PRP Changes, You had better be educated!

MILLINGTON, Tenn. (NNS)

— A NAVADMIN released Sept. 29 emphasized the Navy’s exceptional progress in attaining
a culture of fitness and announces several policy revisions to strengthen the Navy Physical Readiness Program(PRP).

“Navy Physical Fitness Assessment (PFA) failures have decreased more than 50 percent over the past four years. We’re really seeing a change in culture and change in lifestyle. Better fitness ultimately leads to better quality of life, better performance and better readiness,” said Rear Adm. Daniel P. Holloway, director, Manpower, Personnel, Training and Education, N13.

In recent years, the Navy has made significant strides in helping sailors achieve a culture of fitness. The addition of elliptical and stationary bike options for the cardio portion of the PFA was welcomed by many sailors. A General Military Training (GMT) program on NKO in 2008 provides sailors greater insight for physical training and preparing for the PFA. Most recently, an official PT uniform was adopted around the fleet.

“Since 2005, the Navy has made significant strides to support and encourage physical fitness,” said Holloway, citing the addition of new testing options, which include the elliptical and stationary bike. “The majority of Navy personnel performs the PFA semi-annually and can easily meet or exceed the minimum physical fitness standards. I challenge each of you to continue the excellent progress we’ve made to improve Navy’s overall physical fitness for the improved health and readiness of the force.”

The new NAVADMIN builds on the Navy’s culture of fitness and supports the rigors of shipboard life, global missions and individual augmentees, according to Holloway. The changes announced in NAVADMIN 277/08 include: Effective Oct. 1, 2008, unless the most recent PFA was passed; sailors who have failed two PFAs in the past three years shall not be assigned to overseas,
pre-commissioning, instructor duty, special programs billets, or Global War on Terror (GWOT)Support Assignments (GSA). Special programs billets include recruit division Commander, recruiting duty, joint duty and Washington D.C. staff.

Additionally, individuals who have not passed the current PFA and have failed three times in four years, will not be allowed a short term extension for the purpose of passing the PFA.

Software upgrades to the Physical Readiness Information Management System (PRIMS) will allow commands to enter all waivers, including current progress and readiness waivers. Commands are required to enter all PFA waivers into PRIMS. Current waivers must be entered no later than Dec. 15, 2008. This upgrade will allow the Navy to track the progress of sailors who need administrative separation processing due to multiple PFA failures. Effective Oct. 1, 2009 the Navy will discontinue waivers for progress. The present requirement for processing for administrative separations (ADSEP) for three PFA failures within a four-year period remains.

For more information read NAVADMIN 277/08, posted on the NPC Web site at www.npc.navy.mil.

FORCM Navy Hospital Corps update for 02 September 2008

Download the info: Here:

**More Navy Doc Goodness from the FORCM!!
Landlord Foreclosure info

**CPO Re-balancing for newly minted CPO’s (I.e your moving!) Welcome to the CPO CRAZYTRAIN!

**IA info (Individual Augmentation) Update

**SRB, NEC Manning, and other goodness..

We will be discussing all of this, tomorrow night (Wednesday 03 Sept 2008) on our Attack of Da-Chief Netcast.  You can listen on Corpsman.com Live or directly on Talkshoe and get involved with the broadcast @ Talkshoe !

Enough Babbling, here is the FORCM info..

“From the Desk of the BUMED FORCE MASTER CHIEF”

and Director of the Hospital Corps

2 September 2008

1. LANDLORD FORECLOSURES

Please review the attached info sheet Landlord Foreclosures. This should provide some relief for Sailors who are in a situation where their landlord forecloses, and the Sailor and or their family is forced to move.

2. COMNAVSURFOR ANNUAL CPO RE-BALANCING
Please review the attached GENADMIN on COMNAVSURFOR CPO Re-Balancing due to selection results. This message provides guidelines for re-balancing excess CPO’s resulting from their recent CPO advancement selection.

3. FEDERAL VOTING ASSISTANCE PROGRAM (FVAP)

Are you registered to vote? Now’s the time to register and request your absentee ballot for the November 4, 2008 General Election!

Fill out the Voter Registration and Absentee Ballot Request Form at www.fvap.gov to register and request a ballot from your state. You can also use our new automated tool to guide you through completion of the Form, by following the link on our homepage.

Ask your Unit Voting Assistance Officer for help or a cardstock version of the Form.

