Deployments Taking a Toll on Military Kids Again

Before troops were sent into Iraq, before they were sent to Afghanistan, long before they were sent to Kuwait, we knew a lot about PTSD but the general public didn't. Once wars are declared over, in the public view, it should be over and done with. They never notice the combat casualties kept coming. They came in the health issues caused by chemicals like Agent Orange. They came with the suicides of veterans. They also came with health issues caused by war in their children as well as suicides of their children because Daddy went to war.

If you take Combat PTSD seriously, the following should be no surprise to you. After all, Australia did a study in 2000 on the relationship of families after war and the veterans sent to fight them. Now some want to bring this hidden price of war out in the open. One thing to keep in mind as you read this, while it has not made a "big" news story, it has been an huge issue for military families going back many generations.

When you think about the stress on adults, you need to think about the stress on kids when they have to adjust to another deployment and time to worry about their parent not coming back.

Deployments Taking a Toll on Military Kids
Posted on 18 November 2011

By Richard Sisk
The War Report
The reality of what happened is nearly unbearable for the two Army wives to speak about, but they said that being silent would be worse.

In June 2009, Daniel, the 12-year-old son of Tricia Sparks Radenz and Lt. Col. Blaine Radenz, hanged himself at Fort Hood, Tex. Last January, Ashton, the 13-year-old son of Ambra Roberts and PFC Luke Roberts, attempted to hang himself at Fort Benning, Ga. He is still undergoing hospital treatment.

“We live this daily,” said Radenz, whose husband has served two tours in Iraq. “We have to get the word out. People have to realize how difficult it is” to keep a military family together through repeated deployments to combat zones, Radenz said.

Ambra Roberts, whose husband has served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and two other advocates met privately today at the Pentagon with Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the Army’s vice chief of staff and the military’s point man on suicide prevention, to discuss the impact on children of coping with the constant fear that their parents won’t come home.

Numerous studies by the military and government agencies have documented the growing number of suicides among active duty servicemembers and veterans. The latest statistics show that a servicemember commits suicide every 36 hours, and a veteran kills himself or herself every 80 minutes. Military wives are also susceptible to suicide.

But until recently, there has been little research on the effects of the current wars on the children of military parents. Earlier this year, a study by the University of Washington School of Public Health showed that adolescents with a deployed parent were more likely to have suicidal thoughts than the children of civilians.
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This is part of the research done in Australia in 2000.

Morbidity of Vietnam veterans: suicide in Vietnam Veterans' children, supplementary report 1: a study of the health of Australia's Vietnam veteran community

released: 7 Aug 2000 author: Commonwealth Department of Veterans' Affairs and AIHW

Analyses suicide patterns among Vietnam veterans' children highlighting time trends, age and sex distribution, location and method of suicide. It is a supplementary report to Morbidity of Vietnam Veterans: Volume 3 Validation Study which recommended that suicide in veterans' children be further investigated and the result drawn to the attention of the Vietnam Veterans Counselling Service. This report extend the knowledge about the health of Vietnam veterans and their families.

You can read the full report on this link.
Suicide in Vietnam Veterans' children
Methods
In the Validation Study the 111 ‘validated’ suicides were confirmed by matching information provided by the veteran about the child’s name, birth year, sex and State/Territory of residence to the National Death Index (NDI) to confirm that the cause of death was suicide. The NDI contains identifiable information for all deaths occurring in Australia from 1980, as contained on death certificates.
The 230 ‘estimated validated’ number of suicides was based on the assumption that the number of suicides ‘not able to be validated’ should be allocated to either ‘validated’ or ‘not validated’ according to the number in each of these categories. This assumption was based on the overwhelming confirmation of suicides of veterans’ children, where veterans had reported such events in the Morbidity Study. The ‘not able to be validated’ cases refer to reported cases from the Morbidity Study where the veterans did not respond to the Validation Study or were unable to be contacted.
In this report a number of key demographic variables were extracted from the NDI to enable an analysis of the demographic characteristics of those veterans’ children who suicided. The data items used are age at death, sex, birth date, Statistical Local Area of usual residence, and suicide method.
In the following section the suicide rates for veterans’ children are based on the 230 ‘estimated validated’ suicides from Table 1. In the other sections, characteristics are discussed for the 111 ‘validated’ suicides from the Validation Study. These cases represent those children who have been successfully matched to death records and therefore have information available from the NDI. An implicit assumption of this discussion is that the characteristics identified for the 111 ‘validated’ suicides reflect the characteristics of all 230 estimated veterans’ children suicides.

Troops' Return Can Be Challenge For Whole Family

Troops' Return Can Be Challenge For Whole Family

By JESSE LEAVENWORTH

The Hartford Courant

December 27, 2009


ENFIELD — - A woman at Jessica Keller's church — the wife of a Vietnam veteran and mother of their four children — told Keller that she spoke to her husband only once during his yearlong tour of duty.

Keller said that made her see how fortunate she has been.

