MOD accused of turning blind eye to PTSD and veterans committing suicide

Furious campaigners blast MoD amid fresh claims it is turning a ‘blind eye’ to veteran suicides 
Portsmouth UK
Tom Cotterill
October 16, 2018

The dad-of-six, who overcame suicidal thoughts after his time in the army, said: ‘It’s a betrayal by this government to not keep track of people who lose their lives through the hidden wounds of war. ‘All of our allies do it – Germany does it, America does it, so do Australia and Canada. It’s an embarrassment that our government is failing to take action.

CAMPAIGNERS have accused bureaucrats at Whitehall of continuing to bury their hands in the sand and refusing to heed cries to do more to tackle veteran suicide rates. For the past few months, The News has been calling on the Ministry of Defence to up its game and do more for former troops traumatised by the horrors of war.

It comes after an investigation by this paper revealed no records were kept by the MoD of the number of veterans taking their lives – sparking claims the government was ‘turning a blind eye’ to the issue.But now, months after campaigners demanded changes to bring the UK in line with its allies like America and Canada – who do record veteran suicides – The News has learned the Ministry of Defence still hasn’t taken action.
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Military Cross Afghanistan Veteran Says PTSD Veterans Left to Struggle

Suffolk Military Cross winner’s anger at MoD over treatment of PTSD war veterans
UK East Anglian
Colin Adwent
April 2016

Combat no longer involves the Iraq and Afghanistan veteran putting himself in mortal danger.

It now reflects the 41-year-old’s daily struggle with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

The ex-Royal Irish Regiment Colour Sergeant, who lives in the Woodbridge area with his wife and five-year-old son, served his country for almost 20 years. He was awarded the Military Cross for risking his own life to protect comrades in Iraq.

But he feels he, and many others like him, are being treated shamefully by the Ministry of Defence (MoD). Mr Coult is scathing in his condemnation over the help those with PTSD receive.

Mentally fragile, they return to civilian life haunted by flashbacks, frayed nerves and financial pressures.

For a few it is too much and they take their own lives. Others end up homeless or in prison. Relationships break down. Drugs or alcohol become a source of self-medicating comfort.

Mr Coult believes the MoD casts off many veterans too cheaply by giving them a few thousand pounds as an interim payment, with a proviso their cases will be reviewed in two years.
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PTSD Royal Irish Regiment Iraq Hero Selling Medals

Iraq war hero to sell off his medals as he battles with post-traumatic stress disorder 
Belfast Telegraph
By David Young
March 5, 2016

He felt that he first noticed the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in 2005 but was not diagnosed until 2009. "You serve your country and end up feeling like I do," Trevor said.

Sgt Trevor Coult with the medals he has put up for auction

Former sergeant Trevor Coult (41) was awarded the Military Cross in 2006 for his bravery in a machine-gun ambush involving suicide bombers and gunmen in Baghdad.

Three armed insurgents stopped his multi-vehicle convoy on a stretch of road billed as the most dangerous in the world, opening fire on the stationary vehicles.

Acting as top cover sentry in the rear vehicle, he managed to return fire and control his vehicle, allowing two other convoy crews to retreat.

The former Royal Irish Regiment soldier, who now lives in Suffolk, said: "Every day is such a struggle for me. Over the past few years I've lost six ex-colleagues to suicide."

Trevor, who has a wife, Luba, and a five-year-old son, Sebastian, added: "The medals bring back bad memories for me. I've put them up for sale as someone will enjoy them more than me."

The Military Cross is the Army's third highest honour, behind the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross and the Victoria Cross.

Trevor's commanding officer, Lt Colonel Michael McGovern, described him as being "an outstanding young man of courage".

He was later honoured by both the Queen and former American President George Bush.
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400 American Soldiers Brown Bag Lunch Replaced

Shlomo Rechnitz Pays for US Soldiers Meal in Shannon, Ireland
Man Buys Hot Meals for 400 American Troops
[VIDEO]
KHAK
By Courtlin
November 24, 2015

This story will warm your heart! An L.A. business man did quite the good deed when he spent $20,000 buying dinner for American soldiers at an airport in Ireland.

44-year-old Shlomo Rechnitz is the owner of Brius Healthcare Services, the largest nursing home provider in the state of California.

He was waiting for a flight at an Ireland airport, on his way to Israel with his family, where he came across 400 American soldiers eating dinner out of brown paper bags. He noticed that everyone around them was eating hot meals, and that just didn’t sit right with him. That’s when he approached their commanding officer and offered $50 to each soldier so that they could eat at any restaurant in the airport. read more here

Nov 17, 2015
An LA businessman named Shlomo Rechnitz paid $50 per meal for about 400 US solders in an airport in Shannon, Ireland. He saw them eating standard army food while all the other passengers in the terminal were eating in trendy and appetizing restaurants. Rechnitz then asked their commander if he can give them something extra. This is Rechnitz offering words of appreciation to the soldiers after the commander agreed.

Irish soldier gets property tax bill for barracks?

