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

Air Force not doing enough for the War Effort –SECDEF

Breaking news on MSNBC http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24238978/

Air Force must do more for war, Gates says

Pentagon chief: Getting aircraft to Iraq, Afghanistan ‘like pulling teeth’

AP–WASHINGTON - Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Monday the Air Force is not doing enough to help in the Iraq and Afghanistan war effort, complaining that some military leaders are “stuck in old ways of doing business.”

Gates complained in a speech at Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala., that getting the Air Force to send more surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft to Iraq and Afghanistan has been “like pulling teeth.”

The Pentagon chief praised the Air Force for its overall contributions but made a point of urging it to do more and to undertake more creative ways of thinking about helping the war effort.

He said he has been trying for months to get the Air Force to send more surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft, like the pilotless Predator drone that provides real-time surveillance video, to the battlefield.

“Because people were stuck in old ways of doing business, it’s been like pulling teeth,” Gates said. “While we’ve doubled this capability in recent months, it is still not good enough.”

To push the issue harder, Gates said he established last week a Pentagon-wide task force “to work this problem in the weeks to come, to find more innovative and bold ways to help those whose lives are on the line.”

PT INSTRUCTIONS, OPNAVINST 6110.1H

So you always have questions about the PFT program. Why not educmate yourself so you know what is what instead of going by word of mouth? PT is serious business during this war climate. I myself have fallen off the wagon since I got out 1 year ago today. Why do I write this? Because I am getting back on the wagon and starting PT today.

The Navy has always (In the past) had a culture of being portrayed as “FAT & LAZY”, unless you were a DOC who has served with the FMF. Those days are over especially since the IA (Individual Augmantee) program has kicked in. We now have quad zero’s with boots on the ground in IRAQ as well as Afghanistan and Africa.

Our culture itself has made us fat and lazy with the ease in which we can do things. When I was young as my son is @ 6 years old, I would have been outside all day long playing Cops and Robbers, or Cowboys and Indians (Now Native Americans of which I am one). I would come in after the day hot, dirty and sweaty and complain that I needed a bath.
Not anymore since the advent of Cable, Fast Food, and Video Games, Kids are now couch potatoes. Why? Look who is sitting next to them. Who are they emulating?

Well I myself even though I am retired am going to read this instruction, and am going to incorporate PT (Good for you, Good for me) in my daily life as are my kids. I even have convinced my kids principal to start a Daily PT Program each day with 30 mins of exercise next year. Yours truly will be leading it. Who knew?

Anyways, You can download OPNAVINST 6110.1H and the change to it OPNAVINST 6110.1H/CH1. I would advise highly reading it regardless if you are going to PT more as you are a DOC, and we always get questions about this program from shipmates in other rates, and I would bet you will see it again on your advancement tests.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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#