November 24, 2014
The get-tough attitude doesn’t work when someone with PTSD is groggy from medication or sunk by depression. Telling that soldier to suck it up isn’t just bad medicine, it’s bad discipline.
Vernon Bryant/Staff Photographer
Michael “Mikey” Howard gets medication from wife Robin at their Killeen home. Howard, a former combat medic, has PTSD and early-onset dementia. He sought relief from the Warrior Transition Unit but got “stress and work.”
The Army’s Warrior Transition Unit should be a place where the unseen wounds of soldiers, the psychological injuries, are salved and allowed to begin to heal.
Instead, as an exhaustive two-part report from The Dallas Morning News and KXAS-TV (NBC5) shows, it too often is subject to a military culture that either doesn’t comprehend or doesn’t care enough about the depth of pain that some soldiers experience upon return from war.
That is unacceptable in a program designed in 2007 to help the Army treat soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder.
At the very least, the Army should ensure that a doctor’s orders trump higher-ranking officers when it comes to routine matters like showing up for formation or being assigned to night watch when a suffering soldier needs rest. The Army must also do more to meld military culture with good psychological care.
The Army should be, and is, a place of stern discipline. And there is evidence that soldiers recovering from PTSD can benefit from the strict routines of Army life.
But this isn’t about some slackers and complainers who don’t show up for formation. It’s about people like former Army medic Zackary Filip.
Filip displayed extraordinary courage in Afghanistan and then at home when he leaped to help the wounded cut down by Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan.
Yet even someone like Filip, named 2010 Soldier of the Year by Army Times, has been caught between his doctors and his unit.
Dr. Stephen M. Stahl, a psychiatrist who worked closely with the transition program at Fort Hood, left disillusioned with the Army’s understanding of PTSD.
The sense was the disorder wasn’t real or that it was a weakness, he said.
Zackary Filip isn’t weak. And neither are the soldiers like him. The Army must respect that as it nurtures these wounded back to health.
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The main reason i left the army was a lack of discipline after basic and ait,there was none when i got to nam,i had to worry more about my side than the vc, viet cong.
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