Soldier sent €427 property tax bill for an entire barracks
ELAINE KEOGH
18 APRIL 2013
Independent

A SOLDIER has been landed with a €427 property tax bill for an entire army barracks.

The unexpected bill from Revenue was addressed to the soldier at Cathal Brugha Barracks in Dublin where he once was based.

In it, the Defence Forces member, who is now stationed in Aiken Barracks in Dundalk, was told that records showed he was the owner or person liable for "local property tax (LPT) on the residential property".

The Department of Defence confirmed "the barracks is owned by this department".
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Ex-soldier wins €300,000 damages for PTSD

Last Updated: Tuesday, July 22, 2008, 18:04
Ex-soldier wins €300,000 damages for PTSD
Irish Times - Dublin,Ireland

MARY CAROLANA former soldier has secured €302,873 damages from the High Court over negligence by the Army in failing to diagnose and treat him for post-traumatic stress arising from his experiences in Lebanon.

Mr Justice Declan Budd found former Private Victor Murtagh was “obviously stricken” with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) while in Lebanon in 1986/87 and that culpable negligence by senior army staff in failing, despite his “strange and abnormal behaviour”, to refer him for diagnosis and treatment led to his contracting chronic PTSD.

Mr Murtagh (42), a father of six of Pearse Road, Ballymote, Co Sligo, claimed in his action against the Minister for Defence that he did not receive any counselling or treatment from the Army for severe anxiety attacks and stress-related illness sustained from his experiences in Labanon in 1986/87.

During the hearing of his action, his counsel described Mr Murtagh as a “broken man” when he returned from his first and only tour of duty there at the age of 21.

Mr Murtagh was in Lebanon at a time when there was an atmosphere of huge hostility with UNIFIL troops coming under regular fire, the court heard.

On December 6th, 1986 a fellow soldier and friend, Pte William O’Brien was killed, while on January 10 1987, another colleague, Cpl Dermot McLaughlin, was shot dead by Israeli forces. Mr Murtagh had reacted badly to both deaths, the court heard.

Mr Murtagh, who was discharged from the Army in 1998 on health grounds after 14 years service, also sought damages for deafness and was awarded another €2,650 as part of the overall award.
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http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2008/0722/breaking63.htm

Maine:Veterans plan Post Traumatic Stress Disorder program

Coping with stresses of war
Veterans plan Post Traumatic Stress Disorder program

By Jane Andrews


BELFAST — Dan Avener can’t stand the noise of helicopters and gunfire because they remind him of the war in Vietnam.


He was visiting a friend at a gas station when the town’s noon whistle went off and he found himself in the grease pit with no memory of how he got there. He was working in the field as a surveyor when a gun collector decided to test an AK-47 rifle. That time, he came to lying flat in the mud, but didn’t recall “hitting the dirt.”

Avener was never diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, but he had heard and read many articles about veterans suffering PTSD and he decided to attend a seminar in Portland recently. He found there is a high rate of suicide and violence among veterans who suffer from the disorder.

Now, he would like to find out how many people in the Midcoast area would be interested in hearing a counselor from the Veterans Administration hospital in Togus speak about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder at the Belfast Free Library sometime this summer.

He and Ed Robeau, who counseled veterans at the Veterans Administration hospital in Togus until he retired, plan to set up a panel to raise awareness about the problem that afflicts veterans of all wars and will invite Major Ciro Olivares to speak.

Robeau and Olivares, both licensed clinical social workers, worked as counselors in the PTSD program at Togus where Olivares is still employed.

Olivares is an army veteran of the Iraq war and Robeau served in the air force during the Vietnam war, but wasn’t in a combat position.

“Olivares has seen people killed by rocket attacks in Iraq and came close to being killed himself,” Robeau said. “There’s no safe place.”

No firm date has been set for the program at the library, which would be open to the public and focused especially on returning Iraq veterans.

Robeau said the possibility of the Maine National Guard unit serving again in Iraq makes it even more timely.

Avener sent letters to the American Legion and the VFW Club inviting them to sponsor the panel to lend legitimacy to the event and said he may contact Waldo County General Hospital next.

He said counselors would explain what the problem is, what its symptoms are and how and where it can be treated.

Avener hears about prescriptions without counseling, and doubts that pills are enough. He said the main idea would be to point suffers in the direction of counseling and other therapies, since one veteran’s solution doesn’t always help another.

Avener is now 60 and he keeps reading and hearing about the problem.

“World War 2 veterans in their 80s have been diagnosed with PTSD,” he said.
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Ireland wants answers on death of Spc. Ciara Durkin

Call for new probe into Irish-American's death
Friday, 9 May 2008 16:20
A retired US Army Reserve Colonel has called on the US congress to compel the US army to re-investigate the circumstances surrounding the death of Connemara native Ciara Durkin in Afghanistan last September.

Colonel Ann Wright has researched the suspicious noncombat deaths of military women in Iraq and in Afghanistan.

