Veterans for Common Sense

Veterans returning from tours of duty overseas face a bleak job market at home, according to a published report.

Employment prospects are especially dismal for young veterans and for those searching in Illinois, the Chicago Sun-Times reported in today’s editions.

“I’ve filled out dozens of applications,” said Blue Island resident Angelina Summerfield, 28, who cannot find a job despite a resume that includes two tours in Iraq as a Marine sergeant.

Nationally, the unemployment rate for vets between ages 20 and 24 was 16 percent in 2005, compared with 9 percent for non-veterans in the same age group, the Sun-Times reported.

The overall unemployment rate last year was 5.1 percent.

Experts cite a variety of reasons for veterans’ high unemployment.

Managers today are less likely to have personal connections to the military and don’t seek soldiers out as job applicants, said Robert Bruno, a professor at the Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan also have not boosted the U.S. economy.

Michael McCoy, 24, said he had to fight a perceived stigma from potential employers who were worried about psychological problems like post-traumatic stress disorder.

“You’ve been to war, and they think you’re a dangerous guy,” said McCoy, who was diagnosed with PTSD after returning to Chicago Heights from Iraq in April 2004.

It took McCoy five months to find a part-time job as a package handler at United Parcel Service, at a pay rate of $8.50 an hour and without benefits.

Illinois is last in the country when it comes to getting jobs for veterans, according to the U.S. Labor Department, a ranking that state employment officials dispute.

Federal labor officials say 34 percent of unemployed veterans who asked for help from the Illinois Department of Employment Security found jobs last year, but state officials say new data boosts Illinois’ ranking.

Even using the state’s statistics, Illinois performed better than just seven other states, the Sun-Times reported.

“It makes me angry, and it’s discouraging to thousands of veterans in Illinois who have served their country,” said Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill.

The low ranking is deceiving because Illinois’ younger veterans are more likely than their counterparts in other states to enroll in college, state officials said.

Illinois is one of the few states to offer veterans four years of college benefits, on top of the money they get through the federal GI Bill.

In the last five years, the number of Illinois veterans using GI Bill benefits has risen more than 53 percent, compared to 20 percent nationally, the Sun-Times reported.

“A lot of our younger veterans went into the military so they could get benefits to go to school,” said Lane Knox, who heads Illinois’ veterans employment representatives. “They don’t want to work. But if someone’s taking statistics, all they see is this person is not working.”

(© 2006 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)

Lt. Col. Edgar Montalvo has been deployed overseas six times in 10 years. First Sgt. Brandi Schiff has spent more time overseas for the military in the last six years than in the United States. Montalvo and Schiff aren’t full-time soldiers. They’re Army Reserve officers. And they say their civilian careers have suffered as a result.

Montalvo had been with the same employer for 19 years. Then, six weeks after returning from an overseas deployment, he got a negative job review and immediately accepted a buyout to leave. Schiff was laid off six hours after telling her bosses the Army was sending her to Afghanistan.

At one time, being a reservist or National Guardsman typically meant one weekend away each month and two weeks each summer. Today, with wartime deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, part-time soldiers find themselves being called up again and again, for months, even years at a time. Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, more than 542,000 reservists and guardsmen have been activated.

“There are only two types of people in the Reserves today: those who have already been deployed and those who are going to be deployed,” says Montalvo, 45, of Tinley Park, who returned from Iraq last October.

STATE OF SHAME:
A SUN-TIMES INVESTIGATION

PART 1: Where are all the jobs?
Veterans nationwide are facing a tough job market, but in Illinois the post-military opportunities are even more scarce.
• Front line to the unemployment line
• Trading a home base for a Home Depot

PART 2: Reservists fight to keep jobs
More than half a million reservists and Guardsmen have been called to active duty in Iraq. When they come home, will they have jobs?

RELATED GRAPHICS

Unemployment, veterans and non-veterans
Veterans have historically had a higher unemployment rate, but among 20- to 24-year-olds, that rate has been climbing dramatically since the beginning of the war in Iraq.

Illinois vs. Indiana
Among Illinois veterans — those who served from World War II to Iraq — the employment rate currently is the same as non-veterans. But in neighboring Indiana, veterans enjoy a higher rate of employment than non-veterans.

And the military is only going to increase its dependence on reservists because that’s cheaper than maintaining a larger full-time military, says Montalvo, who leads a Reserve unit in Forest Park.