Be smart, do your part, vote!

4. NAVY RESERVE COMPONENT INDIVIDUAL AUGMENTATION (IA) MOBILZATION

Please review the attached NAVADMIN 235/08 as it provides Business Rules for Navy Reserve Component IA Mobilizations.

5. NAVY FAMILY OMBUDSMAN APPRECIATION DAY

14 September is set aside to recognize the contribution of our Family Ombudsmen. These dedicated volunteers work tirelessly and give of their time to improve the readiness and lives of our Sailors and their families. For more information please review the attached NAVADMIN 217/08.

6. SELECTIVE REENLISTMENT BONUS (SRB)

Please review the attached NAVADMIN 240/08 as it announces the revised SRB Award Levels for Active and Reserve Component Full Time Support (FTS).

7. NEC MANNING (NECMAN) DOCUMENT

Understanding the NECMAN can be a challenge: Please review the attached NECMAN for August 2008. Enlisted Programmed Authorization (EPA) Total (Green): 2008 EPA numbers (updated twice a year) (BILLETS) Individual Account (IA) EPA Total (White): EPA personnel we planned for in the training pipeline.

Adjusted (Blue) is the difference between the EPA total and IA EPA.

INV TOTAL: (Green) monthly reported from the Digital Dashboard, the number of personnel actually in inventory (BODIES) I/A Account (White) number also reported monthly from the Digital Dashboard listing personnel in I/A account which includes TPPH (Transient, Patient, Prisoner, Holdee (TPPH), Student, and Limited Duty Pipelines Adjusted INV (Blue) is the difference between the Inv Total and I/A account Total Inv/EPA is the percentage we utilize to determine our manning for each NEC.

8. FORCE MASTER CHIEF/CPO SELECTEE RUN

I would like to thank all the participants that supported the Annual BUMED Force Master Chief run. We had over 200 Navy Chief Petty Officers and Chief Selects participate this year. The pride and enthusiasm we take in wearing the Anchors was evident throughout the day. I am already looking forward to next year’s event.

Director of the Hospital Corps

POINTS OF CONTACT

HMCM(SCW) Jim Menke
Deputy Director of the Hospital Corps
(202) 762-3139

HMCM(SW/FMF) Doug Glascoe

Hospital Corps Planner/From the Desk

(202) 762-3147

NCCS(SW/AW) Marco Soave
Navy Medicine Force Retention Hospital Corps Planner
(202) 762-3173

HMCS(FMF) Matt Lubold

HM Monthly

(202) 762-1682

HMCS(SW/AW) Jose Esquillin
FORCM Executive Assistant
(202) 762-3137

Ms. Evelyn Burford

Scheduler Exec. Secretary/Ret. Ltrs/Travel Mgr.

(202) 762-3030

Iraq: U.S. Fighters to be Disarmed???

WTF??

If this is what is going to happen, it is time to get our folks out of that god forsaken crap hole ASAP.  I don’t want any of our folks there if they cannot fire back or carry a weapon. From the AP, Read Below:

BAGHDAD — Iraq’s government is grateful to U.S.-allied Sunni fighters but won’t allow them to keep their weapons indefinitely, the prime minister said Saturday, hinting at a more intense crackdown on the Sunni groups.

In recent weeks, the Shiite-dominated government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has gone after Sunni fighters despite their alliances with the Americans. Some leaders have been arrested, while scores of others have been disarmed and banned from manning checkpoints except alongside security forces.

Al-Maliki’s government has mixed feelings about Sunni tribes that rose up against al-Qaida in Iraq, starting in 2007, and joined the Americans in the fight against the terror network.

The groups, known as Awakening Councils, Sons of Iraq and Popular Committees, have helped rout al-Qaida in some parts of Iraq. But Shiite leaders fear the Sunnis’ switch of allegiance is just a tactic, and that they could one day turn their weapons against the Shiite majority.

The U.S., which put many of the Sunni fighters on its payroll, has urged al-Maliki to incorporate them into his security forces, but the government has been slow to do so.

In a speech to Shiite tribal leaders in Baghdad on Saturday, al-Maliki mixed praise for the Sunni fighters with a warning. He said armed groups, alongside security forces, were tolerated for a limited period because their weapons were “aimed at the chests of the terrorists.”

