PETAWAWA, Ont. — Jamie and Cyndi Teather were once as dedicated to the Canadian military as they are to each other. A soldier’s life was all either wanted. They both served in Afghanistan and Bosnia, Jamie as a trained sniper and a member of the elite Pathfinder squad, Cyndi as a technician skilled in the maintenance of weapons sighting systems.
“She knows how to fix weapons and I had weapons,” laughs Jamie. “Sleeping with her was the smart thing to do.”
Laughs are rare for the Teathers these days. Both were mentally damaged in Afghanistan and Bosnia — Jamie barely sleeps, suffers from chronic anxiety and when things get especially grim, he can spend weeks alone in his basement. Cyndi plunges into deep periods of emotional despair.
“I never wanted to take medication,” says Cyndi, with Jamie a member of the first Canadian contingent, Roto 0, that went to Kabul in 2003. “It’s like you’ve crossed the line, like you’re a loser. There is a huge stigma in the military attached to taking meds. But like I told the doctor, if Jamie and I are going to survive one of us has to be medicated.”
So far, that’s mostly been Jamie. In Afghanistan, one of his jobs was sorting bodies, and he’s had trouble dealing with the memories.
“Guys who’ve seen what he’s seen think over and over about what they should have, would have, could have done to save others,” Cyndi says. “It’s chronic, overwhelming guilt and it rips you to shreds. Afghanistan was far harder on Jamie than it was on me.”
Now 41, Jamie was security manager at Forward Operating Base Wilson on Christmas 2008, a day that still haunts him four years later, a day he can’t recount without breaking down.
“The Taliban knew it was Christmas Day and I knew they were likely to take advantage of that,” he starts. “The next day we had about 27 IEDs (roadside bombs) go off in five hours ... there were bodies everywhere. I saw four of those explosions.
“The driver and crew commander both blew out the top of an armoured vehicle and there’s a young reservist guy in the back and he blows out the top, too. But he gets up and doesn’t even check himself before he starts trying to pick up the pieces of his buddies and stay alive at the same time. He was a true hero.”
For six months after he left the military, Cyndi says her husband was “a drooling goo bag. I had to hold it together for him. When he got his shit together, then I fell apart and he held it together for me.”
Married 10 years, they are both functioning these days. But life remains a tough grind for troubled ex-soldiers getting minimal medical help. Jamie has started a landscaping and snow removal company, hiring several ex-soldiers to help with the work. He approaches life in a pragmatic fashion and, he says, a grimly realistic one.
“We’re disposable,” he says bluntly. “We were disposable when we were in battle and we’re disposable now that we’re home. I think the way Canadian society is treating these amazing soldiers, these true patriots, is very rude.”
Jamie doesn’t believe the military is equipped to deal with the influx of human damage from Afghanistan — ‘it’s their job to prepare for the next war” and not worry about the effects of the last one, he says — and is deeply worried one of these patriots might snap in the worst way.
“Most of us would sooner hurt ourselves than anyone else, but it only takes one to say, ‘I don’t want to be part of this anymore — but I’m going to be sure they remember me,’” he says.
“We just have to hope that if someone does snap they aren’t at their best. Look at what happened in Norway when a rank amateur (Anders Breivik) put his mind to it and trained himself off the Internet. Canadian soldiers are not rank amateurs.”
***
The Teathers are not unique, of course, nor is their view that CFB Petawawa has become a powder keg.
Nicky Thom, the military wife of a battle-damaged husband who helps ex-soldiers deal with Veterans Affairs paperwork, describes the mental health situation at Petawawa as “a time bomb ... and it’s just a matter of time before it explodes.”
Her big fear is that someone is going to drive to Ottawa and “do some damage ... and then everyone is going to say, ‘Why didn’t we see it coming?’”
That might sound alarmist, but it rings true with a mental health professional who has treated Petawawa soldiers suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and listened to their darkest stories.
“They describe their rage,” says the clinician, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Some feel they died over there and the deaths of their comrades meant nothing.
