PLucas1
2010-02-21 03:05:00 UTC
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/veterans-abandoned-to-private-
hells/story-e6frg6nf-1225780235653
http://tinyurl.com/yza9627
Veterans abandoned to private hells
IT hurts "Jim" that when he was medically discharged from the army with
psychiatric problems in 2007, he was left for six weeks without any money.
It pains him that he was asked to work 20-hour days in Iraq, facing
constant mortar barrages without any protective armour.
But what plays most on his mind is that since returning from Iraq in 2006,
when he crashed into a depression that has seen him attempt suicide more
than 10 times -- including by trying to hang himself in full uniform -- no
one from the army has ever rung him.
No one -- not from his unit, not from the command -- has ever called to
say: "How are you going, mate?"
He does not feel part of the brotherhood. He does not feel he can talk to
veterans his own age.
The army has washed its hands of him. He is seen as a head case. And those
who have taken an interest in this young man -- namely, veterans from
earlier conflicts -- are now seeing great numbers of Iraq and Afghanistan
veterans with post-traumatic trauma syndrome and major depression.
This man, aged 25 years, does not wish to be named. He was a
communications specialist who was sent to Iraq on a six-month deployment
in 2006.
Revelations of Jim's abandonment by the army come after The Weekend
Australian reported on Saturday that dozens of Australian soldiers who had
been seriously wounded in Afghanistan were checked into hospitals under
false names to keep them from the public eye.
As far as the public knows, many of the terrible injuries Diggers have
sustained did not happen. While the dead -- there have been 11 Australians
killed in Afghanistan -- are seen coming home in coffins and in tragic
airfield ramp ceremonies, discussion about the badly wounded, who come
home in secret, is off limits.
Jim's case is another that appears to be off-limits for the army. He says
things started going wrong about three weeks into the deployment.
"It wasn't so much that I saw things that affected me; it was the constant
stress," he says.
"There's no safe zone while you're over there. There's always a threat on
a daily basis. We were rocketed and mortared quite a lot whilst inside the
camp, and whilst on patrol there was always the threat of IEDs (improvised
explosive devices) and roadside bombs and ambushes."
Jim knew to expect such an environment, but he didn't expect to be working
20-hour days for two months straight, installing vital communications
equipment, while at the same time ducking bombs. He became frazzled and
unsure of himself.
"I'd be out in the open and had to work in cleanskin uniform (no body
armour) and all of a sudden the rockets and mortars would start to land,"
he says.
"I wouldn't say I wasn't coping but I started to develop anger problems.
Certainly, my work performance began to slip by the end of my deployment.
"There's an ingrained culture in the army of 'harden the f..k up'. You're
not encouraged to say, 'Sir, I'm having a bit of a bad day'. You shut your
mouth and get on with the job."
When he came home, he was given six weeks' post-deployment leave. That's
when he noticed he wasn't right.
"I had a girlfriend," Jim says. "She left me a within a week. I had very
bad anger problems and I started to drink quite heavily. I had no idea why
I couldn't control my anger. All I wanted to do was just drink."
Jim had seen an army psychologist on the way out of Iraq, in Kuwait. It
was a standard debriefing, like all soldiers get.
"She told me that I was very flat," Jim says. "But she said I should be
OK."
After his post-deployment leave, he planned to return to normal service in
Australia.
"The night before my leave finished, that's when I became suicidal," he
says.
He cut his wrists but "it didn't work". He tried again more than 10 times.
Jim fell out with his family. "I couldn't relate to them any more," he
says. "The things they would talk and worry about seemed very trivial to
me. That was pretty much the key issue, along with my anger problem and my
drinking. After I came back, I had very bad sleep problems. I couldn't
have a good sleep -- nightmares."
Jim is bitter about many things. He says he and a colleague should never
have been overworked the way they were in Iraq. He says that upon
discharge, he was left for six weeks without any financial assistance from
the military or the Department of Veterans Affairs. He was offered no
follow-up assistance for his mental health issues.
Living up north at the time, he was not told there was a good repatriation
hospital in Heidelberg, Victoria, for mentally traumatised veterans. He
believes the army didn't want to spend the money sending him there. They
would have preferred never to hear from him again.
