WWII Veteran Diagnosed With PTSD at 105

Durham’s oldest veteran, 107, faces life’s end with post-traumatic stress disorder 
Durham News
BY VIRGINIA BRIDGES
July 28, 2015

Samie Anderson turned 107 last week
Anderson was diagnosed with PTSD at 105
Late in life diagnosis aren’t uncommon as veterans slow down and ‘darker voices get louder’

Samie Anderson has lived many lives.

Anderson, who turned 107 last week, grew up in rural Mississippi in the early 1900s, rode freight trains across the country as a teenager, hand rolled biscuits and cinnamon rolls as a chef and became a father of three and grandfather and great grandfather to many.

Today, however, one of Durham’s oldest veterans faces his final days with post-traumatic stress disorder more than 70 years after he fought in World War II.

Anderson was just diagnosed last year.

The late-in-life struggle is “actually common,” said Ilario Pantano, director at the N. C. Division of Veterans Affairs.

Many older veterans came home from war and needed to jump right back into the work force or faced a country that wasn’t very sympathetic, he said. Back then, post-traumatic stress wasn’t a mental health disorder, but something waved off as “shell shock.”

“They were forced to bottle up their pain, literally and figuratively, and get to work,” Pantano said.

“And then as their children left home, or now that they’ve retired and they have more time to begin decompressing in the later part of their life, some of these memories start to surface.”

More than 400,000 veterans in the state are older than 60, Pantano said, and as some of them slow down “those darker voices get louder.”
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