More vets seeking help for PTSD

More vets seeking help for PTSD

By BRIAN SCHEID
Bucks County Courier Times

It should have been one of happiest days of Nick Santoro's young life.

After two hellish combat tours in Iraq, Santoro was back at his Buckingham home just before Thanksgiving last year. He was surrounded by his loving family and many of his oldest, closest friends.

Santoro felt fine, like himself, he thought, but everyone kept asking him what was wrong. They kept telling him to cheer up. They kept telling him to smile.

Santoro was furious.

“That (angered me) so bad,” said Santoro, 23. “I had to hold myself back from just punching them in the face. These were good friends, friends I've had my whole life, and I was just getting so frustrated. I wanted to choke them out.

“They don't know and I can't hate them for that,” he said in a hushed voice, “but I don't think a lot of people know what really happened over there.”

When Jared Baker, 24, of Plumsteadville joined the Army in July 2002, he was always the cool, level-headed friend who rarely had problems with anyone. After his combat tour in Iraq, Baker came home and started drinking a lot. Now, he gets angry all the time.

“We would just be out at a bar and some dude just looks at you the wrong way and it just sets me off,” Baker said. “I get irritable with just about everything with everybody now and it's about nothing.”

Debbie McKee of Chalfont said, when it came to his marriage, her son Philip McKee was always the calm one. But after his 15-month combat tour of Iraq in December, he frequently loses his patience.

“He can really be short-tempered now,” she said. “The smallest things set him off.”

McKee, 29, an Army sergeant, was a tank driver and gunner in Iraq, where he was hit by seven separate improvised explosive devices, one with more than 700 pounds of explosives, Debbie McKee said.

“It's just such a scary thing,” she said. “There's only so many times your body can handle something like that.”

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