PFC Dwyer loses Battle with PTSD

Soldier in photo dies after PTSD struggle

By Kelly Kennedy - Staff writer
Posted : Thursday Jul 3, 2008 17:03:09 EDT

During the first week of the war in Iraq, a Military Times photographer captured the arresting image of Army Spc. Joseph Patrick Dwyer as he raced through a battle zone clutching a tiny Iraqi boy named Ali.

The photo was hailed as a portrait of the heart behind the U.S. military machine, and Doc Dwyer’s concerned face graced the pages of newspapers across the country.

But rather than going on to enjoy the public affection for his act of heroism, he was consumed by the demons of combat stress he could not exorcise. For the medic who cared for the wounds of his combat buddies as they pushed toward Baghdad, the battle for his own health proved too much to bear.

On June 28, Dwyer, 31, died of an accidental overdose in his home in Pinehurst, N.C., after years of struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder. During that time, his marriage fell apart as he spiraled into substance abuse and depression. He found himself constantly struggling with law, even as friends, Veterans Affairs personnel and the Army tried to help him.

“Of course he was looked on as a hero here,” said Capt. Floyd Thomas of the Pinehurst Police Department. Still, “we’ve been dealing with him for over a year.”

The day he died, Dwyer apparently took pills and inhaled the fumes of an aerosol can in an act known as “huffing.” Thomas said Dwyer then called a taxi company for a ride to the hospital. When the driver arrived, “they had a conversation through the door [of Dwyer’s home],” Thomas said, but Dwyer could not let the driver in. The driver asked Dwyer if he should call the police. Dwyer said yes. When the police arrived, they asked him if they should break down the door. He again said yes.

“It was down in one kick,” Thomas said. “They loaded him up onto a gurney, and that’s when he went code.”

Dwyer served in Iraq with 3rd Squadron, 7th Cavalry Regiment as the unit headed into Baghdad at the beginning of the war. As they pushed forward for 21 days in March 2003, only four of those days lacked gunfire, he later told Newsday. The day before Warren Zinn snapped his photo for Military Times, Dwyer’s Humvee had been hit by a rocket.

About 500 Iraqis were killed during those days, and Dwyer watched as Ali’s family near the village of al Faysaliyah was caught in the crossfire. he grabbed the 4-year-old boy from his father and sprinted with him to safety. Zinn grabbed the moment on his camera. The image went nationwide and Dwyer found himself hailed as a hero.

He did not see it that way.

“Really, I was just one of a group of guys,” he later told Military Times. “I wasn’t standing out more than anyone else.”

According to Dwyer, he was just one of many who wanted to help after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. He’d grown up in New York, and when the towers came crashing down, he went to see a recruiter.

“I knew I had to do something,” he said. Just before he left for Iraq, he got married.

But when he returned from war after three months in Iraq, he developed the classic, treatable symptoms of PTSD. like so many other combat vets, he didn’t seek help. In restaurants, he sat with his back to the wall. He avoided crowds. He stayed away from friends. He abused inhalants, he told Newsday. In 2005, he and his family talked with Newsday to try to help other service members who might need help. He talked with the paper from a psychiatric ward at Fort Bliss, Texas, where he was committed after his first run-in with the police.

In October 2005, he thought there were Iraqis outside his window in El Paso, Texas. When he heard a noise, he started shooting. Three hours later, police enticed him to come out and no one was injured.

Dwyer promised to go to counseling, and promised to tell the truth. He seemed excited about his wife’s pregnancy.

But the day he died, he and his wife had not been together for at least a year, Thomas said.

And almost exactly a year ago — June 26, 2007 — Dwyer had again been committed to a psychiatric ward. Thomas said police received a 911 call that Dwyer was “having mental problems relating to PTSD.” “We responded and took him in,” Thomas said. “He’s been in and out.”

Military Times could not reach Dwyer’s family, but his wife, Matina Dwyer, told the Pinehurst Pilot, “He was a very good and caring person. He was just never the same when he came back, because of all the things he saw. He tried to seek treatment, but it didn’t work.”

She told the paper she hoped his death would bring more awareness about PTSD.

In 2003, Dwyer was still hopeful about the future, and about his place in the war.

“I know that people are going to be better for it,” he told Military Times. “The whole world will be. I hope being here is positive, because we’re a caring group of people out here.”

