"Help me, please!" the former Army medic begged, "I'm dying"

"Help me, please!" the former Army medic begged, "I'm dying"
Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
August 3, 2013

The PFC Joseph Dwyer Peer-to-Peer Veterans Counseling Program in the name of the Iraq veteran made famous by a photograph taken of him holding a child.

After this picture was taken, Pfc. Joseph Dwyer life ended and because of his fame, it made national news.

The Iraq war veteran had called a taxi service to take him to the emergency room. But when the driver arrived, Dwyer shouted that he was too weak to get up and open the door.

The officers asked Dwyer for permission to kick it in.

"Go ahead!" he yelled.

They found Dwyer lying on his back, his clothes soiled with urine and feces. Scattered on the floor around him were dozens of spent cans of Dust-Off, a refrigerant-based aerosol normally used to clean electrical equipment. Dwyer told police Lt. Mike Wilson he'd been "huffing" the aerosol.

"Help me, please!" the former Army medic begged Wilson. "I'm dying. Help me. I can't breathe."

Unable to stand or even sit up, Dwyer was hoisted onto a stretcher. As paramedics prepared to load him into an ambulance, an officer noticed Dwyer's eyes had glassed over and were fixed.

A half hour later, he was dead.

After that yet another program was funded and pushed to help veterans with PTSD.

"Both state Sens. Greg Ball and David Carlucci announced recently that funding for the program has been secured in seven additional counties across the state. Funding was secured through the state Office of Mental Health with $2.3 million allocated to the program in the 2013-2014 state budget, according to Carlucci’s office.

Putnam, Rockland and Westchester counties will each receive $185,000 to fund the program named after the Iraq war veteran who died in 2008 of a drug overdose following struggles with PTSD.

While some seem to think that combat related PTSD is something new, in the above article there was this.

“I know for myself I waited 30 years after Vietnam before going to the VA because I thought I could take of it myself,” said Karl Rohde, director of the Putnam County Veterans Service Agency. “If we can get veterans in sooner and anticipate problems before it becomes a last resort and they try to harm themselves it would help.”

Vietnam veterans are the majority of the claims in the VA system waiting to be approved or reevaluated. They reflect the real issue with treating PTSD. First is that researchers have been funded and studied PTSD for over 40 years yet what was learned because of Vietnam veterans pushing for it has been forgotten. What didn't work then is suddenly something some researcher is pushing and getting money to do it. What did work but didn't cost much money has been forgotten.

Peer support works and is not expensive. If it is done right, it can help them heal. That is one more thing learned by Vietnam veterans.

Point Man International Ministries began in 1984 when a Vietnam veteran was tired of arresting other veterans clearly troubled by where they had been. Since then it has saved countless lives and supported families in emotional crisis while trying to live with their veterans.

Headed by Dana Morgan, a Vietnam veteran Marine, along with other veterans heading Out Posts and families heading Home Fronts, Point Man is peer support that heals generations. We do it with Christian based spiritual ministry. As researchers are beginning to discover the need to address PTSD and the moral issues they are trying to sort out, it was known all along.

So why are they still begging for help? Why are they still dying? Didn't we spend billions of dollars funding "prevention" so that veterans like Dwyer would not suffer more back home than they did during combat? Didn't we read about this claim and that claim made every time the number of military suicides went up? Didn't we read that every time another family went to the press to talk about their veteran suffering without help?

How much will it take for them to stop begging for help or worse, avoiding it, before this country gets the point. What has failed has been repeated so we end up with the DOD trying to spin the deadliest year on record for military suicides topped off with the fact that as veterans, suicides they don't have to count any more have gone up as well. One more thing they keep ignoring is that attempted suicides have gone up but just because they survived it, they get ignored in most of the published numbers. Families can still remember the times they begged for help but didn't find it. Will you remember them?