PTSD wasn't recognized as an illness until the 1980s, but it has been around for as long as men have been killing one another. Its symptoms include the abuse of alcohol and other drugs, an overall emotional numbness punctuated by outbursts of rage, severe depression and recurring nightmares. In extreme cases, it can lead to suicide or murder. One military doctor described PTSD's symptoms as "going from zero to combat speed in nothing flat."
Soldiers who serve in Iraq and Afghanistan may not experience the hostility from society upon their return to the U.S. that Vietnam vets did. But they encounter something that psychologists say is nearly as disorienting: America has found ways to distract itself from the fact that it has dispatched 1.6 million service members to two wars and kept them fighting for far longer than the duration of World War II. This struck Waddell while he was at a mall, when a shopper asked him how he broke his leg. "Iraq," Waddell answered. The reply: "Was it a car wreck or a cycle wreck?" Colorado Springs psychologist Kelly Orr, who is treating the ex--Navy SEAL, says, "We get all excited when Johnny goes marching off to war, and then we forget about him a few days later when our favorite football team loses a game." This, says Orr, adds to a returnee's well of anger and loneliness.
Shorter: Thanks for your service, now hit the bricks. Man up and suck it up and don't bother us. Dancing With The Stars is on.
And, says Marshéle, "you need an environment where the warrior can be vulnerable." Typically, that's not a military base. Waddell speaks of what he terms a "break in the covenant" between those who volunteer to fight and the society that sent them into battle and then forgot about them (my em). "It's not enough to give soldiers free tickets to NASCAR races," he says. "It has to be something more, a deeper way of honoring the sacrifices these men and women have made."
The "covenant" is slowly being restored in Colorado Springs. Members of the clergy keep an eye out for troubled military families in their congregations. Neighbors help with babysitting so that a couple can get reacquainted after a long tour of duty. Nonprofit groups have stepped in to give veterans and active-duty service members the kind of confidential help they feel they cannot get on base. On the assumption that a soldier is more likely to reveal buried traumas to someone who has also experienced combat, the Pikes Peak Behavioral Health Group has lined up vets who can steer the combat-bruised troops through their personal troubles and the VA's cavernous bureaucracy.
Just as it takes an addict to help addicts, it takes veterans to help veterans.
Photo gallery, "An Army Town Copes With PTSD".
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