By the time he was finally sent to the hospital's Ward 17 -- after Jim's
mother had begged the army to do something with him -- he was too far gone
for the low-security psychiatric facility to handle. But there was nowhere
else.
He was twice put on life support after suicide attempts.
At the hospital, he met "Sandra", now his fiancee. She was an ex-
policewoman who also had PTSD. They were able to talk and have now been
going out for two years. Jim has tried to kill himself in his time with
Sandra, but now believes -- a major relapse aside -- he might have come
through the worst of it.
"He cries and screams in his sleep," Sandra says. "If there's a loud bang,
he hits the deck for cover. He can't go into shopping centres. He tried to
hang himself in uniform in full sight, to let people know what the army
are doing to their troops.
"It's disgraceful how the military and Department of Veteran Affairs treat
their veterans. The lack of support is disgraceful."
At Heidelberg, he met another person who has become important to him. Mick
Quinn is with the Australian Peacekeepers and Peacemakers Association, the
modern version of the RSL.
Quinn is a veteran of Cambodia and himself a minor PTSD sufferer. He says
the symptoms can come on quickly -- as in Jim's case -- or lie dormant for
years. Veterans of the mid-1990s Rwanda deployment are still presenting,
searching for help.
About 400 Australian Defence Force peacekeepers were sent to Rwanda. It
was a mind-wrecking assignment: the rules of engagement meant they could
not intervene to stop massacres. They had to just stand and watch.
Quinn believes 40 per cent of those who went to Rwanda have PTSD. He is
still seeing people emerging with problems from Sinai, Western Sahara,
Somalia and East Timor.
"We are now getting quite increased numbers coming through from Iraq and
Afghanistan, which are resulting in medical discharges," Quinn says.
"These guys are coming back with very severe symptoms of PTSD, which in a
lot of younger blokes they don't actually realise what's going on.
"The early stages are hyperactivity, worried about someone being behind
their back, explosive tempers. In the later stages, they have what you'd
call mental breakdowns."
Quinn says it used to be "standard" for the military to report 20 suicides
among serving personnel each year. That has dropped to five, which
suggests the army is doing something right.
"But post-army, the numbers are massive," Quinn adds. "And those numbers
are not calculated. People discharge on request, they have problems
fitting in, they go into fits of depressions, they become unreliable,
their marriages normally break down.
"They lose their employment and they don't know what's going. They top
themselves."
Quinn believes the army is trying to come to terms with the issues but
says the organisation is so large and unwieldy that it can't cope. So it
just kicks the psychologically traumatised out.
"A lot of the people who are getting psych-discharged don't want
discharge," Quinn says. "They want to get themselves as well as they can
and stay in the army. But they fall into a category where they're not
trusted with a weapon any more."
Asked if public knowledge, and public empathy, would help these people,
Quinn says it's hard to say. "Most expect if they go overseas and get hurt
they will be looked after," he says.
"If they go overseas and come back mentally damaged, they expect they will
be looked after. They're getting quite severely let down because the
system can't cope with these guys.
"You can't fix them quite often because they're on a self-destruct
mission. They don't want help. They want the system to react to them
quickly.
"Public empathy is a funny one. One of my clients is a Timor vet. He was
involved with Interfet and was in a couple of contacts and in cleaning up
atrocities over there.
"He was working in a bar and on the television there was pictures of a
body that was being taken off the back of a Herc(ules plane). One of the
soldiers on guard with the coffin had tears running down his eyes.
"A fellow on the other side of the bar made the comment, 'Jeez, imagine if
there's a big body count'.
"The Timor vet has gone off his head and trashed this guy. Public
understanding would be better than public empathy, if that makes sense.
"They don't want to be in the public eye. It's embarrassing to have a
PDST. I don't go out and advertise it. I take my tablets and when I have
issues, I hide away and keep everything functioning normally. A lot of
these guys can't do that."
