The first time Kristin Peterson’s husband hit her, she was
asleep in their bed.
She awoke that night a split second after Joshua’s fist
smashed into her face and ran, terrified and crying, to the bathroom to wipe
the blood spurting from her nose.
When she stuck her head back into the bedroom, there he was
— punching at the air, muttering how she was coming after him and how he was
going to kill her. Kristin started yelling but Joshua’s eyes were closed. He
was still asleep.
The next morning Joshua saw the dried blood on his wife. “Oh
God,” she recalls him saying. “I did that.”
Joshua doesn’t remember the night or the nightmares. He also
can’t remember punching his wife again in his sleep a few weeks later, this
time driving her front tooth through her lip, all the while murmuring how he’d
never go back.
For six months last year, Joshua helped build an oil
pipeline across Iraq as a specialist in the Army’s 110th Quartermaster Company.
On the same highway where Pvt. Jessica Lynch was ambushed, he saw Iraqi
soldiers, dead and rotting, dangling out of their tanks. One time, Joshua’s
truck broke down and he was surrounded by a group of Iraqi children, some
throwing rocks, others toting AK-47s. “I kept thinking, ‘God, I can’t handle
this,'” the 24-year-old says with a hollow laugh.
Since Joshua came back to Richmond Hill, Georgia, in August
2003, these memories have turned him into a man Kristin often doesn’t recognize
— a man who lashes out in anger at her and their 21-month-old son, whose
awful dreams tell him to beat his wife because, in his sleep, she’s an Iraqi.
There are thousands of Operation Iraqi Freedom soldiers
across the country like Joshua. They are coming home with minds twisted by what
they’ve seen and done in Iraq.
A December 2003 Army study — published in the New England Journal of Medicine —
found that approximately 16 percent of soldiers returning from Iraq were
suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, a psychologically debilitating
condition causing intense nightmares, paranoia and anxiety. But that study is,
already, out of date.
Now, after a particularly bloody summer and fall, many
military and mental health experts predict the rate of PTSD will actually run
nearly twice as high as what the Army study found, approximately the same level
suffered by Vietnam War veterans. Others think it could spike even higher and
note that rarely before has such a dramatic rate of PTSD manifested itself so
early.
At the same time, there is mounting concern over the system
designed to help those afflicted: the Department of Veterans Affairs. Numerous
reports show the VA does not have many of the essential services veterans
desperately need.
“I don’t know how many people are going to be seeking
treatment, or whether the demand is going to be met by available resources,”
acknowledges Matthew Friedman, executive director of the VA’s National Center
for PTSD. “What I am confident of is that people who come for treatment will
get good treatment.”
Yet the VA has severely underfunded mental-health programs
and projects a $1.65 billion shortfall in the budget for those programs by the
end of 2007.
“If we don’t give the VA what it needs immediately, the
consequences will be lifelong and devastating,” says Steve Robinson, executive
director of the National Gulf War Resource Center.
The emerging scenario is one of a generation of new veterans
whose psyches are in tatters, their families scarred by the strangers their
loved ones have become — and of an exhausted health care system holding its
breath.
“When you
kill someone in combat, two things can happen,” says Sgt. Walter Padilla
of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 12th Infantry Division. “The crazy ones go
crazier. Or nothing happens.”
In October 2003, Padilla was commanding a Bradley fighting
vehicle near the city of Kirkuk, rounding up insurgents and fending off mortar
attacks.
On a break one day, Padilla’s company headed to a deserted
area a few miles from base to practice their marksmanship. When gunfire rang
out from a nearby village, Padilla wheeled his Bradley around to investigate.
He saw two groups of armed men arguing over a pile of wood. The Bradley rumbled
closer, and the men began shooting.
“Everything slowed down. I lost sense of time. I saw
nothing, felt nothing,” he says. “Then I opened up with the machine gun.”
After Padilla gripped the trigger long enough, he moved in
for a closer look.
“You’re walking up on something you’ve done with your hands.
You see the back of brains blown out. You know it’s either him or you. But, I’d
never seen anybody dying.”
When Padilla’s unit was shipped back to Fort Carson,
Colorado, in late February, his life unraveled. While he was gone, his wife had
filed for divorce. He began having terrible dreams about Iraq. He grew paranoid
anytime he left home.