“It’s a sad state of affairs. It seems that what we have inside Petawawa is more loyalty to a sick system than loyalty to sick soldiers.”
That’s no small worry. CFB Petawawa, the renowned “Training Ground of the Warriors, is home to about 6,000 soldiers, the majority of whom served in Afghanistan. Many older veterans also did tours in Bosnia in the 1990s.
Not since the Korean War has Canada seen such a large return of battle-hardened, emotionally affected troops. And despite military and political assurances that these soldiers are being well cared for, there is evidence that is not always the case.
A damning internal medical report and a Citizen investigation both recently revealed evidence the government is neglecting many of the men and women it sent to war. Suicide attempts among returning vets have become commonplace. In the past few weeks alone, there have been at least three attempts and one suicide at Petawawa. The clinician estimates there are up to a dozen attempts in a typical month.
To deal with emotionally scarred soldiers, the mental health unit at the base, Warrior Support Services, offers four programs. One provides a basic walk-in service where, among other things, soldiers can be screened for addiction. A related service provides a three-step program for addictions.
Another, for “general mental health” treatment, requires referral by a physician and provides psychological and psychiatric help to deal with a range of issues such as depression, anxiety and insomnia. And, lastly, there is a “trauma and stress support program” specifically for soldiers emotionally damaged by war-related experience. That one has a waiting list of up to four months.
Lt.-Col Sean Blundell, the commanding officer with overall responsibility for health care on the base, says that while the waits can be long, the sickest are moved to the front of the queue and closely monitored. More than 150 PTSD-diagnosed soldiers are now being treated at the base or at a soon-to-be-closed Ottawa satellite clinic.
However, the internal report written by clinicians and uncovered by the Citizen last month said the mental health system at the base was “in crisis” — poorly funded by the federal government, devoid of planning, scrambling to provide even basic services and leaving mentally ill, sometimes suicidal soldiers waiting months for psychiatric and psychological treatment.
The situation is exacerbated at both ends, said the report: by the skepticism of senior military officials that the PTSD situation is as bad as some experts claim, and by the fact many sufferers are hiding their illness because they fear it will hurt their careers or push them out of the military.
Blundell rejects the accusation that mental trauma isn’t taken seriously at the base. “Most everyone has been to Afghanistan, so everyone understands.”
***
Like many of his fellow soldiers, Colin has witnessed a type of horror that, despite their best efforts, none of the tightly controlled, embedded journalists covering the Afghanistan conflict has seen first hand.
“I’ve been in 40 or 50 firefights, been almost blown up twice and shot at and had shrapnel shoot a few inches past my head,” says Colin (not his real name — serving soldiers asked that their names be withheld, fearing reprisals). “While you’re out there doing the job, the camera (in your brain) is always rolling. You take it all in and put it away. But eventually the movie starts playing again in your head and won’t stop.”
Colin has killed Taliban insurgents and has no regrets — “it’s us or them,” he says — but what haunts him are the mental images of his friends being blown apart by improvised explosive devices.
“Sometimes you were lucky if you could find a toenail later,” he says.
Colin is still serving — sidelined to menial tasks at Petawawa — and he is clearly ill. He battles with alcohol and drug addiction and has attempted suicide, yet short of a prescription for meds, he’s getting no help.
“I always get up at 4 a.m. and often I’m in a panic looking for my gear ... and hyperventilating,” he says. “And the camera is always on playback. If I can get up and put my uniform on, that’s a good day.”
Symptoms vary among war-damaged soldiers, of course, but sleeplessness and sudden outbursts of anger triggered by seemingly minor everyday incidents are common. For people trained to be on constant alert for suicide bombers, road rage is a constant.
“I’ve been driving my car and other drivers have pissed me off,” he says. “I’ve followed them but luckily they haven’t stopped or got out of their car.”
Colin finds that distressing, but it is his crumbling family life that worries him most. He’s flown into rages over innocuous occurrences like dirty dishes left on the kitchen counter and recoils at the smell of coffee being re-heated in a microwave oven.