Veterans and service people who need help should contact
www.peacekeepers.asn.au
--
Peter Lucas
Brisbane
Australia
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hells/story-e6frg6nf-1225780235653
http://tinyurl.com/yza9627
Veterans abandoned to private hells
IT hurts "Jim" that when he was medically discharged from the army with
psychiatric problems in 2007, he was left for six weeks without any money.
It pains him that he was asked to work 20-hour days in Iraq, facing
constant mortar barrages without any protective armour.
But what plays most on his mind is that since returning from Iraq in 2006,
when he crashed into a depression that has seen him attempt suicide more
than 10 times -- including by trying to hang himself in full uniform -- no
one from the army has ever rung him.
No one -- not from his unit, not from the command -- has ever called to
say: "How are you going, mate?"
He does not feel part of the brotherhood. He does not feel he can talk to
veterans his own age.
The army has washed its hands of him. He is seen as a head case. And those
who have taken an interest in this young man -- namely, veterans from
earlier conflicts -- are now seeing great numbers of Iraq and Afghanistan
veterans with post-traumatic trauma syndrome and major depression.
This man, aged 25 years, does not wish to be named. He was a
communications specialist who was sent to Iraq on a six-month deployment
in 2006.
Revelations of Jim's abandonment by the army come after The Weekend
Australian reported on Saturday that dozens of Australian soldiers who had
been seriously wounded in Afghanistan were checked into hospitals under
false names to keep them from the public eye.
As far as the public knows, many of the terrible injuries Diggers have
sustained did not happen. While the dead -- there have been 11 Australians
killed in Afghanistan -- are seen coming home in coffins and in tragic
airfield ramp ceremonies, discussion about the badly wounded, who come
home in secret, is off limits.
Jim's case is another that appears to be off-limits for the army. He says
things started going wrong about three weeks into the deployment.
"It wasn't so much that I saw things that affected me; it was the constant
stress," he says.
"There's no safe zone while you're over there. There's always a threat on
a daily basis. We were rocketed and mortared quite a lot whilst inside the
camp, and whilst on patrol there was always the threat of IEDs (improvised
explosive devices) and roadside bombs and ambushes."
Jim knew to expect such an environment, but he didn't expect to be working
20-hour days for two months straight, installing vital communications
equipment, while at the same time ducking bombs. He became frazzled and
unsure of himself.
"I'd be out in the open and had to work in cleanskin uniform (no body
armour) and all of a sudden the rockets and mortars would start to land,"
he says.
"I wouldn't say I wasn't coping but I started to develop anger problems.
Certainly, my work performance began to slip by the end of my deployment.
"There's an ingrained culture in the army of 'harden the f..k up'. You're
not encouraged to say, 'Sir, I'm having a bit of a bad day'. You shut your
mouth and get on with the job."
When he came home, he was given six weeks' post-deployment leave. That's
when he noticed he wasn't right.
"I had a girlfriend," Jim says. "She left me a within a week. I had very
bad anger problems and I started to drink quite heavily. I had no idea why
I couldn't control my anger. All I wanted to do was just drink."
Jim had seen an army psychologist on the way out of Iraq, in Kuwait. It
was a standard debriefing, like all soldiers get.
"She told me that I was very flat," Jim says. "But she said I should be
OK."
After his post-deployment leave, he planned to return to normal service in
Australia.
"The night before my leave finished, that's when I became suicidal," he
says.
He cut his wrists but "it didn't work". He tried again more than 10 times.
Jim fell out with his family. "I couldn't relate to them any more," he
says. "The things they would talk and worry about seemed very trivial to
me. That was pretty much the key issue, along with my anger problem and my
drinking. After I came back, I had very bad sleep problems. I couldn't
have a good sleep -- nightmares."
Jim is bitter about many things. He says he and a colleague should never
have been overworked the way they were in Iraq. He says that upon
discharge, he was left for six weeks without any financial assistance from
the military or the Department of Veterans Affairs. He was offered no
follow-up assistance for his mental health issues.
Living up north at the time, he was not told there was a good repatriation
hospital in Heidelberg, Victoria, for mentally traumatised veterans. He
believes the army didn't want to spend the money sending him there. They
would have preferred never to hear from him again.
