Combat PTSD And Then He Lived

Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
July 6, 2014

Our story is not that unusual. We've been married for almost 30 years now. We went through the worst any couple could face but even after all these years a lot of our friends have been married even longer.

Think about that for a second. While far too many marriages fail many more last but we don't seem to read about them as much. Sure, everyone wants a lasting relationship but having one is not as newsworthy as one ending in tragedy. A healing veteran is not as hashtag worthy as one who lost his battle to PTSD.

Years ago Congressman Filner, at the time Chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee and Congressman Alan Grayson came to Orlando for a meeting with veterans advocates. I asked both of them why they were not interested in holding hearings on what worked since families like mine lasted when little was being done on PTSD. They really didn't have an answer, making me furious. Filner said something along the line of they should get older family members involved in helping the younger ones. Should have but didn't.

How many more stories like this do we have to read before we finally figure out we failed?

Brian Portwine's Mom said

When he returned home for the second time, Portwine noticed major changes in her son, including irritability and anger. She says her son visited the VA in Florida, but was never properly treated for post traumatic stress disorder.

"I feel like the VA failed him," Portwine told 11Alive's Blayne Alexander. "I mean, when you're on your second tour and you're screaming out in the night, your brothers have to wake you up -- why are they not sending you home?"

This heartbroken Mom does not know the difference between how the Department of Defense failed her son in the military and the Department of Veterans Affairs failed him afterwards.

Any idea what it is like to read stories like this every single day of the year, year after year? The calendars on my wall change faster than 4 committees actions. The House and Senate have committees that failed, not just the 113th, but for decades. There is the Armed Services Committee and Subcommittees in the House as well as the Senate. Then there are the Veterans Affairs Committee and Subcommittees in both houses.

As an example the House Veterans Affairs Subcommittee

Disability Assistance and Memorial Affairs

Chairman JON RUNYAN, NJ-3, Republican
Ranking Member, DINA TITUS, NV-1, Democrat
GUS BILIRAKIS, FL-12, Republican
PAUL COOK, CA-8, Republican
DOUG LAMBORN, CO-5, Republican
GLORIA NEGRETE MCLEOD, CA-35, Democrat
BETO O'ROURKE, TX-16, Democrat
RAUL RUIZ, CA-36, Democrat

Economic Opportunity

Chairman JON RUNYAN, NJ-3, Republican
Ranking Member, DINA TITUS, NV-1, Democrat
GUS BILIRAKIS, FL-12, Republican
PAUL COOK, CA-8, Republican
DOUG LAMBORN, CO-5, Republican
GLORIA NEGRETE MCLEOD, CA-35, Democrat
BETO O'ROURKE, TX-16, Democrat
RAUL RUIZ, CA-36, Democrat

Health

Chairman, DAN BENISHEK, MI-1, Republican
Ranking Member, JULIA BROWNLEY, CA-26, Democrat
CORRINE BROWN, FL-5, Democrat
JEFF DENHAM, CA-10, Republican
TIM HUELSKAMP, KS-1, Republican
ANN KUSTER, NH-2, Democrat
GLORIA NEGRETE MCLEOD, CA-35, Democrat
DAVID “PHIL” ROE, TN-1, Republican
RAUL RUIZ, CA-36, Democrat
JACKIE WALORSKI, IN-2, Republican
BRAD WENSTRUP, OH-2, Republican

Oversight and Investigations

Chairman MIKE COFFMAN, CO-6, Republican
Ranking Member, ANN KIRKPATRICK, AZ-1, Democrat
DAN BENISHEK, MI-1, Republican
TIM HUELSKAMP, KS-1, Republican
ANN KUSTER, NH-2, Democrat
DOUG LAMBORN, CO-5, Republican
BETO O'ROURKE, TX-16, Democrat
DAVID “PHIL” ROE, TN-1, Republican
MARK TAKANO, CA-41, Democrat
JACKIE WALORSKI, IN-2, Republican
TIMOTHY WALZ, MN-1, Democrat

You can look up the rest of the members in the committees and subcommittees but as you can see from the above, they come from all over the country as Republicans and Democrats. What you won't see unless you look back to the original members of the House Veterans Affairs Committee in the 79th Congress in 1946, is that these conditions our veterans live with are not new.