“It reminds me of the smell of IEDs,” he says.
Sensory triggers are common among combat-damaged soldiers. Another veteran interviewed for this article reported angry reactions to the smell of Juicy Fruit chewing gum, which reminds him of the odour from newly dead bodies in Bosnia.
“When I smell it, I’m right back there — in 3-D,” he says.
Also common among these battle-hardened veterans is a fear of crowds, an inability to cope with lineups and shoppers in large retail outlets, like box stores.
“Go to the Wal-Mart, walk around the parking lot and look all the guys sitting in their cars, waiting for their wives,” Colin says. “They will be vets.”
Colin feels depressed and guilty about the turmoil he’s heaped on his wife and family. His marriage is rocky, to say the least.
“A lot of guys keep going back to Afghanistan, six or seven times, because it’s easier than staying home. Over there you have nothing to worry about except keeping yourself and your buddies alive,” he says. “I’ve always been proud to wear my uniform but why are we being left twisting in the wind?”
***
Denise and Jim (not their real names) are breaking up and it’s breaking his heart.
“He used to very kind-hearted and happy-go-lucky ... very patient,” Denise says. “But after he came home from Afghanistan he was very aggressive and moody. After his first tour he hid himself in his room for a year playing violent video games ... I don’t believe he would have eaten if I hadn’t brought food to him.”
Jim, 32, interviewed separately from his wife, says he’s begged for help since returning from his third tour, but still hasn’t been able to find a spot in the mental health system.
“Unless you’re a quivering mess on the floor, they figure you must be able to do your job. I’ve been on the waiting list for two months but I need help — and I need it now.”
Jim, a dedicated soldier who says he wants nothing more than to mend his life and continue his career, is desperate to find out what’s wrong with him, to get a diagnosis and start treatment.
“I’m so freakin’ angry all the time. Last time I went to Warrior Support they said, ‘Do you have an immediate plan to hurt someone or hurt yourself?’ I said, ‘Not today but I don’t know about tomorrow.’”
After he returned from his 2006 Afghan tour, Jim grabbed the family cat by the tail after it scratched him, intent on throwing it out of the house. Another time, he grabbed his wife as she walked by carrying a bag.
“It made this big popping sound and the next thing I knew I had her pinned up against the wall. I can’t believe I did that.”
Denise, 31, remembers it well: “The look on his face was not him. He pinned me ... and gave me shots to the kidney. I took it until he stopped. Then he was about to throw a suitcase at me but put it down and walked away.”
As Jim’s anger became scarier and more unpredictable — the top left off toothpaste tubes drives him into fits — the marriage began to fall apart. Jim has taken group-counselling sessions with other male soldiers, but it didn’t help.
“It was just a bunch of guys bitching about their wives,” he says.
Like many soldiers, Jim is reluctant to speak openly about his experiences in Afghanistan — even to his wife. But she knows he did help to pick up the pieces of some of his army friends.
“He once he asked me to watch a video showing a buddy who had died,” recalls Denise. “We started watching and he just curled into the fetal position and started crying.
“The biggest thing he’s told me was about the time he had to put an Afghan civilian on a gurney and his hand sank into the man’s body. He had to get tested for HIV-AIDS after that. He needs to talk ... he needs to stop keeping it all inside.”
**
Early last month, Greg Woolvett became so desperate to save his soldier son Jonathan from harming himself he kidnapped him from Petawawa in the dead of night and drove him to an alcohol treatment facility in Windsor.
He’d watched as his son, a master corporal with three Afghan tours under his belt, waited three years for the treatment he needed. Finally, he couldn’t take it anymore.
“I got so sick and tired of repetitive inaction by the military I had to take matters into my own hands. Jon was a dead man walking and sooner or later he was going to kill himself,” he says.
Jonathan had just been released from General Hospital in Ottawa, where he’d been taken after a second suicide attempt. He relapsed almost immediately. Depressed, upset and drinking heavily, Jonathan did not report in each day as required at what is known as sick parade. When his father was told he could be disciplined, he took action.