Deployment “RUT” I feel for them..

I have been there. I have been in their shoes. I wish there was something I could do to help my brother out who is winding down on his “4th” Deployment to Iraq.

Yeah it sounds like it should be happy time, bells and whistles etc, but in reality it is the worst of times. The newness of the deployment has worn off. Loved ones have learned to get along without you. Your focus is on the daily mission and nothing else. Little things that never ticked you off do at a moments notice.

I can relate. Gysgt Bermudez and myself, great friends, Would joke and coke all the time, I remember when we almost came to blows on a deployment due to stupid tensions. Crap that I didn’t understand (He did) and that was all brushed under the rug when we got back, but at the time, I would have killed over.

This is the Rut of Deployments, the most dangerous time for a Corpsman taking care of his charges.

Read HM1 Dustmans Post below from his site “Doc in the Box”

Sean is working on his 4th Deployment. I had been worrying about him for the last 2 weeks as we have not heard from him. HM1 is a writer plain and simple. He’s one of those unique folks that can put thoughts on paper and you just understand what he is going through. The Navytimes thinks so as well and have used his articles for their papers.

I started to worry from the silence, but today he popped up from under his rock. Here are his words from his site. For you young bucks out there.. this should be read and heeded.

Monday, June 02, 2008
My brain has stopped adding words together

I’ve hit the slump of the deployment along with many of the Marines and Sailors that I work the only difference is this is the first time that the slump has shut down my writing cold. I would put an idea on paper and try to expand on it and would end up having monosyllable conversations with myself. As painful as it is to have a conversation with one of those people, it’s worse to read it.

I did a two blog post a while back ago called Twilight of the Deployment (take one and take two) and I can’t really improve on either of them with this block filling up my head just to note that my unit is in that period of time.

The Dear John’s or Jane’s have started trickling in one party, here or there is shocked and can’t believe it’s happening to them. It’s that season of the deployment, between the middle till right before we get home. I’ve been here before and most of the Staff NCO’s I work with are on their second or third marriage, it’s the junior guys that worry me. Right now is where relationships crumble, one party realizes that they really don’t like being alone or that their significant other isn’t the “One” or meets someone special who isn’t far away and don’t know how to break it off with someone on the other side of the world then waits till right before they get home. There is no easy way to break off a serious relationship.

Where one party is lonely and falls for someone they are interacting with daily and breaks the relationship off. The spouse that cleans out the bank account and max’s out credit cards out of spite and disappears. Tired of the lack of email, phone calls, letters, etc. Tired of how the other party is spending their finances.

I see these stories every single day, the names and faces change and as a leader or a healer, you have to help these people make something constructive out of the crap that life took on them. For an air unit like mine, it’s not the suicide bombers or the mortars that cause most of us to toss and turn at night or think it’s not worth it anymore. It’s the worry about the person we expected to spend the rest of our lives with on the other side of the world. The military is tough on family life any way you look at it and there isn’t a cookie cutter solution that can fix all of the problems.

For me, this trip I’m just soul weary tired, 4 trips out here is beginning to add up and it’s tough to keep that cheery grin on my face or to find the words to put words down on paper. The last year was a bit rough on my psyche and I haven’t a chance to patch all of the holes that have been made. It all adds up in the end.

If I haven’t proved it in the past, I do write when I’m depressed but that’s not exactly what I’m feeling right now. I just a sense of numbness in my brain, I’m trying to talk some of them out, the heartache I’m feeling isn’t for me, it’s for the people whom I work with and care about. It sucks not having an answer to such big questions when they are so desperately. My head feels like I’ve stretched something too far and it broke away.

Speaking of away, while I wasn’t typing on the keyboard I did get a chance to read everything by an author named Jim Butcher and Bane, I agree, thanks for the tip. One of the ingredients that probably added to my writers block was the lack of sleep I was getting because I couldn’t stop reading. Seriously, he’s good.

I’m sorry for not popping my head up for an entire month, every writer I know hits a low point in their writing and this has been mine. Some days they flow from my fingers but I just haven’t found it lately and I’m not one of those people that like tossing up words.

This is stuff you can’t learn in a book, this is why we have leaders like HM1 and Crazycajun who impart valuable knowledge to our juniors.

