Home > Soldiers can sustain psychological wounds for a lifetime
The unseen cost of war: American minds
By M.L. LYKE
The soldier’s eyes dart from ceiling to floor, window to door. The rough hands — hands that poked dead animals and probed human body bags in search of enemy explosives — wrap around a cup of high-octane buzz he doesn’t need. He’s wired, wound tight — a buff, tough sergeant ready to explode inside a strip-mall Starbucks.
"I knew I had a problem in Iraq when I wanted to start machine-gunning whole towns," says the National Guardsman, who returned to Fort Lewis from active duty in late March after an extended deployment.
He landed at McChord Air Force Base, got off the plane and flamed. "I wanted to start tearing people’s heads off."
Neighbors in his Bellingham block may remember the soldier. He’s the one who was outside shouting "You missed me again, - - - - - - - !" on the Fourth of July.
He’s the one who screamed at the television when an Arabic speaker came on.
He’s the one who still jumps out of his skin when someone drops a pan in the kitchen. "My heart rate goes up to 220."
He is one of a growing number of local soldiers returning from Iraq with PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. It’s a brain condition that has wreaked havoc on warriors’ nervous systems since the first shell-shocked Johnny came marching home with a thousand-yard stare and a million-dollar question:
Will anything ever be the same?
"Those guys on the side of the road with the cardboard signs. I can see how they get there. ... I’m afraid of losing everything I came home to," said the 35-year-old Guardsman, who bitterly calls himself a poster child for PTSD.
"I’ve got some serious issues."
A tremendous cost
Puget Sound PTSD specialists call the disorder one of the "hidden wounds of war." It can’t be stitched up, earns no Purple Heart and can fester over a lifetime.
The specialists predict the trickle of affected soldiers from Iraq now coming into clinics will turn into a flood, with serious consequences for strained Veterans Affairs budgets and for taxpayers who foot disability bills.
"We hear about the thousands of injuries — brain injuries, leg injuries, arm injuries — but rarely do we hear about the psychological casualties in war," said PTSD expert Dr. Evan Kanter, a neuroscientist and staff psychiatrist at the Veterans Affairs Puget Sound Health Care System in Seattle
"There will be tens of thousands of these, and the cost of that will be tremendous."
An Army survey published in the New England Journal of Medicine on July 1 said 15.6 percent to 17.1 percent of returning soldiers from Iraq exhibited signs of anxiety, major depression or other mental health problems. A new study of 1,300 Fort Bragg paratroopers who took part in the Iraq invasion echoed the findings, showing 17.4 percent exhibited PTSD symptoms.