One morning, on his way to work at Fort Carson, Padilla
glimpsed the lights of an Air Force jet. He swerved his car off the highway and
grabbed his cell phone to call his commanding officer — “I thought it was a
tube flash from a mortar,” he says.
At a bar one night, he argued with a stranger over a pool
table. “Doesn’t this guy know I’ve fucking killed people?” Padilla thought
incredulously.
That night Padilla lay awake, contemplating whether he
should rush out into the night and search for the stranger. He shoved some
sleeping pills in his mouth and fought to let it go. “If I’d have found him, I
would have beat him over the head with a bar stool,” he says.
While Padilla grasped at his ghosts, Washington bureaucrats
were hearing about another nightmare. On March 25, Dr. James Scully, medical
director of the American Psychiatric Association, testified to the House
Appropriations Subcommittee on Veterans Affairs, Housing and Urban Development,
and Independent Agencies.
A Navy veteran, Scully reported a 42 percent explosion in VA
patients with severe PTSD, with only a 22 percent increase in money spent on
PTSD services. And this imbalance comes as more vets than ever — nearly half
a million people — are using the VA for psychological help.
It was the latest blow for an institution that has struggled
for decades to fulfill its mission.
The VA’s health-care system began treating veterans in 1930,
charging a sliding fee based on a variety of factors. But in the wake of the
first Gulf War, the system swelled out of control. The soaring cost of civilian
health insurance combined with aging World War II, Korean War, and Vietnam
vets, pushed droves of service people toward the VA, where everything was
cheaper.
The VA responded by opening hundreds of outpatient clinics
in the ’90s, but only about half provided mental health services. Again,
funding was a factor. By 2003, the previous decade had seen a 134 percent jump
in vets seeking care, with only a 44 percent increase in the budget.
In April, 2003, as U.S. troops pushed toward Baghdad, Dr.
Joseph T. English, chair of psychiatry at St. Vincent’s Catholic Medical
Centers of New York, told the subcommittee that veterans were waiting an
average of 47 days to get into PTSD inpatient programs and up to a year at some
outpatient facilities.
VA secretary Anthony Principi (who resigned December 8 as
part of the Bush administration’s cabinet shuffle but is still on the job
pending confirmation of his replacement) commanded a Navy gun boat during
Vietnam and understands PTSD. He also knew that combat-dazed vets were
beginning to trickle home from Iraq, so he commissioned a task force to prepare
for the onslaught.
The task force found four major deficiencies: mental-health
services were scattered, substance-abuse programs had been reduced, the VA’s mental-health
leadership hadn’t been diligent in overseeing the situation, and there was no
coherent mental-health strategy. Principi ordered VA brass to begin plugging
the holes immediately.
Meanwhile, the VA’s Special Committee on PTSD delivered a
report to Congress in October warning that with more soldiers with PTSD
arriving home, services needed beefing up. The VA plan estimated it would take
$1.65 billion by 2008 to fix things.
“If the human cost of PTSD and its related disorders is
staggering, so are the long-term medical costs to the VA associated with
chronic PTSD,” the report states.
The House Veterans’ Affairs Committee urged Congress to pump
an additional $2.5 billion into the Bush administration’s VA health-care budget
for 2005. But by November, with the budget poised for passage, it seemed
unlikely, despite the warnings from veterans groups and VA doctors who sat on
the PTSD Committee.
These same doctors knew they could treat the disorder better
than anyone. They’ve been on the cutting edge of PTSD since its diagnosis was
born from a war whose lessons now seemed distant.
Sgt. Dave
Durman did a tour in the Mekong Delta in 1969. He was 18 and had
joined the Navy the minute he got his draft notice, even though some of his
buddies had already gone and died there.
“I think it was because I just really loved the water,”
Durman says.
Durman also loved working on the supply ship where he was
stationed and the pulsing adrenaline whenever his unit supported the Marines on
missions around the South Vietnamese coast. He loved it all so much that he
stayed in the Navy for nine years and, in 1995, joined the Virginia National
Guard’s 1032nd Transportation Company, 10 miles from his home in Kingsport,
Tennessee.
In February 2003, Durman’s unit was sent to Kuwait. He was
52 years old.
