Wounded veterans congregate in Tacoma

The communities surrounding Tacoma have the highest per capita population of seriously disabled Iraq and Afghanistan veterans on the West Coast, according to Department of Veterans Affairs records. Veterans come to the region for several reasons. Some finish their military careers at nearby Joint Base Lewis-McChord, which is home to two Stryker brigades deployed in Afghanistan. Some seek medical care at the base’s Warrior Transition Battalion before they leave the service. And others stay for the resources at Puget Sound Veterans Affairs hospitals and clinics, as well as for the region’s diverse economy and its generally supportive attitude toward veterans.

“They live here because they’re welcome here. I honestly believe that,” said retired Army Lt. Col. Jake Holeman, 66, a Vietnam veteran and an officer in a local chapter of Disabled American Veterans.

But even with the goodwill, the presence of thousands of seriously disabled veterans poses new and lasting challenges for the region as it learns to assimilate the generation of service members who bore the brunt of a decade of combat in the Middle East.

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., chairwoman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, said, “We have thousands of veterans coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan in the next year and a half, and that could overwhelm the system very quickly.”

Policy makers foresee multiple challenges for disabled veterans as the wars end, such as:

• Many veterans with severe combat-related stress still face long waits to get the care they need, despite adding billions of dollars for mental health care to Department of Veterans Affairs budgets the last four years, and the hiring of 7,000 more mental health professionals at VA clinics and hospitals. A rule directs that veterans with severe PTSD begin treatment within 14 days of seeking care, but needed therapy gets delayed by weeks or months.

• Nearly half of disabled veterans from all generations recently surveyed by the Pew Research Center said their combat injuries prevented them from holding down steady work after they left the service.

• About half of homeless veterans have disabilities.

Veterans Affairs data show that some 5,000 seriously disabled Iraq and Afghanistan veterans live in the region around Tacoma. According to VA criteria, a seriously disabled veteran is one who is 50 percent to 100 percent unable to perform his job in the military.

Retired Staff Sgt. Jim Dahl of Des Moines, Wash., is one soldier who settled in the South Puget Sound area as he left the Army because of injuries he suffered in Iraq. Dahl, 43, has wounds to his head, neck, back and legs, but he’s considered disabled by the VA because of the PTSD he developed during his deployments.

“They didn’t expect the war to go on as long as it did, and they didn’t expect it to be as violent as it was,” Dahl said.

He said Puget Sound VA has treated him well, but he has not yet found counseling he trusts. He avoids anti-depressants and counseling because he finds they do more harm than good. Instead, he tries to live simply, takes cooking classes and is putting together a plan to open a bed and breakfast where veterans can relax by working with horses.

State Rep. Tina Orwall, D-Des Moines, just led a hearing in Olympia in which lawmakers advanced several bills to help veterans land on their feet when they leave the service. She’d like to expand social services for former service members to access immediately after they leave the military. That can be a vulnerable period because it can take months for veterans to figure out how to get what they need from the VA.

The safety net for those veterans is not “nearly what it’s going to need to be for the men and women coming back,” Orwall said. “It’s pretty scary.”

– edited from The News Tribune (Tacoma, Wash.), Dec. 5, 2011
PeaceMeal, Nov/December 2011

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Ex-Marine, veterans’ advocate kills himself

Handsome and friendly, Clay Hunt so epitomized a vibrant Iraq veteran that he was chosen for a public service announcement that told veterans that they aren’t alone. The 28-year-old former Marine corporal earned a Purple Heart and returned to combat in Afghanistan. Upon his return home, he lobbied for veterans on Capitol Hill, road-biked with wounded veterans and performed humanitarian work in Haiti and Chile. Then, on March 31, Hunt bolted himself in his Houston apartment and shot himself.

Hunt’s death has shaken many veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those who knew him wonder why someone who seemed to be doing all the right things to deal with combat-related issues is now dead. Friends and family say he was wracked with survivor’s guilt, depression and other emotional struggles after combat. But with his boundless energy and countless friends, he came across as an example of how to live life after combat.

But some knew he was grieving over several close friends in the Marines who were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. “He was very despondent about why he was alive and so many people he served with directly were not alive,” said John Wordin, 48, the founder of Ride 2 Recovery, a program that uses bicycling to help veterans heal physically and mentally.