“So they (the Sunni fighters) deserve our gratitude and the inclusion (into the security forces) because we adhere to a policy that there are no arms but the arms of the government,” he said.

In other developments Saturday, a suicide bomber struck a car bazaar in the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, killing at least five people and wounding at least seven others, according to the U.S. military and Iraqi police.

Among those killed was a senior member of a U.S.-allied Sunni group from nearby Diyala province, said Brig. Gen. Sarhat Qadir, a senior police official in Kirkuk. The bomber also was from Diyala, which has been an insurgent stronghold and is the site of ongoing U.S.-Iraqi military operations, Qadir said.

In the capital, gunmen killed an adviser to Iraqi Culture Minister Mahir al-Hadithi in a roadside ambush. A bodyguard was wounded in the attack along a main thoroughfare in eastern Baghdad, police and hospital officials said.

Two cars were involved in the killing of the adviser, Kamil Shiya, the officials said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak with the media. One vehicle blocked Shiya’s car and gunmen opened fire from the second vehicle.

Shiya’s death was confirmed by officials at nearby Kindi Hospital.

Something has to be done now. Leave a comment below what do you think?

Airline Baggage Problems!!!

Ohh.. This is classic.. Enjoy!!

Top enlisted Marines push corpsmen equal pay for deployments

Snagged this from Navytimes I am glad the Top Marine Enlisted Leaders are trying to look out for, us, IMHO the Navy “OFFICER” Leaders forget about those of us who serve with the Marine Corps.

What do you think?? Leave a comment Below:

When sailors deploy with Marine units, they live in the same conditions, eat the same food and face the same dangers.

But when Marine units are extended in Iraq or Afghanistan, the sailors don’t always get the same bonus pay. That needs to change, the Corps’ top enlisted members say.

The Corps’ sergeants major community has recommended to Marine Commandant Gen. James Conway that the service investigate options for giving those sailors the same assignment incentive pay, or AIP.

“You’re talking about being fair,” said Sgt. Maj. of the Marine Corps Carlton Kent, the Corps’ senior enlisted adviser. “We always have to be fair in the Marine Corps.”

The recommendation came out of the Sergeants Major Symposium, an annual meeting of top enlisted Marines in which policy recommendations are debated. Six command master chiefs were allowed to participate in the symposium for the first time, following an invitation from Kent.

Command Master Chief Raphael Sanchez, the top enlisted sailor with I Marine Expeditionary Force and Marine Corps Central Command, praised Kent for allowing command master chiefs to join the symposium, held from July 27 to Aug. 1.

Additionally, Sanchez said the issue of AIP is worth discussing.

“Even though it’s a [Defense Department] policy, the Navy implements it one way and the Marine Corps implements it another,” he said. “When you have sailors and Marines serving together … discrepancies kind of show up.”

Sanchez said the change would apply primarily to corpsmen, but also to religious program specialists and other sailors serving with Marines. About 8,000 sailors serve with the Corps, Sanchez said.

Sailors whose combat zone deployments are involuntarily extended beyond 12 months receive the same as Marines, $800 per month in AIP and an additional $200 in hardship duty pay, said Capt. Jerry Logan, acting director of the Navy’s Military Personnel Plans and Policy Division.

But the Navy has not sought to expand AIP to match the Corps’ policy of paying $250 per month to Marines extended beyond 210 days but less than 365 days, Logan said in a statement. “The Navy’s retention, recruiting and mission requirements differ from the Marine Corps, thus we use the Assignment Incentive Pay program differently,” he said.

The Navy offers AIP for various hard-to-fill billets via an auction-style Web site; sailors submit bids for pay they would accept in exchange for orders.

Sanchez said he is impressed with the Corps’ openness to discussing sailor issues. “I’ve been serving with the Marine Corps since 1993, and this is probably the most progressive that I have seen the Marine Corps be,” he said.

Leave a comment below!

FORCM For Navy Hospital Corps update for 18 August 2008

“From the Desk of the BUMED FORCE MASTER CHIEF”

and Director of the Hospital Corps

18 August 2008

forcm_18_aug_2008_files

1. LANDLORD FORECLOSURES

Please review the attached info sheet landlord foreclosures. This should provide some relief for Sailors who are in a situation where their landlord forecloses, and the Sailor or Sailors family is forced to move.

2. MILITARY HANDBOOKS NEWSLETTER – AUGUST 2008

Please review the attached Military Handbooks Newsletter, it provides some valuable information for all military personnel and their families. 

