Lance Waldorf could not take more pain from PTSD

Soldier could not endure more pain, wife says

By Jeff Karoub - The Associated Press
Posted : Wednesday Jun 4, 2008 16:50:41 EDT

DETROIT — Lana Waldorf spent two hours Wednesday morning poring through a “lifetime of photos” of her husband, Lance. The images brought to her mind his love for God, family and country that he sought to share at home and a world away as a soldier.

But as she reflected on his 40-year life and death Monday from a self-inflicted gunshot wound at a veterans’ cemetery, she also knew he could not share his deep suffering with those closest to him.

“His desire to be at peace in heaven was greater than the thought of enduring any more pain,” she said of her husband, a major in the U.S. Army Reserve who twice had been deployed to Afghanistan and soon was expecting to receive orders for a third deployment.

Police say a caretaker at the Great Lakes National Cemetery in Holly Township, about 40 miles northwest of Detroit and not far from the Waldorfs’ home in Bingham Farms, discovered Lance Waldorf’s body in full military fatigues with a handgun next to him.

Also beside him was a note, his will, a backpack and photos of him with his wife, family members and friends, according to Michigan State Police Sgt. Gary Muir.

Lana Waldorf, 51, said her husband of seven years suffered from depression as a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder.
go here for more
http://www.armytimes.com/news/2008/06/ap_soldier_suicide_060405/


When? When will ever get to the point, the place and the time, this stops happening? How far we've come since I started this work over 25 years ago is just not far enough. Will it ever be? When will we treat PTSD for what it is? It's a wound. The only difference is you cannot see this wound on a body but within a soldier. You cannot touch a scar because the scar has already touched their soul. You cannot treat it with stitches or watch the wound heal over time. Time is the enemy when the wound is within.

We cannot go on accepting more deaths after their combat battles are over than we lose during them. The battles they fight back home are just as lethal to them when the enemy has followed them home. These men and women need to be regarded as unacceptable fatalities because they were all preventable. Preventable if every branch of the military took their lives seriously enough to act as if this was the fiercest enemy on the planet, which is exactly what it is. It has been killing veterans of the wars all over the planet since time began. It will keep killing long after uniforms are taken off and guns put away until every resource this nation has is put to work on treating this wound of the humans we send.