In 2007, while in Iraq with the Marine’s 2nd Battalion, 7th Regiment, Hunt heard over the radio that his 20-year-old bunkmate had died in a roadside bombing. Hunt later wrote online about sleeping in his bunkmate’s bed. “I just wanted to be closer to him, I guess. But I couldn’t — he was gone.”

A month later, Hunt was pinned by enemy fire in his truck as a fellow Marine, shot in the throat by a sniper, lay nearby. Hunt wrote that seeing his friend placed in a helicopter, where he died, is “a scene that plays on repeat in my head nearly every day, and most nights as well.”

Three days later, a sniper’s bullet missed Hunt’s head by inches and hit his wrist. He didn’t immediately leave Iraq. His parents say Hunt asked to fly to a military hospital in Germany a day later so he could accompany a fellow Marine who was shot in both legs.

 “I know he’s seen some traumatic stuff in his time and I guess he holds that to himself,” said Marine Sgt. Oscar Garza, 26, who served with Hunt in Iraq. “He was a very compassionate Marine, a very passionate person, one of the few people that I know that has a big heart and feels a lot of people’s pain and makes it his own.”

Hunt’s mother Susan Selke said after he was wounded, she’d hoped her son would get out of the military. Instead, he went to school to be a scout-sniper and went to Afghanistan. He seemed to do well. He was honorably discharged in 2009, married and enrolled at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.

But Hunt was frustrated by the Veterans Affairs Department’s handling of his disability claim. He also piled up thousands of dollars in credit card debt as he waited for his GI Bill payments. Hunt found an outlet to help improve the system by doing work with the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. He had appeared in the group’s ads encouraging veterans to seek support from an online network of fellow veterans. He also helped build bikes for Ride 2 Recovery and participated in long rides.

“If I had one thing to say to my fellow veterans, it would be this: Continue to serve, even though we have taken off our uniforms,” Hunt wrote in an online testimonial for a nonprofit organization. "No matter how great or small your service is, it is desired and needed by the world we live in today.”

Last year, Hunt’s life took a downward spiral. His marriage ended, he dropped out of school and he began to have suicidal thoughts, his mother said. She said Hunt sought counseling from the VA and moved in temporarily with Wordin in California. Things seemed to improve for him in recent months after he returned to his hometown of Houston to be near family. He got a construction job, leased an apartment, bought a truck and began dating. In the days before he died, he hung out with friends. He even told Garza he couldn’t wait to see him at a Fourth of July reunion with other Marines. Then he was dead.

Hunt’s friends say he was an idealist and voiced frustration that he couldn’t make changes overnight. He also questioned why troops were still dying. Jacob Wood, 27, a friend who served with Hunt in the Marines and in Haiti, said, “He really was looking for someone to tell him what it was he went over to do and why those sacrifices were made.”

– edited from MSNBC and the Associated Press, April 15, 2011
PeaceMeal, May/June 2011

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Comment left by daryl on newsvine.com

Too many put a flag lapel pin on their suit or a yellow ribbon decal on their SUV and call themselves patriots. Politicians of all stripes who have never seen a day of true service claim their positions of power to be patriotic. I have yet to see one I would agree with. The religiously obsessed claim that their god created this country and that only through paying their religious leaders both in money and obeisance can one be a patriot.

This man and those who serve and risk their lives for the rest of us are the only true patriots I’ve ever seen. I do not blame anyone for his death. Yet I wish that we humans could learn to love one another in truth, not just in false words. If we followed our words and showed the love for all that we brag about, we would have no need of war or warriors, and people like this man and so many others would be around today to share their true honor and greatness with the rest of us.

Fighting for peace of mind

On Veterans Day 2010, Army Specialist Jeff Hanks made headlines when he turned himself in to military officials after going AWOL in October. Hanks, a 101^st Airborne soldier, refused to return to Afghan-istan after being denied treatment for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) he has suffered since his 2008 tour in Iraq. The penalty he faces could include jail time or a less-than-honorable discharge, which would strip him of all veterans’ rights and health benefits.

Hanks’ decision to speak out about his struggle to secure mental health care drew attention to the Operation Recovery campaign of Iraq Veterans Against the War, which aims to stop the redeployment of traumatized soldiers suffering from PTSD, brain injuries and sexual trauma. One in every 10 soldiers who has completed a single deployment has a mental ailment; the rate rises to 1 in 5 after a second deployment and nearly 1 in 3 after a third. Studies estimate anywhere from 10 to 50 percent of all service members deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan — 15,000 to 75,000 troops — suffer from PTSD. Another major military problem is that veterans with PTSD are six times more likely to attempt suicide than civilians.