3. NATIONAL POW/MIA RECOGNITION DAY

The attached NAVADMIN 220/08 Highlights the Department of Defense Prisoner of War/Missing in Action (POW/MIA) public awareness program and solicits support for the 2008 National POW/MIA Recognition Day.

4. LEAVE POLICY CHANGES

The Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness has released a memorandum which summarizes the changes to the Leave Policy. For more information please review the attached NAVADMIN 221/08.

5. NAVY FAMILY OMBUDSMAN APPRECIATION DAY

14 September is set aside to recognize the contribution of our Family Ombudsman’s. These dedicated volunteers work tirelessly and give of their time to improve the readiness and lives of our Sailors and their families. For more information please review the attached NAVADMIN 217/08.

6. FORCE MASTER CHIEF/CPO SELECTEE RUN

As we are well into this year’s Season of Pride, my office has begun preparations for the annual FORCM/CPO Selectee Monument Run to be held on 29 August 2008. All Command Induction Committee Chairpersons are encouraged to contact HMCM(SW/FMF) Doug Glascoe or HMCS(SW/AW) Jose Esquilin for further information and roster development. Their contact info is listed at the bottom of the page. For lodging information please contact HMCS Rafael Felipe at (301) 319-8704 or via e-mail at Rafeal.Felipe@med.navy.mil.

Welcome to Corpsman.com Version 3.0!!

We are the #1 site for all Doc’s in the United States Military. We are a site for Doc’s run by Doc’s.

We are back up online with Version 3.0. CrazyCajun has been working on this upgrade for 2 months. Drop him a line and thank him!

You will find quite a bunch of new changes in this version.

If you have a story or you see news that we should put on our front page, please email me @ admin1@corpsman.com with a link etc. We always give credit to the email writer as well as the site supplying the news.

If you wish to write a article for our site or our newsletter, please email it to DeeDee @ editor@corpsman.com.

We have also Created a FLICKR account for Pictures of Doc’s doing their thing. What we don’t want are the “STOCK” Navy, Army, AF, Coast Guard pictures.

We want them from you, the folks doing the real job they do.

Vets you aren’t to be left out either. Do you have a function you want to promote?

Let us know. Do you have pictures from a reunion to put out? Let us know..

We ask though that all pictures you submit to us, you give your permission to display them on the front of our site in
our rotating picture area.

Please, if you find any bugs please drop us a line.

Please remember, the Forums are still here.. Just hit the forums button off the front page.

We will still be hosting our chats etc. in the E-Club chat area.

Thanks so much for your Brother, and Sisterhood. I have been out of the Navy “1″ year this month. I have gained a much bigger family through you all on Corpsman.com!

Thanks!

Day 5 Gotcha!! Those Activation Rumors…

Greetings!

GOTCHA!! Well got quite a few of you. Yesterday I posted that I had received a message via courier that I had been re-activated to active duty. What most didn’t catch though was yesterdays date.

Last year I got folks thinking I had sold out to Google, made a huge fake press release and everything. I was getting congrats from several folks, even folks in the media because it had gotten out to Google news. (Too funny!).

Well this year, I wasn’t sure if I could top it, but I did.

8404 was frantically trying to find a way for me to get out of it, until he heard my podcast. He had forgotten that yesterday was “April 1st”.

It truly was a great prank, I thank all of you who helped the seed spread. Hell I even had phone calls from Corps School wondering what was going on! (Naval Hospital Corps School was my last command.).

So with that wondrous holiday over, Spring is here, plants are starting to sprout and it looks like old man winter is taking a much needed rest. He deserves it.

We are completing our categories.. I have suggested quite a few to Crazy, and he will be putting them in order tomorrow. We are also creating a “WTF” list, (Usually a FAQ, but since most of us are Vets.. we are calling it WTF?)

More tomorrow, we are almost there. I believe we are keeping the colors we have as we have only had 1 negative comment and the rest have been positive.

Drop us a email if you see any bugs..

admin1@corpsman.com We will hunt it down and squash it..

Gnight!

Day 4 Happy Birthday Navy Chiefs, Recall to Active Duty, and a new Podcast/Netcast.