While Maj. James "Jake" Keller served in Afghanistan last year, he and Jessica e-mailed each other every day. They also spoke every week by phone and even had a few video conversations over the Internet. Through regular mail, Jessica Keller sent her husband drawings from their two young daughters and sent pressed leaves in the fall to remind him of his Connecticut home.

"It's good just to hear that life is actually normal back in the real world," Jake Keller, a National Guard soldier, said, "knowing that you've got something to look forward to once you get out of there."

The Kellers say that constant contact helped them adjust and carry on when Jake Keller returned from his yearlong tour two days after Christmas in 2008. People who counsel returning service members and their families say that the ease and variety of modern communications have helped with the homecoming adjustment.

"Overall, more communication tends to be better than less communication," said Joseph Bobrow, executive director of the nonprofit Coming Home Project (cominghomeproject.net), which provides counseling and support for service members and their families.

Still, communication can't smooth every jagged patch caused by long separation and the brutality of war. Keller had a relatively easy return to family and work, but some service members travel a tougher road home.

"There are many, many challenges," Bobrow said. "The first is that the service member may be home physically, but they're not home emotionally, spiritually, mentally. They haven't begun to process all that they've been through. Getting home takes quite a bit of time."
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Return Can Be Challenge For Whole Family

Soldiers Question the Defense Secretary About Long Deployments

Soldiers Question the Defense Secretary About Long Deployments
Washington Post
By Walter Pincus
Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Outside the military, not much attention is paid to the personal problems of families caught up in the endless rotational deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan that mark serving in the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines.


Last Friday, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates dealt with a handful of those problems in a town hall meeting at Fort Drum, N.Y., in front of Army units that either were coming from Southwest Asia or preparing to go there.

Many of the questions focused on disparities among units when it comes to "dwell time" -- time spent at home between deployments to Iraq or Afghanistan. With 130,000 troops remaining in Iraq through the end of the year and 68,000 more scheduled to be in Afghanistan during the same period, pressures on military family life have grown.

An Army sergeant opened by pointing out that one brigade has alternated between one year at home and one year deployed over the past five years, whereas another brigade in the same division has been spending two-year stretches at home. He asked whether anything could be done to even out the dwell time.
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Soldiers Question the Defense Secretary About Long Deployments

Divorces inflict home front damage on US troops

Divorces inflict home front damage on US troops
David Smith (The Guardian)

2 June 2008



In an army base in Baghdad, in functional wooden booths in a white-walled room, a row of young men in uniform stare at computer screens. Many are emailing, instant messaging or playing online card games with their wives and girlfriends seven or more time zones away.


There is a background hum from others talking on a bank of phones. One soldier can be heard protesting: 'You have no idea what I'm going through out here.'

With the Iraq war in its sixth year, some of these American soldiers are on their third or fourth combat tour - 15 months away from home with just 18 days' leave. The strain is showing on their relationships and many will return home, exhausted, to find a disenchanted wife has walked out. Divorce rates among the US military are soaring.

Corporal Leonard Allen, 33, is missing his son's first year of life. A member of the 2-4 Infantry 'Warrior' Battalion, 10th Mountain Division, Allen served a nine-month stint in Afghanistan in 2006. Normally he could then have expected at least a year at home. But eight months later he and his comrades were training in Kuwait, then deploying for a long tour in Baghdad.

'There were a lot of deployment babies after Afghanistan,' Allen joked. His son Colton is eight months old. 'I've seen two and a half months of his life. My wife Andrea gives me daily progress reports - he's learning to crawl - but it's a shame when a father has to miss being there. Six or nine months here wouldn't be so bad, but these 15- month tours are killing everybody.'

Allen, a former bill collector now regularly on patrol in the streets of Baghdad, married two years ago in Las Vegas. 'We knew there was a chance I'd be sent to Iraq. She was pretty down for a while, quite sad, and she worries about me here. She knows why I'm here and she's glad, but she wants me to come home.'
go here for more
http://www.khaleejtimes.com/darticlen.asp?xfile=data/theworld/2008/June/theworld_June46.xml&section=theworld&col=
linked from ICasualties.org

Adm. Michael Mullen honest about deployments

Mullen: Army must return to 12-month tours

By Anne Flaherty - The Associated Press
Posted : Thursday Feb 7, 2008 5:44:07 EST

WASHINGTON — The top uniformed military officer on Wednesday described a tired U.S. military force, worn thin by operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and unlikely to come home in large numbers anytime soon.

The assessment comes as President Bush decides whether to continue troop reductions in Iraq — possibly endangering fragile security gains made in recent months — or not, and risk straining ground forces further.

“The well is deep, but it is not infinite,” Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate Armed Services Committee. “We must get Army deployments down to 12 months as soon as possible. People are tired.”

Mullen’s stern warning swiftly became political fodder for anti-war Democrats, who want legislation requiring that troops start coming home from Iraq immediately. Democrats also want legislation that would require soldiers and Marines spend more time at home between combat tours. The Pentagon objects to both proposals, contending it would tie the hands of military commanders.