The Woolvetts’ story, published three weeks ago in the Citizen, triggered a sympathetic reaction across the country. Among those who responded were the parents of Cpl. Stuart Langridge, who committed suicide at CFB Edmonton and whose case is currently the subject of a military complaints inquiry.
“I wish we’d done the same thing,” said Langridge’s mother, Sheila.
The military’s first reaction to Jonathan’s “kidnapping” was to threaten the 30-year-old soldier with court martial, but they softened that stance shortly before the story became public. They have now allowed him another 60 days at the facility and have agreed to his request for a transfer to CFB Borden near Barrie, Ont. (The military is also paying for his treatment, which it is not obliged to do).
“Right now he is in a good place, has a good attitude and is very happy about the transfer,” says Greg. “He asked last fall to get out of Petawawa because ... it was adding to his depression. They left him there. It was spiteful.”
**
Nicky Thom and her husband recently recycled 62 empty 40-ounce bottles of rum. That was four months’ consumption.
“And that doesn’t include the beer,” she says.
Nicky’s husband, who declined to be interviewed for this story and has different last name, spent most of the six or seven months of his last tour of Afghanistan in 2006 in the thick of war outside of base as part of Operation Medusa, one of the bloodiest engagements for Canadian troops in the decade-long war.
During four tours in Bosnia and two in Afghanistan, the 20-year veteran has seen more than his share of brutal combat, experience that has earned him high respect from fellow soldiers.
He is currently one of dozens of soldiers suffering from PTSD who travel for weekly psychological counselling at an Ottawa clinic scheduled to close at the end of the month. At the same time, he will lose his civilian counsellor at the base, who has been redeployed with her husband, a serving soldier.
After a mental breakdown last year, it took him six months to get an appointment with the Ottawa clinic. By the end of June, he expects to be back to square one.
‘My husband was very outgoing, spontaneous, laughed a lot,” Nicky says. “We travelled and had hobbies, played squash and were active in the community. He coached minor hockey.
“With each tour of duty, things just went downhill ... Now he is very much a loner who doesn’t participate in sports. He hasn’t played ball or hockey in the last five years. He spends the majority of his time sitting on the couch watching TV. Basically, he does nothing.”
Nicky’s husband is haunted by the memory of an Afghan boy whose life he tried to save. The child was a passenger on a motorcycle that headed toward her husband’s unit, its driver ignoring a warning shot and multilingual orders to stop. In a country where children are used as lures, the soldiers feared a suicide bomber was barrelling toward them and shot the boy.
Nicky’s husband, a decorated father of three teenaged boys, held the child in his arms and administered battlefield first aid until medics arrived.
“He told me how that little boy looked at him with such trust and such pleading in his eyes,” Nicky says. “It broke his heart. And when he found out later that the boy hadn’t made it he was devastated. He still finds it very difficult to justify it to himself.
Nicky says her husband tried to get help as far back as 2007, after his first tour in Afghanistan.
“He went to a counsellor at Warrior Support who began to cry during their session and said she couldn’t help him.”
Today, he goes to work at the base every day to a manual job he enjoys but his military career is grinding to a halt. Once he leaves, Nicky fears his chances of getting help will further diminish.
Nicky, like Denise and the Teathers, believes the situation at Petawawa won’t improve until there is a wholesale change in attitude among those in charge on the base and until the government begins to support sick soldiers with “the same enthusiasm now as it did when it sent them to Afghanistan.”
She wishes that those who don’t believe Afghanistan veterans are suffering as much as they say could live with a mentally damaged soldier for a few days to see the impact first hand. Not one aspect of their family life remains unaffected.
“We bought a king-size bed so we could still sleep in the same room but I still get fat lips and bruises from his nightmares and flailing arms. You be the one to watch my husband cry,” she says.
“I don’t believe it’s possible for anyone who served outside the wire in Afghanistan to return undamaged. They all left a piece of themselves buried over there.”
Original Article
Source: ottawa citizen
Author: Chris Cobb
No comments:
Post a Comment