Vietnam veteran families know what it is like to lose someone they loved to suicide. To see their families fall apart and our kids suffer. We know what it is like to grieve wondering what we did wrong or what right thing we didn't know how to do. To question what right words did not come to our lips. We know what it is like to visit a grave instead of hugging. To see a homeless veteran collected change knowing they once risked their lives for the sake of someone else and at one time in their lives they had someone loving them. We know all that can go wrong but we also know what can go right.

We learned to get up out of bed when our husbands' were having a nightmare because we understood in the darkest hours of their dreams they were back in combat and would lash out. We learned to not yell at them when they were having a flashback and how to walk away instead of trying to win an argument. We adapted to what was normal for us when it was abnormal to the rest of the world and we found peace with living after after war. We stopped trying to get civilian families to "understand" something they would never be able to at the same time we prayed they would at least try. And we walked away from conversations when they were talking about ending their own marriages over his inability to take out the trash on time.

We learned how to help our kids thrive when their friends couldn't understand why their Dads were so different. How to not blame themselves for the way Dad reacted to them and that it was not their fault. We learned how to look in the mirror and see ourselves in our own eyes instead of theirs when pain was all they saw. We learned how to live with them yet still live our own lives doing what we wanted to do even if it meant doing it without them on one of their bad days. We learned to let go of what made us sad because the joyous times were all the more sweater.

Oh sure, we have all the same issues other couples have but we were able to put things in a proper perspective. "How important is it?" A question we ask before we take a stand knowing on the grand scale of things we deal with, we have to pick our battles and fighting for them is job number one, not fighting them.

We know that while the rest of society may view their actions as jerk-attitude it comes with the package deal of a veteran we love because of all that is inside of them always considering that quality we treasure the most is the one that wounds them the deepest. It is the strength of their unselfish love that left them hurting so much.

What else can you call what they did? They put their lives on the line for someone else. Do you think that came from a jerk? Do you think for one second that came from any other place than deep in their soul? Would you be able to do what they did if you didn't have that level in your emotional core?

Society always seems all so ready to blame them when they do something wrong after years in the military, multiple deployments and sacrifice after sacrifice, yet few take the time to wonder why it happens. Why did they go from putting others first and themselves last into someone we no longer want to associate with?

Nothing about PTSD is new. It doesn't matter what title their suffering is labeled under. It doesn't matter because if they do not understand it, why they have it or how to heal it, you could very well call it combat flu and it wouldn't make a difference to their quality of life or their willingness to reach out for the help they need. Changing the title of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is a road we've been down for generations and too many generations made it without fanfare or publicity. Perhaps that is the most repulsive outcome of all since the outcome of decades has produced more suicides and less healing.

Just because reporters were not paying attention to any of this, it didn't make any of it less real to us. It gives us little comfort now that they are paying attention to the younger generation now when the focus is not on what makes them, and us, the way we are or the way we were then if they don't pay attention to what we paid such a high price for so long ago. We had to do all of it without the online support groups on Facebook and fancy phones plugging us in. We did it without hashtags and we even did it without videos but we wanted to make it easier than we had it for the generation after us, just as our parents tried to make it easier for us.

Thirty years ago I was listening to Vietnam veterans talk and wrote this based on their words.

IN THE NAME OF GLORY
The things I’ve seen and done would boggle your mind.
I’ve seen the death and destruction created by mankind in the living hell that I walked away from but could not leave behind.
It all comes back to haunt me now and makes peace impossible to find.
The ghosts of the past that find me in the night
make me wonder if my life will ever be right.
I have tried to forget what I have done,
and now there is no place left to run.
All this in the name of glory!
There is no end to this horror story.
It still does not make sense even now that I am older,
why, when I was so young they made me a soldier
and why I had to be a part of that war
when I didn’t even know what we were there for.
At eighteen I should have been with my friends having fun
not patrolling through a jungle with a machine gun.
I did my part just the same, just for my country
and stood helplessly watching my friends die all around me.
I felt a surge of hate engulf my soul for people that I did not know
and saw children lose their chance to grow.
All this in the name of glory!
There is still no end to this horror story.
There was no glory for guys like me
only bitter memories that will not set me free.
I can never forget the ones who never made it home
some of them dead and others whose fate is still unknown
and the stigma that we lost what was not meant to win
most of us carry that extra burden buried deep within.
All this in the name of glory!
Will there ever be an end to this horror story?

I signed the poem W.T. Manteiv for We Trusted and Vietnam backwards.

We have gone backwards and too many are still having to share their pain because too few listened to our overcoming all of it. Headlines across the country focus on their tragic deaths but the headlines missed how many more lived.