PTSD Between then and now

Iraq’s Signature Wound
Posted on Jul 2, 2008
By Marie Cocco

WASHINGTON—George Ball remembers last July 4 all too well.

“I spent it in my room with the windows drawn and the covers over my head,” the 32-year-old Iraq war veteran says. The bottle rockets, with their shrieking whistles followed by the pop of explosions, affected him most. “I got up in the middle of the night and looked for my weapon. This is normal stuff, though. You would have, too, if you’d been to Iraq as many times as I have.”

Ball served two tours there as an Army staff sergeant. He’d volunteered for duty in 2001—before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. “I didn’t get caught up in all the patriotism,” he said from his home in Jupiter, Fla. “I volunteered before it was popular.”

Now Ball suffers from one of the signature wounds of the Iraq war, post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. He says it was the reason given for his early discharge, a release that was forced upon him after his Bradley fighting vehicle was blown up while his unit was on patrol near Ramadi. While convalescing in Germany, Ball says, he became determined not to return to Iraq because his memory was so inconsistent as to be dangerous. “I couldn’t remember things—little things like where I put my keys and things like that,” he says. Knowing he had authority over the lives of other soldiers frightened him. “I was afraid I would forget something important and get somebody killed.”

And so, with his discharge papers affirming that he suffered from PTSD, Ball sought help from the Department of Veterans Affairs, where he applied for disability due to his inability to keep a steady job. He had tried working as an electrician’s apprentice at construction sites, but that only inflamed his condition, and he was fired. “Things would drop and they would scare me pretty bad. I’d keep forgetting stuff. I figured I could live with it if I just wrote stuff down,” he says. But the hard physical labor also worsened his war-related back injury, and the crashing sounds typical in construction work would send him diving into a ditch for cover.

A year after he applied for disability—a year after the Army had acknowledged his PTSD—Ball received an 80 percent disability rating and, with it, a steadier income. He is typical of those veterans who say the disability claims process is a labyrinth that leaves returning vets and their families in dire situations, unable to keep jobs in the civilian labor force or to navigate the disability maze with sufficient speed. Medical care, including mental health care, also is seen as slow in coming.
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Every time I read stories like this the voices awaken in my own head. "Well, as soon as his claim is approved, you'll have all the money you need." That's what everyone from the VA and the DAV kept telling me about my husband. He came home from a different war, a different time and a different place. Today's veterans come back from Iraq and Afghanistan to a nation just learning what some of them bring back with them trapped inside of them. The wound of PTSD. My husband came home to a nation that simply didn't care when he came back from Vietnam. No one wanted to hear anything. We've learned a lot since then but we have so much more to learn still. We need to be aware of not only the wound the veteran has inside of them but the wound they bring home to their families.

We have to deal with the changes in them between short term memory loss, nerves on end, mood swings, detachment, avoidance along with their nightmares and zone out flash backs. Pile on top of all of that we usually have to deal with the kids who can't understand what we are just learning about. We deal with wondering if we will have anything close to the marriage we used to have. We also have to deal with the loss of income. Between then and now and when is almost impossible to cope with.

For my husband, he had a job and made a good living when PTSD was mild and we dealt with it. Then it got worse without the help he needed and the wound began to kill him. We were lucky. I knew what it was. I knew how to deal with it better than most wives at the time and was even doing outreach work. Even with all that, it was nearly impossible to stay together. His PTSD became so bad, he had to give up his job and retired before he was even 50. We lost a lot of income and overtime, which was very hard, but I almost lost him as well. It took him a long time before he was able to accept that he cannot work. The VA takes good care of him and he will be in therapy and on medication for the rest of his life, but he's living a life instead of spending every day waiting to die.

We've come though it ok and will be married for 24 years this year. I've spent over half my life with him and no matter what we went through, I cannot imagine not being with him. We deal with what most people would find impossible but we've found what works for us and made our own kind of normal.

This is a different time and a different place but veterans are still humans and still pay the price for what we ask them to do. The only difference between then and now is that there are a lot more of them and the media has raised awareness. The fact they still have to fight the government to have their claims approved and wait far too long for the income they need to survive is deplorable. Too many families were torn apart after Vietnam and too many of them ended up homeless. When will we ever get it right?
Senior Chaplain Kathie Costos
Namguardianangel@aol.com
www.Namguardianangel.org
www.Woundedtimes.blogspot.com"The willingness with which our young people are likely to serve in any war, no matter how justified, shall be directly proportional to how they perceive veterans of early wars were treated and appreciated by our nation." - George Washington