Two months later the 1032nd crossed into Iraq, charged with
shipping supplies from the southern city of Talil, 300 miles north to Balad.
Other convoys had been attacked on the same route, so Durman and the
19-year-old soldier who rode with him slung their flak jackets protectively
over the outside of both truck doors because, Durman says, “you could stab a
hole through those doors with a knife.”
During one August haul, Durman came upon a group of Iraqi
police who had just shot two children for stripping a car on the side of the
road. He drove right by their bodies. “We’re told not to interfere with
domestic affairs,” Durman says quietly.
“I didn’t want to get personally close to the Iraqis,
because I knew we might have to shoot them,” he continues. “I’d look into their
eyes and they all looked like gooks.”
In September, Durman’s unit shipped back to Virginia. It was
then the nightmares started, about Iraq, but also things he’d buried — his
abusive childhood, Vietnam.
His girlfriend, Teresa A. McKay, noticed that Durman, once
confident and kind, now broke into random sweats and angered easily. He drank
too much whiskey and bought a .357 pistol. Their sex life, McKay said, went
“190 degrees different.”
To McKay, a former nurse who’d worked with homeless Vietnam
Veterans, Durman’s behavior looked disquietingly familiar.
Indeed, Vietnam provides the clinical and historical
framework for PTSD and Iraq. Before Vietnam, treatment of a soldier for the
psychological effects of battle wasn’t really treatment at all, even though
PTSD had long been acknowledged under a variety of names.
In 1871, a former Union Army medic J.M. Da Costa wrote about
a stress disorder caused by heavy fighting. He called it “Irritable Heart,” a
name changed shortly thereafter to “Soldier’s Heart.”
During World War I, according to VA psychiatrist Jonathan
Shay, veterans returning home with Soldier’s Heart were told by military
doctors they had “shell shock,” or “combat neurosis.”
After World War II, Shay says, when tens of thousands of
soldiers were hospitalized with psychiatric problems, doctors diagnosed the
majority with paranoid schizophrenia.
“The diagnostic spirit which prevailed was based on Plato’s
idea that if you had good parentage, good genes, a good education, then no bad
things could shake you from the path of virtue,” Shay says.
During Vietnam, that Platonic ideal began to shift. In 1970,
20 young vets from the group Vietnam Veterans Against The War called
psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton to speak with them about the war. The vets
didn’t trust the VA or the military, but knew they needed to calm the devils
they’d brought home.
Lifton, who had studied Hiroshima survivors and been an Army
psychiatrist, began meeting in New York with the group in what became known as
“rap sessions.” He was shocked by the extent of the veterans’ traumas.
“These men talked about a particular combat situation that
had a level of extremity which was new, even to me,” Lifton says.
Prompted by the rap sessions, VVAW opened up dozens of
“storefront” counseling centers — places where Vietnam veterans could speak
with other vets about their experiences, a crucial part of treating PTSD.
Still, despite the growing number of vets clearly suffering,
the VA wouldn’t accept PTSD as a diagnostic entity.
“This was because many of them were talking about
atrocities, and that process was associated with a political view of the war,”
Lifton says.
Finally, in 1979, the VA opened up its own network of
storefront vet centers. A year later, the American Psychiatric Association
recognized PTSD as a legitimate medical diagnosis.
By the time the National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Study
concluded in 1988 that 30 percent of Vietnam vets suffered from PTSD, not many
were surprised.
Lifton and psychiatrists from the VA, including Matthew
Friedman, became leading experts on PTSD and pushed the condition into
psychiatric and public consciousness.
Through group and individual therapy, and sometimes
medication, the VA was helping veterans heal, though the process could take
years. But by the time US soldiers touched Iraqi soil, because of the enormous
growth in the number of vets seeking mental health services and the VA’s
failure to adequately respond, the advancements in PTSD treatment were being
compromised.
A new conflict, which bore an uneasy resemblance to Vietnam
for the doctors who knew that war’s demons, would test those advancements even
further.
As Crystal
Luker tells it, May 5 was the day her husband’s platoon ran into
trouble.
As usual, on that afternoon, Spec. Ron Luker was patrolling
a section of Baghdad with his 1st Cavalry Division platoon.