This is why we have Corpsman.com

Official Urged Fewer Diagnoses of PTSD

It’s all about money unfortunately, not about what is right. Vote this year make your Vote count. Don’t be sheep actually look at what is going on.–D/C

By Christopher Lee
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 16, 2008

A psychologist who helps lead the post-traumatic stress disorder program at a medical facility for veterans in Texas told staff members to refrain from diagnosing PTSD because so many veterans were seeking government disability payments for the condition.

“Given that we are having more and more compensation seeking veterans, I’d like to suggest that you refrain from giving a diagnosis of PTSD straight out,” Norma Perez wrote in a March 20 e-mail to mental-health specialists and social workers at the Department of Veterans Affairs’ Olin E. Teague Veterans’ Center in Temple, Tex. Instead, she recommended that they “consider a diagnosis of Adjustment Disorder.”

VA staff members “really don’t . . . have time to do the extensive testing that should be done to determine PTSD,” Perez wrote.

Adjustment disorder is a less severe reaction to stress than PTSD and has a shorter duration, usually no longer than six months, said Anthony T. Ng, a psychiatrist and member of Mental Health America, a nonprofit professional association.

Veterans diagnosed with PTSD can be eligible for disability compensation of up to $2,527 a month, depending on the severity of the condition, said Alison Aikele, a VA spokeswoman. Those found to have adjustment disorder generally are not offered such payments, though veterans can receive medical treatment for either condition.

Perez’s e-mail was obtained and released publicly yesterday by VoteVets.org, a veterans group that has been critical of the Bush administration’s policies in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a nonprofit government watchdog group.

“Many veterans believe that the government just doesn’t want to pay out the disability that comes along with a PTSD diagnosis, and this revelation will not allay their concerns,” John Soltz, chairman of VoteVets.org and an Iraq war veteran, said in a statement.

Melanie Sloan, executive director of CREW, said in a statement: “It is outrageous that the VA is calling on its employees to deliberately misdiagnose returning veterans in an effort to cut costs. Those who have risked their lives serving our country deserve far better.”

Veterans Affairs Secretary James B. Peake said in a statement that Perez’s e-mail was “inappropriate” and does not reflect VA policy. It has been “repudiated at the highest level of our health care organization,” he said.

“VA’s leadership will strongly remind all medical staff that trust, accuracy and transparency is paramount to maintaining our relationships with our veteran patients,” Peake said.

Peake said Perez has been “counseled” and is “extremely apologetic.” Aikele said Perez remains in her job.

A Rand Corp. report released in April found that repeated exposure to combat stress in Iraq and Afghanistan is causing a disproportionately high psychological toll compared with physical injuries. About 300,000 U.S. military personnel who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan are suffering from PTSD or major depression, the study found. The economic cost to the United States — including medical care, forgone productivity and lost lives through suicide — is expected to reach $4 billion to $6 billion over two years.

Ng said diagnosing PTSD often requires observing a patient for weeks or months because the condition implies a long, lingering effect of stress. “Most people exposed to trauma, in general, can get better,” Ng said. “You don’t want to over-diagnose people with PTSD. Whether it’s adjustment disorder is one thing. It’s usually a temporary disorder with severity that is not as bad as someone with full-blown PTSD.”

From National Veterans Foundation

Maine National Guard has forward thinking.

Kudo’s to the State of “MAINE’s” National Guard. They are testing folks for cognative skills etc prior to deploying to the mid-east. This is really the only way to know what folks have suffered due to brain injuries from the conflict over there. Not only does it help with Physical injuries but PTSD as well.

This article from WBZTV.com.

Maine Guard embarks on brain injury initiative

PORTLAND, Maine (AP) The Maine Army National Guard has embarked on a program to test its members before and after they’re deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan in what is thought to be the first state-level initiative to identify brain injuries in troops.

The Guard is collaborating with Dartmouth Medical School in giving computerized cognition tests to Guard members before they go overseas. It’s the same test given to National Football League players to test their memory and attention span.

The members will be given the same test when they return home to determine the extent of their brain injuries. Concussions are considered the signature wounds of war the force of explosives can rattle the brain against the skull, causing serious injury but untold numbers of soldiers don’t get diagnosed.

Elizabeth Pearson, the Dartmouth researcher who helped create the program, said more than 150 Guard members were tested earlier this year before they left for yearlong tours

”I just kept thinking ‘please come home safe,”’ Pearson said. ”I don’t know what’s going to happen between now and January. I hope everybody is right where they were.”

