Sgt. Gaskins, AWOL and PTSD still fighting ghosts

A Sergeant Who Fled the Army but Couldn’t Escape the War Inside His Head

By FERNANDA SANTOS
Published: November 18, 2007
EAST ORANGE, N.J., Nov. 15 — The psychotherapist remembers the strapping young soldier, slouched in a chair in her office one morning last month, asking if God could be punishing him because he had once thought it would be exciting to fight in a war.



Sergeant Gaskins, 25, served two combat tours in Iraq. He had been absent without leave since August 2006.


By then, the soldier, Sgt. Brad Gaskins, had been absent without leave for 14 months from his post at Fort Drum in northern New York State, waging a lonely battle against an enemy inside his head — memories of death and destruction that he said had besieged him since February 2006, when he returned from a second tour of combat in Iraq.

“I asked Sergeant Gaskins whether he thought about death,” the psychotherapist, Rosemary Masters, said in an interview on Thursday. “He said that death seemed like a good alternative to the way he was existing.”

On Tuesday, Sergeant Gaskins, 25, traveled almost 300 miles from his home here to the Different Drummer Internet Cafe near Fort Drum. He planned to surrender to military authorities, and his lawyer had notified commanders at the base. But before he could turn himself in, two officials from Fort Drum, accompanied by a pair of police officers from Watertown, showed up at the cafe and placed him under arrest.

Sergeant Gaskins has been hospitalized for his psychiatric problems and could be discharged from the Army for medical reasons. He could be court-martialed, which could land him in prison and prevent him from receiving veterans’ benefits.

“I just put faith in God that everything is going to work out according to his plan,” he said during a telephone interview on Thursday from a veterans’ hospital in Syracuse, where he was taken after his arrest. (On Friday, he was transferred to Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, said Benjamin Abel, a civilian spokesman at Fort Drum.)

“I just want it all to go away, and I want to get my life back,” Sergeant Gaskins said.
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