Building a life after escaping death

Staff Sgt. Ian Newland

“After I was wounded, I had nowhere to turn,” he said. No one told him about the Wounded Warriors program. He had been booted out of Landstuhl Army Medical Center in Germany, still heavily medicated and with no instructions about future treatment. And no one bothered to tell him he had been diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury. he fought for benefits and treatment; he worked to make sure the other wounded soldiers living in the barracks made their appointments and got what they needed. And he started to fall apart. So did his marriage as he tried to deal with his problems with alcohol.

Building a life after escaping death

Ian Newland gets help as he struggles to plan his future

Posted : Saturday Dec 15, 2007 15:52:51 EST

Staff Sgt. Ian Newland promised after Pfc. Ross McGinnis died to save his life that he would never waste the gift.

“I very easily could have died that day,” Newland said. “But my children still have a father. I try to live each day to its fullest potential because of what he did for me.”

On Dec. 4, 2006, an insurgent tossed a hand grenade through the turret of the Humvee in which McGinnis, 19, was manning the .50-caliber machine gun. McGinnis could have followed training procedures and jumped from the turret and saved himself. Instead, he threw himself on the grenade and absorbed the blast, saving four men, including Newland. For his heroic actions, McGinnis has been nominated for the Medal of Honor.

But Newland said that though his friend’s sacrifice allowed him to live, he does so with guilt and pain that have made it difficult to honor his promise.

“I thought I could have done more,” Newland said during an interview at his Colorado home. “Every second, I was reliving it. All of a sudden, I’m in the Humvee again and the grenade goes off.”

He traveled to Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia outside Washington, D.C., for McGinnis’ funeral services, and there he met McGinnis’ family.

“They were so loving and so compassionate,” Newland said. “I thought it was hard losing my soldier — this was just too much. But his dad grabbed me and said, ‘You don’t owe my son anything.’”

Pay close attention to this part from his wife

“I said, ‘I can’t handle this,’” his wife, Erin Newland, said. “‘I’m done. I just can’t take this anymore.’”

Instead, she went online and did some research, and she talked to the family therapist who had been assigned to take care of her husband’s post-traumatic stress disorder.

“I learned to not get into it with him and not get mad,” she said. “Instead, I’d just need to let him do his ranting and raving.”

go here for the rest
http://www.armytimes.com/news/2007/12/bloodbrothersside4/

Emails come in all the time from wives and girlfriends, even a few husbands and boyfriends dealing with their GI coming home. Without the tools, the knowledge of what's going on, there is little reason to stay in a marriage or relationship. Most relationships are hard anyway but when you add in PTSD, it is damn near impossible unless you have the support and gain the understanding of what this is and where all of these thoughts are coming from. When you understand you are not looking at a normal person, but a person who has been through a very abnormal time in their life, you can cope without putting yourself through hell. You can keep a marriage together and even save their lives.

I'm not going to gloss over any of this now with you. We cannot save all of them but we can get a lot closer to it than we are right now. There is no reason for them to lose all hope and take their own life. There is no reason for marriages to end when most will be able to function and start living again. We learn to adapt when there is love there. We learn to deal with the changes that cannot be overcome with therapy and medication. We learn that we can find a "normal" we can live with but only when we truly know what we are dealing with.

I cannot imagine the pain and confusion in partners of trauma survivors when they have no clue what it is. Honestly I damn near fell apart even knowing what it was from the start. I can assure you that once you have all the facts, learn the signs and come to grips with it, you can make it together. I'm not guaranteeing anything other than the simple fact no relationship has to end because of PTSD. The only thing that has to end is the way it was before because this is a whole new life together. It's relearning about who the other person is. Deep down inside their character is still there. You just have to search beneath the pain to find them there. All the love that was there before is still there and for some, it is even stronger because they survived the worst kind of events man has ever known. Most will cherish what they have more even while they deal with the ravages going on inside of them.

Ian Newland and his wife are off to a great future together because as he is healing, she is learning. Changes happen in every marriage. Add PTSD into a marriage and it becomes a roller coaster. It's a ride I've been on for 25 years and there hasn't been one dull moment in all of them. It's a price we pay for the ride he started in 1970 and never managed to get off of. At least with help, he is riding a lot higher than straight down on his own.