The project, which is funded by a three-year, $300,000 grant from the Maine Health Access Foundation, is being followed closely by other states, said Lt. Col. Patrick Tangney, the Maine Army National Guard state surgeon. The Army also is working on a plan similar to the one in Maine, he said.

The Veterans Affairs hospital in Togus is currently treating 62 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans for brain injury, said spokesman James Doherty. But the number of actual injuries is believed to be much higher.

Some veterans choose to see doctors in the civilian sector, while those still in active duty are treated by medical personnel with the Department of Defense. In some cases, doctors may not recognize the symptoms because of inexperience.

”A lot of physicians aren’t trained in brain injury or have minimal training, and so they miss it,” said Marcia Cooper, the project’s manager.

Some patients may underreport their symptoms, which include headaches, fatigue, dizziness and memory loss. And some may not exhibit any symptoms at an initial screening, said Kathy Russin, a licensed clinical social worker who works with Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans at Togus.

”I’ve had the opportunity to get to know someone and something just looked like it required more investigation, a year or two later,” she said.

Besides identifying brain injuries, the program is also trying to make sure troops get care if they need it. The program is holding two workshops for health care workers in June in Orono and Portland to improve their understanding of brain injuries.

RAND CORP: PTSD STUDY–MENTAL HEALTH CRISIS

editor–This was taken from Military.com

WASHINGTON - Some 300,000 U.S. troops are suffering from major depression or post traumatic stress from serving in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and 320,000 received brain injuries, a new study estimates.

Only about half have sought treatment, said the study released Thursday by the RAND Corporation.

“There is a major health crisis facing those men and women who have served our nation in Iraq and Afghanistan,” said Terri Tanielian, the project’s co-leader and a researcher at the nonprofit RAND.

“Unless they receive appropriate and effective care for these mental health conditions, there will be long-term consequences for them and for the nation,” she said in an interview with The Associated Press.

The 500-page study is the first large-scale, private assessment of its kind - including a survey of 1,965 service members across the country, from all branches of the armed forces and including those still in the military as well veterans who have left the services.

Its results appear consistent with a number of mental health reports from within the government, though the Defense Department has not released the number of people it has diagnosed or who are being treated for mental problems. The Department of Veterans Affairs said this month that its records show about 120,000 who served in the two wars and are no longer in the military have been diagnosed with mental health problems. Of the 120,000, approximately 60,000 are suffering from PTSD, the VA said.

Veterans Affairs is responsible for care of service members after they have left the service, while the Defense Department covers active duty and reservist needs. The lack of information from the Pentagon was one motivation for the RAND study, Tanielian said.

The most prominent and detailed military study on mental health that is released is the Army’s survey of soldiers at the warfront. Officials said last month that it’s most recent one, done last fall, found 18.2 percent of soldiers suffered a mental health problem such as depression, anxiety or acute stress in 2007 compared with 20.5 percent the previous year.

The Rand study, completed in January, put the percentage of PTSD and depression at 18.5 percent, calculating that approximately 300,000 current and former service members were suffering from those problems at the time of its survey, which was completed in January.

The figure is based on Pentagon data showing over 1.6 million military personnel have deployed to the conflicts since the war in Afghanistan began in late 2001.

RAND researchers also found:

-About 19 percent - or some 320,000 services members - reported that they experienced a possible traumatic brain injury while deployed. In wars where blasts from roadside bombs are prevalent, the injuries can range from mild concussions to severe head wounds.

-About 7 percent reported both a probable brain injury and current PTSD or major depression.

-Only 43 percent reported ever being evaluated by a physician for their head injuries.

-Only 53 percent of service members with PTSD or depression sought help over the past year.

-They gave various reasons for not getting help, including that they worried about the side effects of medication; believe family and friends could help them with the problem, or that they feared seeking care might damage their careers.

-Rates of PTSD and major depression were highest among women and reservists.

The report is titled “Invisible Wounds of War: Psychological and Cognitive Injuries, Their Consequences, and Services to Assist Recovery.” It was sponsored by a grant from the California Community Foundation and done by 25 researchers from RAND Health and the RAND National Security Research Division, which also has done does work under contracts with the Pentagon and other defense agencies as well as allied foreign governments and foundations.

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#