U.S. sending traumatized troops back again and again to war

How many of caskets have to be filled because of suicide?

I’ve been asking that question since 1982 when a veteran started to notice me while we were working for a cable company in Massachusetts. I grew up surrounded by veterans but this Vietnam veteran was something very different.

Back then, PTSD was something to try to hide as they suffered in deadly silence. No one wanted to talk about it. Back then he felt so ashamed of what his time with the 101st Airbone in Phu Bai did to him, he didn’t want anything to do with it but it wanted to take over every part of his life.

So I tried to protect him as much as I wanted to help him and others see themselves through my eyes. I wrote in a local newspaper under the name Kathie Costos so that I could be honest without hurting him.

I used my Mom’s maiden name and she was pretty proud of what I wrote, so soon all of her friends knew it was me when they read my pieces in the paper. We were not ashamed of him at all but ashamed our country was letting it happen to him and all our Vietnam veterans.

I couldn’t use my real name until a few years ago after I became a chaplain and he asked why I was still using “Costos” instead of our name. This really confused people so lately I’ve just been using Chaplain Kathie because there is already too much explaining to do about what PTSD is so I didn’t need more things to have to explain.

Anyway, there is a tiny bit of our history. The rest you can read in a book I wrote, For the love of Jack His War, My Battle I wrote it before September 11th and self-published it because I knew what was coming with PTSD, our veterans and the military response to it.

The questions that still haunt me is that after all this time, all these websites, all the reporting done on PTSD, how is it that the military is still redeploying troops with PTSD, pills instead of therapy and still threatening them with less than honorable discharges? How is it they are still killing themselves?

U.S. sending traumatized troops back again and again to war
‘These soldiers are broken. The point is to avoid harm. For these guys, it’s too late’
By BRYANT FURLOW 11/11/10 12:16 PM

ALBUQUERQUE– Searching to describe his Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) symptoms, Joseph Callan paused, his gaze momentarily distant.

“I see dead people,” he said, scoffing.

“In crowds, I’ll think, ‘that’s Howzer!’ or somebody else,” the former U.S. Marine Corps sergeant explained. “I know they’re dead. I saw them dead. But I feel compelled to confirm it’s not them, to see them from another angle. So I’m ducking through a crowd to get another look at them and it’s always just some random (person).”

Callan, now 32, joined the Marines when he was 18 years old, he told The Independent.

Surrounded by college students at an Albuquerque coffee shop near UNM, the great-grandson of a Navajo code talker and regional organizer for Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) ticked off the other manifestations of his three combat tours in Iraq.

“Self-medication, alcohol mostly,” he said. “Short temper — angry all the time. And not caring. Just not caring. This detachment. That’s why school didn’t work out for me, I think. I just didn’t care. …And I’m reckless. I ride my motorcycle faster than I should.”

“I never stop thinking about Iraq,” Callen said. “It’s a constant presence. It’s always there.”

Throughout the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, troops with combat-related traumatic brain injuries, called TBIs, or PTSD symptoms have routinely faced multiple deployments, Callan said.

“After the initial invasion, just about everybody I knew exhibited signs of PTSD – and we were all redeployed,” he recalled. “The Army and Marine Corps just needed warm bodies to stuff into slots. I’ve seen guys deploy with arms in casts. I saw (a Marine) deploy on crutches.”

Now, as a field organizer for IVAW, Callan wants to see an end to the practice of deploying troops with combat trauma. The organization’s “Operation Recovery” is a push to force the Pentagon to obey its own directive against deploying troops with PTSD, Callan said.

“These troops have a right to heal,” he said. “It’s inhumane and an awful practice to take somebody who is damaged and put them back in the environment that damaged them. They’re human beings. They break like regular humans.”

Some Marines who sought help were told they had to choose between “remaining deployable” and a “less than honorable discharge,” Callan said.
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Traumatized troops back again and again to war

It is less than honorable to not take care of their wounds!

This is the part I can’t understand. Each year as I track reports from across the country, the military keeps claiming they are doing this or that, that they get it and millions are spent to address the suicides but the numbers go up every year. I have to read all of this knowing that it is possible to save a lot of them when we just keep it simple, human and gain enough knowledge to make a difference.

Hell, I did it! I know enough to know that medication only masks what is behind PTSD and that therapy is what helps them heal. That the reaction of the people they are closest too heals them heal or makes it worse. That they need to know things people are just not telling them and they shouldn’t have to go crazy searching the web for answers. Yet when you think about it the brains behind military operations are great at one thing, killing as many of the enemy forces as possible but really lousy at saving the survivors. How can we get ahead of the veterans committing suicide at a rate of 18 a day when we can’t get ahead of the active duty troops? Maybe the attitude of “they are expendable” is a lot more truthful than we think it is.

How much do we spend to train a soldier? How much do we spend to supply them with what they need to do their job? Then doesn’t it make sense to put them back together again, heal their wounds and then redeploy them if they are healed? Sending them back under medication alone and threatening them if they seek help at all is like taking away their weapon leaving them to just throw bullets at the enemy. It means they end up dead. We’ve come so far since the 70’s but we won’t get to where we need to be until the military stops listening to the people they have been hearing and start listening to the troops!