Public defender confronts post-traumatic stress

Vandeveld: Public defender confronts post-traumatic stress

BY DARREL VANDEVELD
Contributing writer
I can still remember -- in fact, I don't think I will ever forget -- the first time I began to realize that I had been deeply affected, that I had been profoundly changed in some way that I could not define, by my experiences as a soldier serving since 2001 in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Africa and Iraq.

I had returned to Erie from Iraq in August 2006, after a yearlong tour where I spent long days in southern Iraq, in the Green Zone in Baghdad, and in other small towns and villages in that hostile land. In September 2006, now safely at home, I waited in a crowded supermarket to pick up a cake for my son's seventh birthday. Without warning, a sense of unease descended upon me like a shroud.

The people around me seemed to have placed a weight on my chest, their proximity becoming a kind of oppression. My hands started to tremble, my heart began to race, and sweat ran in streams down my face. I felt unable to breathe, and fled in a panic to my car, where I sat, mystified as to what had just happened. I refused to admit to myself, as I wiped the beads of sweat from my brow, that I had just experienced the first public pangs of a disorder that would continue to afflict me and those close to me for years: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD.

I may have heard of the term "PTSD" before that September day, but if I had, I hadn't given it much thought. PTSD is something cowards or weaklings claim to suffer from, I thought, and I knew I was neither weak nor a coward. I'd never shirked a mission, never sought to avoid danger, never froze or failed to act when danger presented itself, and I'd borne the physical burdens of over two years of deployments, laboring in unbelievable heat, fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, with no apparent physical harm and no complaint.

To the contrary, I felt strong, confident -- a man in full, with nothing left to prove to myself or anyone else. Post-traumatic stress? I rejected the notion out of hand. My agony in the supermarket had to have been low blood sugar or an undigested bit of beef, nothing that a good meal and some rest wouldn't cure.

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Public defender confronts post-traumatic stress