“There was a lieutenant in the first Humvee, Ron was in the
second, and his platoon sergeant was in the third with a group of privates,”
Crystal says.
A 19-year-old specialist from Tulsa named James Marshall,
whom Ron had been looking after, also rode in the third Humvee. As the convoy
snaked through a teeming Baghdad street market, there was an explosion.
“The lieutenant was yelling over the radio for all of them
to haul ass back to the base because they were coming under fire,” she says.
When Ron looked behind him, he was horrified. The third
Humvee was gone. He flipped his vehicle around and hurtled back down the street.
Crystal says Luker told her when they found the Humvee, the
force of the blast had blown the flesh from two of the privates all over the
seats. When Luker looked in the back, he saw Marshall, wrapped around the
vehicle’s .50-caliber gun.
“When Ron tried pulling James’s body out, his hands just
went right inside of him. He pulled James’s flak jacket back and his chest was
gone.”
Before that day, Luker called and wrote home religiously,
unburdening himself to the woman he’d fallen in love with at a Mariposa,
California, restaurant four years earlier. But when he came home to Fort Hood,
Texas, for a week in August, things changed dramatically.
That first night, at a welcome-home barbecue, Luker cornered
his wife in the kitchen.
“He asked why I’d been avoiding him and said that I didn’t
want to be around him,” Crystal says. When Ron started cursing, some Army
friends pulled him away. “You didn’t come all the way home to fight with your
wife,” they told him.
As the week went on, there was more arguing. Crystal says
her husband accused her of cheating while he was gone. He rifled through her
purse, the bedroom drawers, and repeatedly listened to old phone messages,
searching for proof.
“I told him, ‘You’re scaring me! You’re not acting right,
Ron!'” Crystal says.
Ron also seemed bothered around his three daughters. In an
emotional revelation, he told his wife why.
“He said he’d turned into a monster in Iraq. How he couldn’t
bounce his kids on his knee when he’d shoved guns in women’s faces and busted
into houses and pushed kids on the floor. He kept saying ‘I’m just trying to
remember who I was before.'”
Ron’s problems resemble those of the growing numbers of PTSD
soldiers. They also signal another trend: soldiers experiencing PTSD early.
While PTSD symptoms usually set in within three months of
the traumatic experience, Friedman told the New
England Journal of Medicine that they sometimes increase in severity during
the first two years after combat. VA psychologist Scott Murray says many vets
won’t feel symptoms of PTSD until 15 months from now.
“This early on, PTSD is much higher than anything we’ve seen
in previous conflicts,” Murray says. “We anticipate the numbers are only going
to keep getting higher.”
Psychologist Kaye Baron treats some 70 active soldiers and
their families in a private practice in Colorado Springs, near Fort Carson.
From clinical discussions she’s had with soldiers, Baron thinks the PTSD rate
could spike as high as 75 percent. Such a rate, Robert Jay Lifton says, is
inexorably tied to the war itself.
“This is a counterinsurgency being fought against an enemy
which is hard to identify, and that leads to extraordinary stress,” he says.
According to VA psychiatrist Shay, the issue with the most
potential for psychological torment is whether soldiers feel they’ve been led
into battle for a noble cause. Shay, who compared the Vietnam veteran’s battle
experience to that of Achilles in his book, Achilles
in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and The Undoing of Character, wrote how the Greek
hero felt betrayed by his arrogant general, Agamemnon, whose disrespect of a
priest of Apollo brought down a plague on the Greeks.
“If a soldier has experienced a betrayal of what’s right by
those in charge, their capacity for social trust can be impaired for the rest
of their lives,” Shay says.
Indeed, Sgt. Durman says he first began feeling
uncomfortable in Iraq when it became clear there were no weapons of mass
destruction. He says his unit was furious when Gen. Tommy Franks retired
mid-war, while the rest of National Guard and Reservists were subject to the
Army’s “stop-loss” policy, which has extended soldiers’ deployments.
Sergeant Padilla and Spec. Luker were outraged when they saw
Iraqi children playing in human sewage gurgling through the streets while the
Army did nothing. “I thought we were here to help these people,” Padilla
says.
That sense of betrayal translates into what Shay calls
“complex PTSD”: nightmares, paranoia, violence, self hate, and a crippling
distrust.