Happy Birthday Brothers and Sisters, Navy Chiefs far and wide!! 115 years strong.. Uhhh– Rah!  Keep up the good work and remember your job is to take care of your junior personnel, not yourself.  If your a Butt-Snorkler (I.e if your Ears Valsalva when your Divo Farts.. your a Butt Snorkler because your nose is so far up their rectum..) Please get out and let someone take your billet that will do the job!

If you haven’t figured it out, Today is April 1st, I am not being recalled to Active Duty.  I got a few folks though.. Too funny…

We also produced a podcast / netcast today, you can listen to it on the talkshoe application on our site.  All of our podcasts are hosted there.

We are hosting a Chat tonight from 2100-2300 EST in our E-Club Chat area on the forums. I will also be live @ http://live.yahoo.com/Corpsman_com

Hope to see you there!

To Important not to post … PTSD Story from Stars and Stripes

A Soldier’s Struggle With PTSD

March 29, 2008

Stars and Stripes|by Tracy Burton

Army Spc. Brandon Garrison looks fine. He pulls his wife, Lily, close. He gives her a quick kiss on the cheek and wraps his hand over her stomach, carrying their first child.

Inside, Garrison fights a rage that consumes most of his days since returning from 17 months of combat in Afghanistan. It’s a demon that shows no mercy and interrupts even simple routines like eating and sleeping. At any moment, halfway through a football game or in the middle of the night, he can lose himself to this evil.

This is his war now. A war that started on a battlefield a half a world away and has now embedded itself in his mind. Through nightmares, flashbacks, anxiety and fear, he battles this beast each day.

Garrison is among thousands of troops experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, as they return from Afghanistan or Iraq. The 21-year-old from northeastern Kansas is also part of a growing number of servicemembers whose well-being has been compromised in a system that’s supposed to take care of them.

The most troubling challenges facing these troops include:

Psychological trauma and mental health care not always receiving the same priority as physical injuries.

Army claims of pre-existing personality disorders, which in many cases slash disability benefits and long-term mental health care for otherwise eligible combat veterans.

The enemy Garrison encountered daily in combat still haunts him. He sees the faces of his fallen brothers. He smells the dirty air, amid the blood. Screams of panic broken with hums of moaning pain lingers and the dust ensues yet another storm inside him.

That is until he finds his way back to Lily, and back to the life he knew before war.

“Without her, I seriously wouldn’t be alive right now,” Garrison said.

Garrison’s platoon from the Army’s 10th Mountain Division based in Fort Drum, N.Y., specializes in fighting in harsh conditions. In northeast Afghanistan they were stationed in Pech Valley Korengal Outpost, one the country’s deadliest valleys.

Now that Garrison is home, he belongs to one of the Army’s Warrior Transition Units, which provides command and control, primary care and case management for servicemembers receiving treatment for wounds suffered while fighting in the war on terror. The unit works to “promote their timely return to the force or transition to civilian life.”

Here is his story.

Shortly after Garrison returned from Afghanistan last June, he headed home on a 30-day leave to Leavenworth, Kansas.

“That’s when my nightmares began,” he said. “I remember waking up in the middle of the night. I’d sit straight up in bed and it was just hard to breathe and I was panicking and I remember my wife Lily asking me if I was OK and I remember crying in her arms several times because of horrific visions that I had, and the memories and the mass casualties that we suffered.”

Nothing in particular triggered the attacks. He would hear a song or a report about the war and before he knew it, he was reliving it.

Garrison started drinking almost daily. It was the only way he knew to escape.

In August, he left to regroup with his unit in Fort Drum. Lily stayed with his folks because Garrison was going to be reassigned to a new base, so it didn’t make sense for her to go right then.

Garrison was OK when he was working. But the second he was alone, the flashbacks returned. It was terrifying and always zoomed back to one event. On this day in Afghanistan, Garrison was watching soldiers patrol a valley below him. It was almost time for them to return when the enemy launched rocket-propelled grenades and gunfire into their path.

Garrison and other soldiers helped the injured until medics arrived.

Blood was everywhere.

Garrison went to his friend, 24-year-old Spc. Christopher Wilson, and held a pressure dressing tightly against his stomach, but his young life was slipping away.

Wilson, whose greatest fear in this war was not coming home to his little girl, died a short while later.

“He was a very good soldier … a good friend,” Garrison said. “He was very brave through it all.”

Garrison needed help. He and Lily fought to where they didn’t know how much their marriage could take.

He was never much of a drinker before war. Lily wanted to understand, but she couldn’t.

