The New York Times has a front page story this morning, in the online edition it has 5 pages, and it is worth the read.
The problem is I haven't even read it yet, but I imagine I could have written it. I have lived it, and it wasn't just alcohol, I tried drugs, I tried becoming a workaholic, if there was an escape, legal or illegal I tried them, up to and including suicide, to rid myself of the demons I carried with me.
My story and the story in the Times is not new, it's goes back as far as war has existed. Things happen in war, that men and women have a hard time living with. The mental images that just do not go away, shredded bodies, your friends, twisted into unrecognizable piles of garbage that do not resemble a body, let alone your best friend, your rock, the person that you spilt everything to, your desires for the war to end, your dreams for after the war ened and you both got to go home.
The dream of going home together and opening a little pizza shop together and never see another tank, a mortar round, a rocket, a machine gun, C4, Claymore mines or M79 rounds, HE, Flechette, Illumination, grenades. No more innocent civilians getting caught in the middle, the kids, that became collateral damage, they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
You just want that 15 minutes back, you want to be able to redo that last few minutes of the patrol back, so things can be changed and lives regained, people moved and their lives allowed to continue.
The problem is, war is not a play, you can't redo the act, you have to finish playing out the scene that was sent in motion, bad intelligence and all.
So when you return to the states, or even bases back in Europe, Hawaii, etc, whatevet is home to you. You start out drinking a few beers, soon that isn;t working to make the demons go away, so you crank it up to rum, vodka, whiskey, whichever flavor your stomach can handle.
Soon you are dealing with the vodka as you can mix it with your breakfast juice, an orange Fanta at lunch, afternoon break, soom you start skipping dinner and start drinking it.
Sometimes it goes beyond this, some of the veterans turn to drugs, legal and illegal, military doctors or civilian doctors will prescribe bottles upon bottles of anti-depressants, anti-anxiety, you name it some of the troops/veterans will try anything to be bale to sleep, and to forget the images they see dance thru their heads.
Most times none of it works. The demons remain.
Desperate for sleep and relief, Mr. Klecker, 30, drank heavily. One morning, his parents found him in the driveway slumped over the wheel of his car, the door wide open, wipers scraping back and forth. Another time, they found him curled in a fetal position in his closet.
Yet only after his drunken driving caused the death of a 16-year-old cheerleader did Mr. Klecker acknowledge the depth of his problem: His eight months at war had profoundly damaged his psyche.
"I was trying to be the tough marine I was trained to be — not to talk about problems, not to cry," said Mr. Klecker, who has since been diagnosed with severe post-traumatic stress disorder. "I imprisoned myself in my own mind."
In this case a an innocent 16 year old paid the ultimate price, dead due to a drinken driving accident. Now the veteran has another demon to carry, and the merry go round gets worse.
Having cut way back in the 1990s as the population of veterans declined, the Veterans Health Administration says it is expanding its alcohol- and drug-abuse services. But advocacy groups and independent experts — including members of a Pentagon mental-health task force that issued its report last year — are concerned that much more needs to be done. In May, the House and Senate passed bills that would require the veterans agency to expand substance-abuse screening and treatment for all veterans.
"The war is now and the problems are now," said Richard A. McCormick, a senior scholar for public health at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland who served on the Pentagon task force. "Every day there is a cohort of men and women being discharged who need services not one or two or five years from now. They need them now."
For active-duty service members, the military faces a shortage of substance-abuse providers on bases across the country, while its health insurance plan, Tricare, makes it difficult for many reservists and their families to get treatment.
Now what are all these veterans and active duty troops supposed to do for treatment?
Here is how the court system handled CPL Klecker, was it the right way or the wrong way, that is for you the reader to decide:
Afterward, CPL. Klecker received a full veterans disability rating for combat stress. At Mr. Klecker’s trial for vehicular manslaughter, the judge recognized the war’s role in his disintegration and accepted his lawyer’s request for a special deal: After a year in jail, Mr. Klecker moved into an intensive inpatient program at the St. Cloud veterans facility to deal first with his drinking and then his combat stress.
Deanna’s mother, Catherine Casey, a Minneapolis police officer, did not welcome the sentence. "There are a lot of young men and women who saw horrible things and have done terrible things and have to live with that," she remembered thinking. "I thought, ‘Suck it up, CPL. Klecker.’ "
In time, though, she came to see him as "a good kid" who made "bad choices." In prison, she said, he would get worse.
Counselors say CPL. Klecker was a model patient. But he hit a rough patch during the four-week lull — a result of scheduling conflicts — between alcohol treatment and therapy for combat stress.
Last November, still untreated for combat trauma, CPL Klecker grew agitated and pulled a pocket knife on a fellow patient after an argument.
He was forced to leave the inpatient program and wait for an outpatient slot. In February, the judge ruled that CPL Klecker could not serve his sentence at home and returned him to prison for 19 months.
19 months in prison, he took an innocent 16 year old life, deprived a family of a bueatiful child, a promise of hope, cut short due to CPL Klecker's drinking, and now his life is ruined as well.
But for the grace of God, go I. I can't tell you how many times my car got home, and I don't have a clue how it got there. Sometimes I woke up in the front seat, other times on my couch, and can't even negin to remember how I got there,
Over the years the depression took it's toll, I first attempted suicide as age 22 in the Army, they put me thru rehab on post and kept me in the Army.
The other 3 incidents both involved drinking and pills, nothe of the attempts worked, I bungled even my suicides, thankfully. Mywfie and kids would be worse off without me, despite how I might have felt about it.
As bad as the demons are, being alive to remember them, is better than being dead, because then you are just dead, and no one wins, you don't, your family doesn't nor does the military.
Regardless it is time for the government to step up and ramp up the mental health available to the troops and veterans, and if necessay but them on monitoring programs for alcoholism or drug use, they may save a few more teenagers and some adult drivers as an added bonus.
Sending home thousands of potential drunk drivers or drug adled drivers is not the answer America needs, the public deserve's protection from these mentally disturbed men, you can't turn "battle mind" or full blown PTSD cases loose on the public. It's as simple as that, Commanders and doctors need to accept the responsibility for this, the troops will not admit their weakness due to the "warrior" motto drilled into them, as to admit to PTSD or Battle Mind, usually commontates the end of a military career, that stigma has to be stopped.