Shay, who also analogized the Vietnam veteran’s homecoming
to Odysseus’s tortured return to Ithaca in a second book, Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming,
says that after Vietnam, “Vets were coming home and burning through their
social capital. Everything in their life was being destroyed or used up.”
Peterson’s dream-induced violence, Padilla’s bar fights,
Durman’s drinking, and Luker’s accusations against his wife are powerful
examples of a similar dynamic.
According to the VA, veterans with PTSD are more apt to be
jobless, impoverished, homeless, addicted, imprisoned, without a stable family,
and three times more likely to die before the rest of us.
Many of the soldiers whom psychologist Baron treats tell her
they only want to get far away from their lives at home.
“They just want to go off in the mountains,” she says, “and
be by themselves.”
Since
reporting on this story began in October, Peterson and Durman have started
therapy at the VA. They’re likely getting some of the most advanced care in the
world. They’re also lucky. Peterson’s mother-in-law knows a VA psychiatrist,
and Durman was already enrolled, thanks to his time in the Navy.
Meanwhile, Padilla is trying to leave the military and says
he’ll get help once out. Luker is still in Iraq, and his wife says she’ll drag
him to the VA if she has to.
These soldiers won’t be alone. So far, more than 10,000
veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan have sought psychological help from the VA,
and there’s every indication the numbers will jump significantly.
Despite the challenges these numbers predict, Harold Kudler,
co-chair of the VA’s PTSD Committee, says: “We’ve never been so prepared,” and
points to unprecedented cooperation with the Department of Defense, intensified
PTSD outreach, and the 206 vet centers.
But some say that preparation is not enough. “You can only
provide the services for which you have the resources,” says VA psychologist
Murray. “There has to be significant improvement in an allocation of funds to
make that occur.”
On November 20, Congress added $1 billion to the Bush
administration’s $27.1 billion VA health-care budget for 2005. The amount fell
$1.5 billion short of what was recommended by the House Veterans Affairs
Committee. And while Congress earmarked
an additional $15 million for PTSD, few think that money will make much
difference.
“The heads of the VA health-care networks are all trying to
figure out how the hell they’re going to manage,” says Rick Weidman, director
of government relations for Vietnam Veterans of America.
As for the VA’s mental-health plan, which estimated an extra
$1.65 billion was needed to fully fix things, VA spokesperson Laurie Tranter
says, “We cannot comment on this now. The plan is still being finalized.”
Still, all the money and services in the world will not
necessarily solve the pain of PTSD.
In 1968, a young soldier named Lewis Puller came back from
Vietnam without his legs and parts of his hands, blown off by a Vietcong land
mine. Puller, the son of the most decorated Marine in US history, soon became a
veterans’ rights advocate and later a Pentagon lawyer. He married a politician,
had two children, and, in 1991, wrote a Pulitzer Prize winning book called Fortunate Son: The Healing of a Vietnam Vet.
Popular on Capitol Hill and among veterans, Puller had seemingly risen from the
physical wounds and the depression and alcoholism which haunted him for years
to live a remarkable life.
On May 11, 1994, 26 years after returning home, Puller shot
himself. In the end, the Soldier’s Heart hurt too much.
Amidst an outpouring of grief, one Vietnam vet wrote an
email to Jonathan Shay, which Shay published in Odysseus In America.
“I get real tired of hidin’ and runnin’ from the demons,”
the vet wrote. “Am I the only one? Has it crossed anyone else’s mind? You think
maybe Lew was right? Is it the only real escape? I got questions. I’m out of
answers.”
Thirty years from now, you wonder how many veterans from
this war will echo those words.
Barbara
Solow of the Independent Weekly in Durham, North Carolina, contributed
reporting to this story. “Soldier’s heart” was commissioned by the Association
of Alternative Newsweeklies, of which City Newspaper is a member. Dan Frosch is
a former staff writer for The Santa Fe Reporter and is currently a New
York-based freelance writer for The Nation, In These Times, and other
publications.
Other related articles from this issue.
ForHelping on the ground: a local perspective click here!
ForRefighting Vietnam (in Rochester)clickhere!
This article appears in Jan 12-18, 2005.
