by admin
Salon.com has a section about combat stress, PTSD, and the army’s neglect. They list various personal accounts from Feb. to July of this year. Soldiers who come home but never really return–soldiers that do not receive the proper aftercare that they deserve after such traumatic exposure & experiences.
From their brief archives(I say brief because there are countless cases of PTSD among returning soldiers…this is just a few of them). Excerpts from article written by Mark Benjamin & Michael de Yoanna
On Oc. 30, 2008, Army Pvt. Adam Lieberman attempted to kill himself via prescription drug overdose at Fort Carson, Colo. After swallowing the pills, he painted a suicide note on the wall of his barracks that read, “I FACED THE ENEMY AND LIVED! IT WAS THE DEATH DEALERS THAT TOOK MY LIFE!”
Lieberman survived the attempt. Five days later, his mother, Heidi, arrived in Colorado and was told that her son would be charged with defacing government property for scrawling his suicide note on the barracks wall. Heidi Lieberman told her son’s commanding officer that she would repaint the wall herself to “make this stupidity go away.” The officer took her up on her offer.
Heidi Lieberman painted over the note, documenting both the note and the paint job photographically.
Below: a mock Army document produced by an unknown person in Fort Carson’s 3rd Brigade Combat Team (which is not Lieberman’s unit), apparently to poke fun at troops who seek medical attention. Stacks of the “Hurt Feelings Report” were found near a sheet where soldiers sign out to see a doctor.
Feb. 10, 2009 | A number of soldiers at the Army’s Fort Carson wrote and signed sworn statements in the fall of 2008 complaining about their medical care. Pfc. Timothy Ryan Alderman signed the statement below on Oct. 13, 2008. In it he says, “I am seeking help but I feel like I’m not being treated right. I mean mental help.” He died of a drug overdose a week later. The Army has ruled that his death was a suicide.
The Army is on a pace this year to shatter the record suicide rate set among soldiers in 2008, according to data released by the Army to Salon. And the numbers, obtained a day after a patient at a combat stress clinic in Iraq killed five, suggest that combat stress may be contributing to the spike in suicides.
During the first four months of 2009, 91 soldiers committed suicide, including suspected suicides still under investigation. During all of last year, 140 Army soldiers committed suicide, resulting in the highest rate on record. If Army suicides continue at the rate recorded from Jan. 1 to April 30, more than 270 soldiers will be dead by their own hands at the end of this year. The large majority of suicides are among enlisted soldiers, privates, specialists and sergeants.
The only bright spot in the new suicide data is some evidence that Army efforts to improve suicide prevention — among other things, implementing “chain teaching” among troops on suicide risk, hiring more mental health workers and releasing suicide prevention videos — seem to be taking hold. While 31 soldiers committed suicide in January, that number dropped to 28 in February, then 22 in March and then to 10 in April.
Blond California surfer John Needham seemed mentally fit when he went to Iraq in late 2006. A year later he held a gun to his head as his PTSD took over. (A buddy grabbed the gun. The bullet hit a wall.) He and his family fought the Army for healthcare through the summer of 2008, when the Army broke its own rules and put him out without required benefits. A few weeks after his discharge, he allegedly beat to death his girlfriend, 19-year-old aspiring model Jacqwelyn Villagomez. The Army brought into the ranks two mentally damaged soldiers, Kenneth Eastridge and Robert Marko. Though the Army knew of their problems, both went to Iraq anyway, further damaging their minds or fulfilling their violent delusions. Eastridge was later an accessory to murder. Marko faces murder charges.
Since the Army surgeon general runs medical care at all Army posts, it is likely that the care at Fort Carson is representative of the care experienced by Army personnel everywhere. So are the problems. Nearly 300,000, or 20 percent, of military service members who returned from Iraq or Afghanistan report symptoms of PTSD, major depression or possible traumatic brain injury, according to a RAND Corp. study last year