When the soul gets breached PTSD enters

When the soul gets breached PTSD enters
Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
October 18, 2013

Unless things change, it won't matter what day you read this. The truth is yesterday 55 veterans didn't want to be here anymore. They tried to kill themselves. The VA says their latest research has found 22 suicides a day. Congress can keep hearing stories about some of these lives lost or they can actually find out how so many live to heal. The clock is ticking.

"After years of struggling with the effects of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Marine Sgt. Travis Hoots died of an overdose, which his family believes was accidental. Five others in his unit died before him from the effects of PTSD." 7,086 times someone did a Google Plus for this story of Doug Barber.

"He just wanted people to know what he was dealing with and didn't want anyone else to go through the same thing." He had waged a private and public battle to get the care he needed. Barber frequented Internet forums to talk about PTSD and the problems vets face after war, Teppig said. Teppig said he had seen Barber medicated to the point his emotions were all over the charts.

Before Barber died, Teppig spent a day with him calling area television stations trying to get somebody to tell his story, but Teppig said no one seemed interested. Another friend, Bob Page, was on one phone line with Barber from California and Teppig was on the other when the shotgun fired.

His life ended, not last week or last month. He was buried in 2006.

Douglas A. Barber, a 35-year-old truck driver, shot and killed himself on Jan. 16 with a shotgun as Lee County sheriff's deputies and two friends on the phone tried to talk him out of it.

Barber, who had an honorable discharge from the Army, had served with the Ohio National Guard's 1485th Transportation Company. He spent part of 2003 in Iraq, returning home ahead of his unit, Army officials said, and later moved from Ohio to Alabama. He had been approved for service-connected disability for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Lee County Coroner Bill Harris said Thursday.

Barber's best friend, Michael Teppig, told the Opelika-Auburn News in a story Thursday that Barber had problems dating back to childhood. But after he went to Iraq, his problems multiplied.

Teppig said he tried numerous times to get him some help, taking him to the Veterans Hospital in Tuskegee or picking up Barber and his truck at a destination because he was unable to finish the job.

Unless the leaders of the military, the VA and congress finally do some basic research on understanding PTSD, they will keep getting treatment wrong and more will die tomorrow.

These men and women are suffering because of what they saw in combat just as much as how they see themselves. If they stop seeing how unselfish they were, remaining on duty, watching the backs of the members of their units and being so concerned for them, they can only see what is below the pain. They begin to believe they are evil and suffering as if to prove some kind of cosmic point they deserve to suffer. The truth is, they deserve to heal, but they can't if they are confused by the military telling them they were trained to be resilient.

They can only come out of this darkness with someone showing them the way.
It is as old as man. It does not know national boundaries. It does not know skin color. It doesn't know gender. It doesn't know anything other than how to penetrate the walls of the soul. It discovers that one moment when combat was just too much and the walls of the soul are breached by when they have seen too much.

It is not just what the war fighters do in combat. It is what the war fighters see during it and afterwards. How can we demand they have the best weapons to stay alive in combat, but not even ask why they don't have the best weapons to stay alive afterwards?

How many more days are we going to tolerate them living in darkness while hearing what the Congress is doing? What the military is doing? What the VA is doing when the results are always the same?