Haunted Vets

From the Washington Post:

Army Spec. Jeans Cruz helped capture Saddam Hussein. When he came home to the Bronx, important people called him a war hero and promised to help him start a new life. The mayor of New York, officials of his parents' home town in Puerto Rico, the borough president and other local dignitaries honored him with plaques and silk parade sashes. They handed him their business cards and urged him to phone.

But a "black shadow" had followed Cruz home from Iraq, he confided to an Army counselor. He was hounded by recurring images of how war really was for him: not the triumphant scene of Hussein in handcuffs, but visions of dead Iraqi children.

In public, the former Army scout stood tall for the cameras and marched in the parades. In private, he slashed his forearms to provoke the pain and adrenaline of combat. He heard voices and smelled stale blood. Soon the offers of help evaporated and he found himself estranged and alone, struggling with financial collapse and a darkening depression.

....

At a low point, he went to the local Department of Veterans Affairs medical center for help. One VA psychologist diagnosed Cruz with post-traumatic stress disorder. His condition was labeled "severe and chronic." In a letter supporting his request for PTSD-related disability pay, the psychologist wrote that Cruz was "in need of major help" and that he had provided "more than enough evidence" to back up his PTSD claim. His combat experiences, the letter said, "have been well documented."

The evaluators turned down Cruz' request for disability pay, because they said that his condition pre-existed before he joined the Army and because he had not proved that he was in combat. So now the troops must prove that they were in combat? Does no one in the Army keep records?

Once celebrated by his government, Cruz feels defeated by its bureaucracy. He no longer has the stamina to appeal the VA decision, or to make the Army correct the sloppy errors in his medical records or amend his personnel file so it actually lists his combat awards.

"I'm pushing the mental limits as it is," Cruz said, standing outside the bullet-pocked steel door of the New York City housing project on Webster Avenue where he grew up and still lives with his family. "My experience so far is, you ask for something and they deny, deny, deny. After a while you just give up."

We send the troops to Iraq and Afghanistan, put them in danger of death and maiming, and then, if they get home in one piece, but require emotional or psychological help, we deny them the treatment they need.

Along with the recent exposés of conditions in military facilities, such as Walter Reed, comes the story of the lack of care for those wounded emotionally and psychologically. The story is not really new. It's been floating around for a while, but the WP pulls it together well.

Perhaps, the WP redeems itself a little for front-paging many stories beating the war drums in the run-up to the Iraq War and burying in the inside pages, Walter Pincus' stories about those who offered dissenting views to the rush to topple Saddam. The dissenting stories were there; I was reading them, but, apparently not enough others were paying attention to slow the madness.

"The paper was not front-paging stuff," said Pentagon correspondent Thomas Ricks. "Administration assertions were on the front page. Things that challenged the administration were on A18 on Sunday or A24 on Monday. There was an attitude among editors: Look, we're going to war, why do we even worry about all this contrary stuff?"

See how that goes? Good for them that we have this story of the denial of mental health care to veterans laid out on the front page. I don't know about you, but a story like this is nearly unbearable for me. The word comes from on high, "Deny, deny, deny."

Veterans Affairs will spend $2.8 billion this year on mental health. However, we spend $200 million per day on prosecuting the war in Iraq.

They occupy every rank, uniform and corner of the country. People such as Army Lt. Sylvia Blackwood, who was admitted to a locked-down psychiatric ward in Washington after trying to hide her distress for a year and a half [story, A13]; and Army Pfc. Joshua Calloway, who spent eight months at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and left barely changed from when he arrived from Iraq in handcuffs; and retired Marine Lance Cpl. Jim Roberts, who struggles to keep his sanity in suburban New York with the help of once-a-week therapy and a medicine cabinet full of prescription drugs; and the scores of Marines in California who were denied treatment for PTSD because the head psychiatrist on their base thought the diagnosis was overused.

We have a shameful history in our treatment of Vietnam veterans, and we should know better the consequences of denying help that is urgently needed.

Jeans Cruz and his contemporaries in the military were never supposed to suffer in the shadows the way veterans of the last long, controversial war did. One of the bitter legacies of Vietnam was the inadequate treatment of troops when they came back. Tens of thousands endured psychological disorders in silence, and too many ended up homeless, alcoholic, drug-addicted, imprisoned or dead before the government acknowledged their conditions and in 1980 officially recognized PTSD as a medical diagnosis.

So why do I bother taking note of this story? The WP has many more readers than the small band who gather here, folks who very likely agree with me already. Maybe I do it for me, because I find the story so hard to take in, so hard to bear, that writing about it helps a little.