Tennessee National Guard families find Iraq war's wounds are slow to heal

TN families find Iraq war's wounds are slow to heal
By Brandon Gee and Chris Echegaray
THE TENNESSEAN
October 3, 2010

More than 20,000 members of the Tennessee National Guard have been deployed since Sept. 11, 2001, with about 17,800 going to Iraq, where 20 members died. The number of Tennessee National Guard members deployed to the Middle East has been reduced substantially to 434.

The Iraq war is officially over, but it continues in the heart of Patricia Shaw, who lost her only son.

Photographs of Steven Cates fill his mother's Wilson County living room six years after the 22-year-old Marine was shot by a sniper in Anbar province.

"There comes a point in time when you wonder if you should put them away," Shaw said. "I can't. I just can't. It's like he's still here. In my heart, he still is."

Although Aug. 19 marked the official end of combat operations in Iraq, the war's toll is still being tallied in Tennessee. Nearly 100 Tennesseans were killed, and more than 600 were wounded. Nationwide, about 4,400 servicemen and servicewomen died in the war, and 32,000 were wounded. Those numbers are easily tabulated, but the impact on families and communities is immeasurable.

And casualty numbers fail to capture the 30 percent of troops who are estimated to develop serious mental health problems upon returning home.

"When you have a war, you automatically affect several generations," said Dr. Paul Ragan, associate professor of psychiatry at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and a former Navy psychiatrist stationed with the Marines during Operation Desert Storm. "I think we're very concerned about a ripple effect."

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TN families
About a year ago I was contacted by the Mom of a National Guard soldier from Tennessee. Her son had already tried to commit suicide twice and she was feeling lost, afraid he'd try it again. Her son had also gone through a divorce, was one of the countless homeless sleeping on the sofa of friends. He had gone to the VA. They put him on medication but that didn't help. It made him feel worse plus added to the meds for his mind, they had him on pain pills for the wounds to his body.

When we read stories like the one above, keep in mind that while we read about some, there are many more you'll never hear about. The one out of three rate in this article from The Tennessean, is right on the mark. That is the common rate used no matter what the cause of the trauma is. The problem comes in when there are countless traumas hitting people over and over again that throws the figures all out of whack.

The Army stated repeat deployments increase the risk by 50% but there have been so many on a growing series of deployments it is hard to come up with the right figure. By the looks of it and data from Vietnam, we're already in the million range for PTSD.

Here's a video I did that may help you to understand that when it comes to the men and women we deploy the Guard and Reservists have it worse when they come home because many of them return to jobs as emergency responders putting their lives at risk back home as well.