PTSD SPECIAL REPORT: Combat that never ends ...

SPECIAL REPORT: Combat that never ends ...
By Alysa Landry The Daily Times
Article Launched: 03/30/2008 12:00:00 AM MDT

FARMINGTON — John Collard bit down on the cold steel barrel of a pistol.
He was alone in his bedroom that day in 1991, alone except for the haunting string of memories that had become his closest companions during the previous two decades — since he returned from Vietnam.

Numb, Collard willed himself to pull the trigger. He still was deliberating when his daughter found him and called 911.

"The doctors didn't really know what was going on," he said. "They didn't understand. Neither did I."

The incident came 23 years after Collard joined the Army at age 20 and went to Vietnam as a combat medic. He spent 13 months covered in blood.

By 1991, he already had spent more than two decades trying to forget it, and he'd had enough.

Collard slept one hour per night for 23 years. When he did sleep, he was haunted by a recurring nightmare.

In the dream, Collard is back at the medic table, up to his elbows in blood.

"I was exposed to injury, death, blood, lots of body parts," he said. "I wake up at night and I am covered in blood, and my clothes are covered in blood. It is so real, I can see it."

Collard, 60, was injured in Vietnam and retired from the military at age 21. He went to college to pursue a career in medicine. He married and raised three children. And five years ago at age 55 — more than a decade after he considered ending his life — Collard was diagnosed with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder.

He's one of an estimated 25 million United States soldiers who didn't leave the war on the battlefield.

Veterans who suffer from the disorder often experience nightmares, flashbacks and exaggerated startle responses, which is the phenomenon that sends veterans scrambling for shelter during fireworks displays or other unexpected explosions.

The reactions are part of a "short circuit" in the brain, said Dawn Snuggerud, trauma specialist at Presbyterian Medical Services. The brain is aware of the stimulus, but it fails to place it in proper context.

"They find themselves acting, but they don't have a clue why," she said. "The trauma is pulling them back to the past and they're problem solving as if they are in the middle of it all over again."

Collard has found himself crouched beneath cars or under beds on more than one occasion. Helicopters trigger this reaction; so do firecrackers. The Fourth of July, he said, feels like an air raid.

"You may be in your office or home, but in your mind you are sitting in a combat zone," he said. "People are setting off firecrackers, but in your head, there are rifles going off and people screaming for a medic."
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