‘Real Warrior’ Describes Post-traumatic Stress

‘Real Warrior’ Describes Post-traumatic Stress
By Elaine Wilson
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, Jan. 11, 2010 – When Staff Sgt. Megan Krause returned home from a deployment in Iraq in 2006, she thought the scariest moments of her life were over.

At her homecoming, “I ran to my mother in that hangar; we both cried tears of joy,” said Krause, now an Army Reserve medic attached to a combat engineering unit in Pennsylvania. “I told her it was over and I was fine.

“Boy, was I wrong.”

Krause later found herself waging a terrifying war with post-traumatic stress disorder. She described the battle and her road to recovery here today during the Real Warriors Campaign session at the 2010 Suicide Prevention Conference sponsored by the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs.

Krause said she hit rock bottom while a student at Penn State University about two years after her deployment.

“It was when I found myself face down in the mud pit, in the middle of a pigpen in State College, Pa., running from the insurgents that I thought were chasing me, that I realized I had not yet survived,” Krause said. “I might not have been having suicidal ideations, but I was well on my way to killing myself.”
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