“To know I had pushed a woman so close to me that far away just because of the trauma I was experiencing … that really just made it worse,” Garrison explained.

He started to hate himself.

“At the time I had been denying God and spirituality was always a big part of my life and I was actually cursing God himself and that’s when I knew that my life was taking a big downfall,” he said.

In September, Garrison went to the behavioral health clinic on base and met with a psychiatrist who diagnosed him with post-traumatic stress disorder.

He agreed to meet with Garrison every week or two and prescribed Trazodone and Ambien to help him sleep.

“I was calling out for help … but I was afraid to say ’suicide,’” Garrison recalled. “I was afraid to tell them what I was truly feeling because that puts a label on you and they patronize you.”

He kept it far from his command.

But by mid-September, Garrison couldn’t take it. He returned to doctors on base and told them he was feeling suicidal. They told him he had to see a regular doctor because they were booked.

The next day he found a doctor off base who prescribed Valium, which helped desensitize his reality. He heard a couple guys who committed suicide from their unit overdosed on Valium.

He was afraid to take it, but he was desperate.

It was football season. Garrison thought it would be good to get out, so he started going to the local bar to watch the games.

For weeks he did this. He was now mixing prescription drugs and alcohol. It seemed to help.

But on September 29 it all caught up.

That morning, he woke with the horrors of Afghanistan. He swallowed four Valium.

Later on he went to the bar. He took two more Valium and started drinking beer.

As he watched the game, he started getting excited. His adrenaline was pumping. Then he saw blood. Dirty air seeped in his senses and screams of horror quickly replaced the cheers.

It felt like iron weight settled in his chest. It was hard to breathe. His hands and feet throbbed. His heart was beating faster and faster and faster, like a hamster spinning a wheel.

Garrison rushed outside to his truck and blasted the air conditioning.

He could barely hold his cell phone as he struggled to dial 911. He blanked out off and on as the operator on the other end told him to keep breathing.

Within minutes ambulances and military police arrived. Paramedics strapped a plastic oxygen mask over his face and rushed him to the closest hospital in Watertown, N.Y.

He woke up several hours later with a man from the hospital’s intensive mental health unit next to him. He asked Garrison if he was suicidal.

“I broke down and cried right there,” Garrison said. “I told him I didn’t want to live anymore.”

The man said he served in Vietnam, and there was no shame in crying.

“I have a wife and a child on the way,” Garrison said through sobs. “I love them very much. I don’t want to be like this anymore, but I don’t want to live when I have these attacks, when I blank out, when I have these flashbacks.”

“I’m trying to be a good soldier. Please don’t tell my chain of command,” he pleaded.

Garrison was admitted into the psychiatric ward.

“That was the most traumatic part, but at the same time it was a relief because here I was in a place now where it was nothing but civilians,” Garrison explained. “I was away from the uniforms.”

After intense medical evaluations, Garrison was diagnosed with PTSD, anxiety and depression, according to his medical records.

For about a month, he attended group therapy and met with doctors daily.

These doctors were different. They didn’t judge him, or compare their story to his. No one said, “Suck it up, soldier.”

They listened to his every word. They sympathized with him.

He let everything out.

In late October, the military transferred Garrison to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. There he was spun through another cycle of psychiatric tests. Military doctors at Walter Reed diagnosed Garrison with PTSD and a borderline personality disorder.

Over the last six years, Defense Department records show that more than 22,500 personality disorder discharges have been processed.

A number of reports from servicemembers, veterans’ service organizations, and the media claiming ‘personality disorder’ discharges have been implemented inappropriately has spurred mental health professionals and political leaders into action.

“It’s ridiculous,” said Rep. Bob Filner, D-Calif. “If they have a personality disorder, why didn’t the military know about it before? Why did the soldier get into the service to begin with?”

Filner, who chairs the Veterans Affairs Committee and has met with soldiers overseas, said he’s talked with military doctors who told him that they were directed to misdiagnose.

“I think it’s a purposeful diagnosis to save money,” he said.

An amendment in the FY 2008 National Defense Authorization Act limits the Pentagon’s use of personality disorders. The act, signed into law Jan. 28, also calls for a full accounting by April 1 for the thousands of servicemembers discharged on the basis of personality disorder.