The leader of the House of Representatives, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, said Mullen’s testimony “confirms our warning that the war in Iraq has seriously undermined our nation’s military strength and readiness, and therefore our national security.”
go here for the rest
http://www.armytimes.com/news/2008/02/ap_mullen_080206a/

AfterDowningStreet.org wants to know too

I feel honored they picked this up.

Presidential Candidates: Stop telling us what to value when you ...
US soldiers serving repeated Iraq deployments are 50 percent more likely than those with one tour to suffer from acute combat stress, raising their risk of post-traumatic stress disorder, according to the Army's first survey exploring ...
AfterDowningStreet.org - Impeach... - http://www.afterdowningstreet.org
This is what I added when I posted it on SanchoPress
My husband and I are a military family along with our daughter. You'd never know it because he has been out of the military since 1972. He came home in 1971. He paid the price since he was in Vietnam and I paid the price when I fell in love with him and our daughter paid the price being born to us. Jack is one men who served because he wanted to. He wanted to be like his father. He didn't believe in what was being done in Vietnam, but he knew he'd be drafted as soon as he got out of high school. So he dropped out and had his Mom sign him up. My family has been living with PTSD and this very proud veteran who happens to be 100% disabled by PTSD.

My Dad was a Korean War vet. He paid the price being 100% disabled. My uncles were Korean War veterans and WWII veterans. My husband's father was a WWII veteran and so where his brothers. My husband's nephew was a Vietnam veteran, also service connected PTSD until he took his own life.

That's what most of us forget. We see the new generation and hear the stories of their families but we forget there are other generations out there with stories to tell, lives to live while suffering and futures to worry about. I've been attacked by people telling me I had no right to my opinion and told by some of the people running to replace Bush, that I was a traitor because I dared to speak of what they were getting wrong. I listened to men like Hannity and O'Reilly and Rush say that people like me had no right to "go against the troops" at the same time people like me had been fighting for them long before Iraq was invaded, long before Afghanistan was invaded and long before they were given a microphone and an audience to attack people like me.

I've been attacked on line, first called a "hero and a true patriot" for the videos I've done on PTSD because the "love I had for the troops was obvious" until they read my political blog. I was then attacked for being against the same troops by those who called me a "true patriot" before. I was attacked by veterans with PTSD because while they wanted to read more about what I had to say about PTSD, they didn't want to read "my political rants" so I started a separate blog just for PTSD to not "offend" them and their sensitivity.

Now there is no hiding the fact that everything people "like me" were complaining about, all the things we were attacked for daring to say, have not only been proven true, they were left alone to grow larger instead of being addressed. Why people vote for any of these people, defend any of these people, invest one single dime on any of their campaigns, is beyond belief. It's not the Republicans who "value the military" because they have proven they only value the contractors once they get into office. The Democrats, well at least they try to do something for the sake of the troops and their families and the veterans. Yet when I hear their speeches, I can't help but wonder if they ever really hear any of us when they are using us.
http://sanchopress.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=205

When in doubt about redeployment emotions, don’t fear to seek help

18. January 2008
When in doubt about redeployment emotions, don’t fear to seek help


Glad to be home, but...
Screening for traumatic brain injury is a routine part of care at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center. See story and photo by Chuck Roberts

Written by Chuck RobertsLandstuhl Regional Medical Center Public Affairs
LANDSTUHL REGIONAL MEDICAL CENTER – Persistent chest pain, difficulty breathing and high fever are symptoms that normally prompt people to seek medical help.

Anger, apathy, irritability and insomnia can also be symptoms alerting Soldiers they may need medical treatment, said Lt. Col. (Dr.) Gary Southwell, an Army psychologist at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center.

For Soldiers redeploying from downrange, such symptoms can often be normal reactions to abnormal situations encountered in Afghanistan or Iraq. When Soldiers find themselves struggling to cope, Southwell encourages seeking help.

"Just look at it as a checkup," Southwell said. "If you’re feeling odd, it doesn’t hurt just to get checked out. Just come on in and say, ‘This is what I’m going through,’ and we can help sort it out."

When they do seek medical help, Soldiers often learn they are experiencing normal symptoms and are going through a normal recovery.

For those requiring more extensive help, Southwell there are a variety of avenues for treatment, such as anger management classes, and individual or group therapy.
In some cases, a physical problem may be discovered during a behavioral health examination, Southwell said.

Thanks in part to increased awareness and strong backing from the Army Chief of Staff and leadership down the chain, more Soldiers view seeking such help as a normal and positive thing, Southwell said.

"People now feel like it’s an acceptable condition just like any other medical condition," Southwell said. "It’s one of the hazards of war, and problems such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder need to be evaluated and treated just like any other medical condition."

However, some remain reluctant to seek help for reasons such as fear of being seen as weak, or concerns that coming forward may be a career killer in regards to security clearances.

Behavioral health is part of the security clearance coordination, but Southwell said anyone’s record of seeking treatment is viewed as a positive indicator.
click post title for the rest