Eye Witness To The Horrors Of War
Reporter Shares First Person Account Of The Origins of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
June 25, 2008
CBS) CBS News has reported extensively on the mental and physical health of American service members fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan and the many veterans who have returned home. We have chronicled the effects of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, an increase in veteran suicides and a VA system grappling to deal with the big issues. We recently had the opportunity to hear first hand from a colleague who is looking to answer one fundamental question about war: what does it actually take to trigger PTSD?
Kelly Kennedy is a health reporter for Army Times. A former soldier who served in the first Gulf War and Mogadishu, Somalia, she embedded last summer as a journalist with Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry in Adhamiyah, Iraq - a neighborhood in Baghdad. Even though Kennedy says she doesn’t have post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from her trip, she says she understands how the emotional repercussions of war could develop into a full-blown disorder.
Kennedy is the author of a four-part series called Blood Brothers, a you-are-there account of the daily struggle to hunt insurgents, dodge roadside bombs-- often hitting them-and treat the physical and emotional wounds of the soldiers in the hardest hit unit since Vietnam.
"I was numb," is how Kennedy describes readjusting to life after Iraq. "I remember talking to the guys about how you have to feel things or else things are going to get worse. If you can tell the stories enough times, then the details won't have as much an effect on you as they would the first time you tell the story."
She says in the weeks following her return she was distracted, not paying attention and driving through stop signs and red lights. She says she knows from experience how easy it is for servicemen to return home and "shut down" because communicating those experiences can be too difficult and stressful.
For every one soldier, who leaves Iraq with no PTSD symptoms, there are five soldiers who suffer from PTSD or major depression - according to a study from the Rand Corporation.
Kennedy spoke with CBS News investigative producer Michael Rey and summer intern, Kim Lengle, who produced the video.
By Michael Rey
© MMVIII, CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.
go here to watch this video
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/06/25/cbsnews_investigates/main4207662.shtml
Showing posts with label Blood Brothers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Blood Brothers. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
The 'Inside' Story On A Mutiny In Iraq
Readers of this blog will remember the series Editor and Publisher is addressing here. It was a fantastic job of reporting what life is like in Iraq for Charlie Comopany. I just wonder what took them so long to do this?
The 'Inside' Story On A Mutiny In Iraq
By Barbara Bedway
Published: February 13, 2008 8:30 AM ET
NEW YORK When Army Times medical reporter Kelly Kennedy embedded with U.S. forces in Iraq last June, a mutiny was probably the last thing she expected to cover. But the catastrophic losses of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry Regiment that preceded the revolt -- including 14 soldiers killed, more than any other Army company sent to Iraq -- convinced Kennedy and her editors at the Gannett-owned, independent weekly to greatly expand the scope of her original assignment.
Instead of focusing on the near-miraculous efforts of the on-site medics, the 37-year-old Kennedy would instead chronicle the company's entire 15-month deployment. "Blood Brothers," the resulting four-part series that appeared in December, became "one of the single best examinations of an Iraq war deployment so far," in the words of Paul Rieckhoff, founder and executive director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.
Kennedy, herself an Army veteran, "took readers deep inside a combat unit in a way nobody else has," he observes. "She knows when an Army public affairs officer is pushing a line of b.s. and can sense when a soldier is afraid to be candid in front of a superior. Her military experience clearly gives her subjects a level of trust that they would not have with someone who had not personally served."
But it wasn't easy. "I cried a lot writing this story," admits Kennedy, who had just started following Charlie Company a few days before the June 21st IED blast that killed five of its soldiers. "They'd been great to us, hanging out the night before, doing karaoke," she recalls.
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/
article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003710253
Sunday, December 9, 2007
Part 3 Blood Brothers "Not Us. We're Not Going"
‘Not us. We’re not going.’
Soldiers in 2nd Platoon, Charlie 1-26 stage a ‘mutiny’ that pulls the unit apart
Stories by KELLY KENNEDY - Staff writer
Posted : Saturday Dec 8, 2007 14:32:57 EST
Spc. Gerry DeNardi stood at the on-base Burger King, just a few miles from downtown Baghdad, hoping for a quick taste of home.