Dr. Charles Goodstein, a psychiatrist at the New York University Medical Center and former military psychiatrist, said that in the Vietnam era, “personality disorder” diagnoses were the rationale for separation from the service.

He explained that an individual’s underlying personality disorder could have easily eluded detection at the time of entry into the military, but in time would become very evident and therefore incompatible with further service. Goodstein, who has been in the mental health field for 44 years, also volunteers his time counseling troops.

“Psychological services have taken a back seat to the more obvious medical services for these men and women coming home from war,” he said. “It’s amazing that anyone could return without experiencing, to some degree the symptoms associated with post-traumatic stress disorder.”

At Walter Reed, Garrison feels like he’s not entitled to be an injured soldier.

“Once you get down here and you get around the uniforms again is when the stress starts again … like a slap in the face - wake up, you’re still in the Army,” he said. “You’re treated like a soldier here and you have the expectations of a soldier and the stress of a soldier.”

And you must act like a soldier.

“I’ve had my commander and my first sergeant here look me in the face and tell me ‘You look fine to me,’” Garrison said. “They told me: You look like a squared-away soldier. You don’t look like there’s anything wrong.”

For three weeks at $71 a night, Garrison and Lily stayed at the Mologne House, a 280-room hotel located on Walter Reed’s campus. If Garrison were alone, he would’ve stayed in an old dorm-style building with other troops with mental or psychiatric trauma.

These troops must pay out of their own pocket if they want family members by their side while they recover at facilities such as Walter Reed.

Servicemembers with physical injuries are more likely to receive “Invitation Traveling Orders,” which provides family members rooms at the Mologne House. Or if the hotel is full, which it typically is, they can stay at area hotels including the Marriott or the Hilton, which cost a paying guest $119 to $289 a night.

The Army also pays an average of $64 a day for food and travel.

Garrison was told Lily could stay under an “ITO.”

“Then they told me no because I’m not handicapped and that it’s only psychiatric and that I don’t need somebody there,” Garrison said. “But any psychiatrist will argue that someone who’s going through this treatment and working through the medications and the stress … they will tell you we do need someone there.”

The night before Thanksgiving, Lily found Garrison in the bathroom.

“He was banging his head on the wall … over and over,” she said through tears. “I can’t leave him like this.”

The horror held on for several more minutes until Garrison came to with Lily at his side.

Lily is his saving grace.

“This is what connects someone back into life,” said Dr. Judith Broder, founder of The Soldiers Project, a nonprofit organization that offers free mental health counseling to veterans and their families.

“There is hope for these men and women,” Broder said. “The human being has a lot of resiliency, but it’s very important to be connected with family … girlfriends, wives, parents, grandparents, anybody close to that soldier can be a bridge that gradually brings them back to themselves.”

In late November, Garrison planned to start an intense therapy program at Walter Reed, but the day it was supposed to begin his command gave him new orders: He was to return to Fort Drum later that week to prepare for medical discharge.

“I’m scared as hell to go back there,” Garrison said before he left Walter Reed in early December. “I feel like I’ve been pushed aside … like I’m on my own to get better.”

Garrison was told he would return to Walter Reed sometime in February to continue treatment.

It never happened.

Garrison worries about his future. He’s accepted that he can’t be a soldier in war ever again.

“That terrifies me and it hurts me at the same time because here I was a soldier that volunteered for deployment,” he said. “I loved putting that uniform on every day and now when I put it on all I feel is the ulcerations in my stomach and the sickness and the anxiety and the worries, because it’s constant memories of what happened and what I’ve been through after wearing it.”

For now, his cell phone ring tone plays “Home” by Daughtry:

“Oh, well I’m going home,

Back to the place where I belong,

And where your love has always been enough for me.

I’m not running from.

No, I think you got me all wrong.

I don’t regret this life I chose for me.

But these places and these faces are getting old.

I said these places and these faces are getting old.

So I’m going home.

I’m going home.”

To Garrison, the lyrics could be summarized in one word.

Lily.

Today, she remains at his side, now joined by their new son, named in honor of a warrior who has gone home.

Christopher.

Garrison and Lily currently live in an apartment in Watertown, N.Y. Garrison is waiting to present his case before the Army’s medical review board. Lily gave birth to the couple’s first child Wednesday.

Original Article From Stars and Stripes but hosted @ military.com  http://www.military.com/news/article/a-soldiers-struggle-with-ptsd.html?ESRC=eb.nl#