If the U.S. military followed its own standards and regulations, says IVAW’s Aaron Hughes, a minimum of 20 percent of soldiers that have fought in Iraq or Afghanistan could not be redeployed. That would make it practically impossible for the United States to continue its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the ultimate goal of IVAW.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) has reported that the military has no comprehensive oversight framework to assure that its members are medically and mentally fit for service, or to assess troops’ mental health conditions when they return. In the current system, a commanding officer has discretion over what happens after a soldier is screened. This means that someone deemed ineligible for deployment by a military mental health professional can still be forced to deploy with severe trauma.

– edited from In These Times, January 2011
PeaceMeal, March/April 2010

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

More troops killed by suicide than war

According to official figures for the past nine years from the Department of Defense, more U.S. military personnel have taken their own lives than have died in action in either the war in Iraq or in Afghanistan. Last year alone, more than 330 serving members of the armed forces committed suicide — more than the 320 killed in Afghanistan and the 150 in Iraq. Since 2001, when the Bush administration launched the so-called “war on terror,” there has been a dramatic year-after-year increase in U.S. military suicides, particularly in the Army, which has borne the brunt of fighting abroad. Last year saw the highest total number since such records began in 1980. Prior to 2001, the suicide rate in the U.S. military was lower than that for the general population; now, it is nearly double the national average.

A growing number of these victims have been deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan. What is even more disturbing is that the official figures only count victims of suicide among active service personnel. Not included are the many more veterans — officially classed as civilians — who take their own lives. It is estimated that the suicide rate among veterans demobilized from fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq is as high as four times the national average.

The Department of Veteran Affairs calculates that over 6,000 former service personnel commit suicide every year. Many of these men came home to a country they fought for only to find no jobs, their homes repossessed by banks that have enjoyed trillion-dollar bailouts, and broken relationships.

– edited from the Gulf Daily News (Bahrain), January 12, 2010
PeaceMeal, March/April 2010

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Dear Abby on PTSD

I’m a man who feels all alone in the world. ... My girlfriend doesn’t understand the living hell of post-traumatic stress from a tour in Iraq, and every time I need comforting, I am pushed away.

The only friends who I’m in contact with are her family. Support from my family isn’t easy to get. My father, a Vietnam veteran, understands what I’m going through, but has told me he chooses to stay away because he’s afraid of a possible relapse.

Help!

– Stressed in Pennsylvania

Dear Stressed:

Consider this: I’m not sure that anyone who hasn’t been through it — or isn’t a trained psychotherapist — can truly understand the pain of post-traumatic stress. And that is why I’m urging you to contact your nearest veterans hospital.

More than in wars past, the military medical system seems to appreciate that a large number of vets returning from Iraq and Afghanistan will need professional help to overcome their trauma. Help is available, so please don’t wait to reach out for it. And while you’re at it, take your father with you, because it appears he could use some help too.

– Tri-City (Wash.) Herald, 22 Nov. 2006
PeaceMeal. Nov/December 2006

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

A soldier's pain deep inside

by Bob Herbert

Specialist Craig Peter Olander Jr. has the look of a mischievous kid, except that his eyes sometimes telegraph that they've seen too much. And there's a weariness that tends to slip into his voice that seems unusual for someone just 21 years old. Killing can do that to a person. ...

Specialist Olander sustained a number of injuries [in Iraq] ... But his major problems then and now, as he readily acknowledges, "are emotional and psychological." He is filled with guilt. ...

He is also filled with turbulent emotions related to the insurgents that he killed. "I had no hesitation about pulling the trigger," he said. "But the aftermath is what hurt. Before I joined the military, I valued life very much, so taking it was hard. It's confusing trying to figure it out, you know, because sometimes I feel rage toward them.

"But then it becomes a very religious thing, because I wonder, you know, since I've taken these lives, if I'm going to be accepted into heaven. You know, have I done the right thing?"

Specialist Olander is being treated for depression and post-traumatic stress disorder at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center [on the Bush administration's current list of base closures – editor's note].

Bob Herbert is an award-winning columnist for the New York Times, where this article was published on August 8, 2005. For the complete article, see: www.nytimes.com/2005/08/08/opinion/08herbert.html?

– PeaceMeal, Sept/October 2005