Camp Taji encompasses miles of scrapped Iraqi tanks, a busy U.S. airstrip and thousands of soldiers living in row upon row of identical trailers. Several fast-food stands, a PX and a dining facility the size of a football field compose Taji’s social hub. The base had been struck by an occasional mortar round, and a rocket had hit the airfield two weeks before and killed an American helicopter pilot. But the quiet base brought on a sense of being far from roadside bombs, far from rocket-propelled grenades and far from the daily gunfire that rained down on the soldiers of Charlie 1-26 as they patrolled Adhamiya, a violent Sunni neighborhood in northeastern Baghdad.
Just two weeks earlier, the 20-year-old DeNardi had lost five good friends, killed together as they rode in a Bradley Fighting Vehicle that rolled over a powerful roadside bomb.
As DeNardi walked up the three wood steps to the outdoor stand to pick up his burger, the siren wailed.
Wah! Wah! Wah! “Incoming! Incoming! Incoming!”
The alarms went off all the time — often after the mortar round or rocket had struck nothing but sand, miles from anything important. Many soldiers and others at Taji had taken to ignoring the warnings. DeNardi glanced around at the picnic tables to make sure everyone was still eating. They were. The foreign nationals who worked the fast-food stands hadn’t left; so he went back to get the burger he had paid for.
The mortar round hit before he could pick up his order.
“I turned around and all of Burger King and me went flying,” DeNardi said.
He’d lived through daily explosions in 11 months with Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry Regiment, at nearby Combat Outpost Apache, a no-frills fortress smack in the middle of Adhamiya’s hostile streets. He had rushed through flames to try to save friends and carried others to the aide station only to watch them die.
“I’m not getting killed at Burger King,” he thought, and he dived for a concrete bunker. People were screaming. DeNardi saw a worker from Cinnabon hobbling around, so he climbed out of the bunker, pulled shrapnel out of the man’s leg and bandaged him. The Pizza Hut manager was crying and said two more foreign workers were injured behind her stand — near the Burger King............
........But within days, he would lose five men, including a respected senior non-commissioned officer. Master Sgt. Jeffrey McKinney, Alpha Company’s first sergeant, was known as a family man and as a good leader because he was intelligent and could explain things well. But Staff Sgt. Jeremy Rausch of Charlie Company’s 1st Platoon, a good friend of McKinney’s, said McKinney told him he felt he was letting his men down in Adhamiya.
“First Sergeant McKinney was kind of a perfectionist and this was bothering him very much,” Rausch said. On July 11, McKinney was ordered to lead his men on a foot patrol to clear the roads of IEDs. Everyone at Apache heard the call come in from Adhamiya, where Alpha Company had picked up the same streets Charlie had left. Charlie’s 1st Platoon had also remained behind, and Rausch said he would never forget the fear he heard in McKinney’s driver’s voice:
“This is Apache seven delta,” McKinney’s driver said in a panicked voice over the radio. “Apache seven just shot himself. He just shot himself. Apache seven shot himself.”
click post title for the rest of this
From Stars and Stripes
Losses in Iraq hit Schweinfurt unit hard
Troops work in one of Baghdad’s riskiest neighborhoods
By Zeke Minaya, Stars and Stripes
European edition, Monday, August 6, 2007
We all need to take a good look at what they go through if we are ever going to understand why so many come home with wounded minds. This is another suicide due to combat. McKinney shot himself after the traumas of combat. How many other stories like his are out there, we may never know. They commit suicide when they are there and when they come home. Some do it soon after coming home while others find they cannot cope years later. We have advanced little since the ancient days of Greece and Rome. To this day we still spend more money waging war than we do recovering from it.
Soldiers in 2nd Platoon, Charlie 1-26 stage a ‘mutiny’ that pulls the unit apart
Stories by KELLY KENNEDY - Staff writer
Posted : Saturday Dec 8, 2007 14:32:57 EST
Spc. Gerry DeNardi stood at the on-base Burger King, just a few miles from downtown Baghdad, hoping for a quick taste of home.
