Losing the battle for combat minds

Losing the battle for combat minds
by Chaplain Kathie
Wounded Times Blog
October 14, 2012

It is very odd that we can acknowledge when it comes to drinking alcohol, someone under 21 is not physically or mentally able to handle it but we can't understand how their thinking is different than adults in other ways. The reason we are losing the battle for their minds is because the DOD doesn't understand the training they receive to send them into combat sets them up for failure when they are done fighting.

They are trained to have minds set for combat but not trained how to get them out of it.

When the news came out in 2006 redeployments increased the risk of PTSD, what did the DOD do about it? Nothing. They kept sending them back. This ended up causing soldiers to return into combat with medications to help them sleep, calm them down and basically numb the hell out of them. This sent them a message that as far as the DOD was concerned, their lives just didn't matter.

When these combat veterans returned home, they returned to families with absolutely no knowledge of how they could help their veteran heal and even less understanding about where they had been.

Years ago one wife told me that she had enough to worry about while her husband was in Iraq and didn't want more to worry about. She passed on getting ready to help him in case he needed it. He came home. He needed it. She left him. She said she sacrificed enough while he was gone taking care of everything and she wanted things back the way they were before. She didn't want to know why she couldn't have what she wanted.

One soldier, one year: $850,000 and rising
CNN
By Larry Shaughnessy
February 28th, 2012
Keeping one American service member in Afghanistan costs between $850,000 and $1.4 million a year, depending on who you ask. But one matter is clear, that cost is going up.

The DOD spends millions a year on medications, research and programs that have been proven failures but they keep repeating them. The suicide rate increased, medications proved deadly and more families fell apart.

One of the biggest failures is Resiliency Training, otherwise known as Battlemind. What this program does could be helpful however telling a young soldier he can "train his brain to be mentally tough" ends up telling him he's weak if he ends up with PTSD. That actually prevents them from talking to others they were with when they need to talk. They feel defective. They feel as if the others are tougher than they are and that is why they are falling apart.

The only way to save them and their families is to tell them the truth about what PTSD is, why it hit them and what they can do to heal.

They are humans able to do what they do because they care courageously. That ability to care that much about others also allows them to feel pain more deeply. They confuse compassion with being weak when in fact it requires courage to act on what they are passionate about. No one told them. No one told them that no matter how much pain they feel while they are deployed, they don't allow themselves to really feel it as long as others are in danger. They push past it. They try to do that back home but that is when their personal pain begins to take over. They try everything to numb it. Getting busy doing stuff, drinking, using drugs, doing dangerous things like starting fights and driving too fast, but what they don't do is what they used to get pleasure out of before. Hobbies are forgotten about. They stop enjoying life because they believe they don't deserve to at the same time they try to blame the people in their lives for feeling so miserable.

This can only be broken when everyone knows exactly what PTSD is and what it does as soon as possible because when PTSD is mild, most of it can be reversed. The longer it goes unaddressed, the more damage done, but as Vietnam veterans have proven, it is never too late to being to heal.