She has concluded that specific US Army units and certain US military bases in those countries have an inordinate number of women soldiers who have died of noncombat related injuries, with several identified as suicides.
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http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/10/04/world/main3328739.shtml?source=mostpop_story

According to her research, 94 US military women have died in Iraq or during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Twelve US civilian women have been killed during the operation.

Thirteen US military women have been killed in Afghanistan during Operation Enduring Freedom. Twelve US Civilian women have been killed in Afghanistan. Colonel Wright says that at least 15 of these deaths occurred under extremely suspicious circumstances.

One such case was the death of Massachusetts Army National Guard Specialist Ciara Durkin.

The 30-year-old finance specialist was found lying near a church on the very secure Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan, with a single gunshot wound to her head on 28 September 2007.

She had recently told her relatives to press for answers if anything happened to her while she was deployed in Afghanistan.
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http://www.rte.ie/news/2008/0509/durkinc.html

Just a reminder of how odd her death was

How Did Specialist Ciara Durkin Die?
Soldier In Finance Unit At Bagram Air Base Said To Have "Discovered Things" Is Found Dead
BOSTON, Oct. 4, 2007



(CBS/AP) Exactly how Ciara Durkin died remains a mystery. The Army National Guard soldier from Massachusetts was found dead with a gunshot wound to the head in Afghanistan last week, and now her family is demanding answers from the military.

Initially the Pentagon reported that Durkin, part of a finance unit deployed to Afghanistan in November 2006, had been killed in action, but then revised its statement to read she had died of injuries "suffered from a non-combat related incident" at Bagram Airfield. The statement had no specifics and said the circumstances are under investigation.

Durkin had a desk job doing payroll in an office about three miles inside the secure Bagram Air Base. About 90 minutes after she left work last Friday, her family says she was found dead near a chapel on the base with a single gunshot wound to the head.

The 30-year-old soldier, who was born in Ireland and came to the U.S. as a little girl, felt safer deployed in Afghanistan over Iraq, her family told CBS News correspondent Kelly Wallace. Yet she was found dead within a highly secure base, with few answers.

"The family has been informed that she was in the compound, and she was shot in the head," Durkin's sister, Fiona Canavan, told the Boston Globe. "She was in a secure area of the compound, which, even though the investigation is not complete, leads the family to believe it was what is called friendly fire," she said.

Adding to the mystery is something the Army Specialist told her family: if something happened to her in Afghanistan, they should look into it. She was concerned about things she was seeing over there, one of her eight brothers and sisters said in an interview.

Pat Tillman's family still wants answers on his death. Family after family still want answers on the deaths of their family members place into the care of the military. To be killed in combat, well that's a lot easier to accept because the risk was known from the beginning. The problem with these deaths is that they were not caused by the enemy.

Sometimes non-combat deaths are because of the enemy in the minds of the soldiers. Those deaths are very hard to cope with because there is always the unanswered questions of what more could have been done. Yet when it comes to deaths like this under very suspicious circumstances, the answers need to be found. Someone is responsible for the life taken. It is not so out of the grasp of reality that someone was murdered. After all the men and women in the military are just as human as the rest of us are and there are some people who are not interested in membership of the military family but have ulterior motives being in the military. Thankfully they are few and far between but we need to face this fact. If you need more evidence of some criminals in the military, look at the rapes that have occurred and remember that it is a crime, yet the military treats it much differently than the rest of us do.

The headline from CBS shouts for an investigation

"Soldier In Finance Unit At Bagram Air Base Said To Have "Discovered Things"

Is Found Dead" yet there are still unanswered questions surrounding her death. This is not a cut and dry case of suicide. Often the family members have a very hard time dealing with suicides and they will try to find other causes instead of accepting the suicide verdict. Most of the time, they are wrong but there are sometimes when they are right and their gut instinct vindicated their suspicion.

Colonel Ann Wright found 15 suspicious deaths for women in the military so how have these stories died? Is truth now a commodity too expensive to seek? What about honor? What about justice? We do still have investigators in the military, trained to find the answers. So where are they? What are they doing? How long does it take to do this right? In civilian life, law enforcement investigators seem to find the answers a lot faster. Why doesn't the military?

When I was researching the non-combat deaths for the video Death Because They Served, I found investigation after investigation still not closed. Years after the death, no one knows how it happened. The family member left behind are left with the haunting questions. Instead of finding closure and grieve for the loss, they are consumed with the lack of accountability from the military. There are many occasions when the military proves the theory they take care of their own but in these cases, it appears they are taking care of the perpetrator instead of the life gone from "friendly hands."

Was there a cover up in the death of Spc. Durkin? Will Ireland cause the investigation to become serious enough to get the family the answers they need to find the closure they need? Are women of lesser value? Too often we have examples this very well may be the case to far too many.
Senior Chaplain Kathie Costos
Namguardianangel@aol.com
http://www.namguardianangel.org/
http://www.woundedtimes.blogspot.com/
"The willingness with which our young people are likely to serve in any war, no matter how justified, shall be directly proportional to how they perceive veterans of early wars were treated and appreciated by our nation." - George Washington