Camp Taji encompasses miles of scrapped Iraqi tanks, a busy U.S. airstrip and thousands of soldiers living in row upon row of identical trailers. Several fast-food stands, a PX and a dining facility the size of a football field compose Taji’s social hub. The base had been struck by an occasional mortar round, and a rocket had hit the airfield two weeks before and killed an American helicopter pilot. But the quiet base brought on a sense of being far from roadside bombs, far from rocket-propelled grenades and far from the daily gunfire that rained down on the soldiers of Charlie 1-26 as they patrolled Adhamiya, a violent Sunni neighborhood in northeastern Baghdad.
Just two weeks earlier, the 20-year-old DeNardi had lost five good friends, killed together as they rode in a Bradley Fighting Vehicle that rolled over a powerful roadside bomb.
As DeNardi walked up the three wood steps to the outdoor stand to pick up his burger, the siren wailed.
Wah! Wah! Wah! “Incoming! Incoming! Incoming!”
The alarms went off all the time — often after the mortar round or rocket had struck nothing but sand, miles from anything important. Many soldiers and others at Taji had taken to ignoring the warnings. DeNardi glanced around at the picnic tables to make sure everyone was still eating. They were. The foreign nationals who worked the fast-food stands hadn’t left; so he went back to get the burger he had paid for.
The mortar round hit before he could pick up his order.
“I turned around and all of Burger King and me went flying,” DeNardi said.
He’d lived through daily explosions in 11 months with Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry Regiment, at nearby Combat Outpost Apache, a no-frills fortress smack in the middle of Adhamiya’s hostile streets. He had rushed through flames to try to save friends and carried others to the aide station only to watch them die.
“I’m not getting killed at Burger King,” he thought, and he dived for a concrete bunker. People were screaming. DeNardi saw a worker from Cinnabon hobbling around, so he climbed out of the bunker, pulled shrapnel out of the man’s leg and bandaged him. The Pizza Hut manager was crying and said two more foreign workers were injured behind her stand — near the Burger King............
........But within days, he would lose five men, including a respected senior non-commissioned officer. Master Sgt. Jeffrey McKinney, Alpha Company’s first sergeant, was known as a family man and as a good leader because he was intelligent and could explain things well. But Staff Sgt. Jeremy Rausch of Charlie Company’s 1st Platoon, a good friend of McKinney’s, said McKinney told him he felt he was letting his men down in Adhamiya.
“First Sergeant McKinney was kind of a perfectionist and this was bothering him very much,” Rausch said. On July 11, McKinney was ordered to lead his men on a foot patrol to clear the roads of IEDs. Everyone at Apache heard the call come in from Adhamiya, where Alpha Company had picked up the same streets Charlie had left. Charlie’s 1st Platoon had also remained behind, and Rausch said he would never forget the fear he heard in McKinney’s driver’s voice:
“This is Apache seven delta,” McKinney’s driver said in a panicked voice over the radio. “Apache seven just shot himself. He just shot himself. Apache seven shot himself.”
click post title for the rest of this
From Stars and Stripes
Losses in Iraq hit Schweinfurt unit hard
Troops work in one of Baghdad’s riskiest neighborhoods
By Zeke Minaya, Stars and Stripes
European edition, Monday, August 6, 2007
Tragedy has had a sense of the dramatic when it comes to the 1-26. In June, on the same day the unit lost five men to a roadside bomb, commanding officer Lt. Col Eric Schacht’s teenage son was found dead in Germany. Schacht returned to Germany to be with his family.
In July, Master Sgt. Jeffrey McKinney was killed in a noncombat related incident that is still under investigation. Within a week of the loss of McKinney, four additional 1-26 soldiers, including another noncommissioned officer, Sgt. 1st Class Luis E. Gutierrez-Rosales, were killed by an explosive.
http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=55455&archive=true
We all need to take a good look at what they go through if we are ever going to understand why so many come home with wounded minds. This is another suicide due to combat. McKinney shot himself after the traumas of combat. How many other stories like his are out there, we may never know. They commit suicide when they are there and when they come home. Some do it soon after coming home while others find they cannot cope years later. We have advanced little since the ancient days of Greece and Rome. To this day we still spend more money waging war than we do recovering from it.
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