Bind up the invisible wounds

Simcox & Gates: Bind up the invisible wounds

By: STACEY-RAE SIMCOX, ERNIE GATES
Published: November 24, 2011

Sgt. Monté Webster came home from Iraq with a Purple Heart, some shrapnel still in his body and a bad attitude. He got a discharge, a separation check and a "Thank you for your service."

What he didn't get was the post-deployment medical review that's supposed to be mandatory — the review that should have disclosed his post-traumatic stress disorder, his depression and his traumatic brain injury from the mortar attack that blasted his squad in Samarra.

Webster, who now lives in Texas, is one of thousands of combat veterans who have gone without that critical physical and mental evaluation, known as a post-deployment health re-assessment.

By the Army's own accounting, from 2006 until June 30 of this year, about 5 percent of its returning soldiers never were reviewed. More critically, only 59 percent were assessed within the prescribed 90- to 180-day window after returning. That 90-day wait matters because sleeplessness, headaches, irritability and other symptoms can be masked or dismissed in the first few months after returning from a combat zone. Research has shown that returning soldiers' mental-health problems are more likely to be diagnosed accurately in the second 90 days. Of the soldiers reviewed too soon, the Army estimated, one-third had potentially serious conditions that might have emerged more severely later — severely enough to make them non-deployable.
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