By the time he was finally sent to the hospital's Ward 17 -- after Jim's
mother had begged the army to do something with him -- he was too far gone
for the low-security psychiatric facility to handle. But there was nowhere
else.
He was twice put on life support after suicide attempts.
At the hospital, he met "Sandra", now his fiancee. She was an ex-
policewoman who also had PTSD. They were able to talk and have now been
going out for two years. Jim has tried to kill himself in his time with
Sandra, but now believes -- a major relapse aside -- he might have come
through the worst of it.
"He cries and screams in his sleep," Sandra says. "If there's a loud bang,
he hits the deck for cover. He can't go into shopping centres. He tried to
hang himself in uniform in full sight, to let people know what the army
are doing to their troops.
"It's disgraceful how the military and Department of Veteran Affairs treat
their veterans. The lack of support is disgraceful."
At Heidelberg, he met another person who has become important to him. Mick
Quinn is with the Australian Peacekeepers and Peacemakers Association, the
modern version of the RSL.
Quinn is a veteran of Cambodia and himself a minor PTSD sufferer. He says
the symptoms can come on quickly -- as in Jim's case -- or lie dormant for
years. Veterans of the mid-1990s Rwanda deployment are still presenting,
searching for help.
About 400 Australian Defence Force peacekeepers were sent to Rwanda. It
was a mind-wrecking assignment: the rules of engagement meant they could
not intervene to stop massacres. They had to just stand and watch.
Quinn believes 40 per cent of those who went to Rwanda have PTSD. He is
still seeing people emerging with problems from Sinai, Western Sahara,
Somalia and East Timor.
"We are now getting quite increased numbers coming through from Iraq and
Afghanistan, which are resulting in medical discharges," Quinn says.
"These guys are coming back with very severe symptoms of PTSD, which in a
lot of younger blokes they don't actually realise what's going on.
"The early stages are hyperactivity, worried about someone being behind
their back, explosive tempers. In the later stages, they have what you'd
call mental breakdowns."
Quinn says it used to be "standard" for the military to report 20 suicides
among serving personnel each year. That has dropped to five, which
suggests the army is doing something right.
"But post-army, the numbers are massive," Quinn adds. "And those numbers
are not calculated. People discharge on request, they have problems
fitting in, they go into fits of depressions, they become unreliable,
their marriages normally break down.
"They lose their employment and they don't know what's going. They top
themselves."
Quinn believes the army is trying to come to terms with the issues but
says the organisation is so large and unwieldy that it can't cope. So it
just kicks the psychologically traumatised out.
"A lot of the people who are getting psych-discharged don't want
discharge," Quinn says. "They want to get themselves as well as they can
and stay in the army. But they fall into a category where they're not
trusted with a weapon any more."
Asked if public knowledge, and public empathy, would help these people,
Quinn says it's hard to say. "Most expect if they go overseas and get hurt
they will be looked after," he says.
"If they go overseas and come back mentally damaged, they expect they will
be looked after. They're getting quite severely let down because the
system can't cope with these guys.
"You can't fix them quite often because they're on a self-destruct
mission. They don't want help. They want the system to react to them
quickly.
"Public empathy is a funny one. One of my clients is a Timor vet. He was
involved with Interfet and was in a couple of contacts and in cleaning up
atrocities over there.
"He was working in a bar and on the television there was pictures of a
body that was being taken off the back of a Herc(ules plane). One of the
soldiers on guard with the coffin had tears running down his eyes.
"A fellow on the other side of the bar made the comment, 'Jeez, imagine if
there's a big body count'.
"The Timor vet has gone off his head and trashed this guy. Public
understanding would be better than public empathy, if that makes sense.
"They don't want to be in the public eye. It's embarrassing to have a
PDST. I don't go out and advertise it. I take my tablets and when I have
issues, I hide away and keep everything functioning normally. A lot of
these guys can't do that."
Veterans and service people who need help should contact
www.peacekeepers.asn.au
--
Peter Lucas
Brisbane
Australia
Killfile all Google Groups posters.........
http://improve-usenet.org/
http://improve-usenet.org/filters_bg.html