received were very helpful and right on target,” which was important, because Howard, like most troops fresh off of extended deployment “took longer to get re-integrated at home than they expected.”
Still, says Russell, the military needs to do more to address emotional issues, such as how soldiers are trained—or not trained—to cope with taking another human’s life. The system is designed to depersonalize its enlisted men and women, hardwiring them to “kill or be killed.”
“The guys often say that they were raised as all-American youth on the Pledge of Allegiance and the Ten Commandments,” he explains. “They go to war believing they are doing a noble service for their country, then they kill and destroy and break all the Ten Commandments. Often, when they reflect about it later they feel bad about it.”
Many counselors with various local veteran-services agencies believe the military needs to spend more time talking openly about killing. And, adds Stevens, soldiers definitely need more time to readjust to civilian life.
“Soldiers need a heck of a lot more than six or seven hours of debriefing. They should be on base in a reentry program for a year or two, and they should be with their cohorts.” says a VA employee who requested to remain anonymous for this story.
They should not be visiting residential programs 30 years later like some Vietnam vets, she adds; “They need to be with people who had the same experiences at the same time. That needs to be a part of their military service.”
Equally as urgent, the VA employee says, is the military’s responsibility to address female-specific PTSD cases. Women often don’t receive the same recognition or respect in the Defense Department despite the fact that they comprise about 15 percent of its total personnel. What’s more, they often have to deal not only with combat stress, but also with sexual harassment, minority status, stigmatization and rape—from the very people who are supposed to be their comrades, those they trust with their lives. Such experiences can be lightening bolts for PTSD.
“In the military, they still look at a woman raped in Iraq and say she asked for it. If she didn’t want to fool around with men she shouldn’t have joined the service,” she says, adding that women often join the military to rise above the sexism they’ve experienced all of their lives, only to be subjected to it at even more extreme levels after they enlist.
When she started working for the administration, this VA employee thought she’d be able to make a difference, and she hoped societal standards and attitudes would change. Unfortunately, she says, that hasn’t happened
“In the mainstream, it hasn’t gotten better,” she says. “This is the heart of America, really. These are the attitudes young and old.”
Although awareness about PTSD and other mental disorders might be breaking onto the public consciousness, all of the counselors interviewed for this story agree the military has a lot of work to do when it comes to preventing and treating the condition—and sometimes, even admitting the problem exists.
Says Russell, “Soldiers aren’t supposed to have problems. The Army is giving soldiers a new message, but it’s goes against years and years of ethics.”