With reservists away from their jobs more, some employers are balking at holding those jobs for them when they return, as federal law requires. Others are laying off or firing reservists and guardsmen, or making things so uncomfortable they quit, a Chicago Sun-Times investigation found.

The number of complaints filed with the U.S. Labor Department accusing employers of job discrimination against reservists and guardsmen went up 38 percent from the military buildup that began after the Sept. 11 attacks until 2005 — from 908 complaints in 2001 to 1,465. It dipped last year to 1,320 — a decline the Labor Department attributes to its aggressive efforts to get the word out to employers about the law. Illinois has seen a similar pattern of complaints.

‘Laws are weak’

People who try to remain in the military part time sometimes face pressure at work to either leave the military or leave their jobs, lawsuits and interviews with returning reservists and investigators show.

“As long as reservists are getting deployed as we are, employers are going to get hip to the law and figure out how to beat it,” says Tice Ridley, 33, an Army reservist who plans to quit as an investigator for the Cook County public defender’s office and go full time with the Army.

The Iraq war veteran filed a job-discrimination complaint in 2004, telling the Labor Department his union president was told Ridley wouldn’t be promoted because “it would hurt the efficiency of the office if he were deployed.”

The public defender’s office denied that. Labor Department investigators didn’t find any violations. His case remains in union arbitration.

“The laws are weak,” says Ridley. “If that’s all we have, as soldiers we’re screwed.”

PROTECTING RESERVISTS

The Uniformed Services Employment and Re-employment Rights Act — known as USERRA — protects military reservists and National Guardsmen from job discrimination based upon their membership in the military. Reservists and guardsmen returning from deployment are entitled to be reinstated to the job they held before being activated — with the same benefits, raises and promotions they’d be due if they had never left. Employers also are required to excuse reservists and guardsmen for drills and annual training. Also, though they don’t have to pay them for time missed while away on duty, employers can’t count it against their paid vacation days. And reservists and guardsmen cannot be fired solely because of their military service.

Some companies say they’re just watching the bottom line and can’t afford to be without their employees for the extended periods now demanded of them — though, in interviews, no employer would complain on the record, citing fears their comments might be viewed as unpatriotic or as an admission they discriminate.

“From an employer’s point of view, hiring a National Guardsman or reservist is a riskier venture that could potentially lead to higher costs,” says Victor Devinatz, a professor at Illinois State University’s College of Business whose specialty is labor and management. “They might want to be patriotic and support the war, but they also have a business to run.”

‘A waste’ to complain

About a fourth of the complaints filed last year in Illinois with the Labor Department claiming job discrimination against military members were “granted” or “settled.” In some of those cases, the employers reinstated the workers. In some, they awarded back pay or vacation time, or promoted them. In total, the employers also paid out more than $72,000 to the workers. But in nearly a third of the cases, Labor Department investigators ruled the complaints had “no merit,” or they couldn’t find sufficient evidence that the employers had violated the law.

Many complaints by part-time soldiers against employers involve workers in highly skilled jobs who were fired or laid off, or were given poor performance reviews when they went away on active duty. In interviews, they say they expected the government to ardently defend them, but they say the investigators sometimes did too little to pursue their claims.

“It was a complete waste of time,” says Schiff, who has been in the Army Reserve for 16 years.

She filed a complaint with the Labor Department in 2003 after being laid off from a public relations job at the firm Citigate Dewe Rogerson in Chicago in 2002 — hours after she informed her employer she was being deployed to Afghanistan.

Schiff, 34, is now deputy director of the Army’s public affairs office in Chicago. She says she regrets filing her complaint because her Labor Department investigator didn’t aggressively pursue her case.

“She didn’t call one person,” says Schiff. “She just talked to the lawyers of the company that I worked for and believed what they had to say. Then, she called me in and said: ‘Case closed. There is no cause.’ ”

Company blamed layoffs

According to the Labor’s Department’s file on the Schiff investigation, obtained by the Sun-Times under the federal Freedom of Information Act, Citigate Dewe Rogerson representatives told a government investigator that Schiff was part of a companywide layoff and wasn’t singled out because of her military involvement.

“But I was the only one in Chicago laid off — and, by coincidence, the only one in the Army, too,” says Schiff.

Schiff told the Labor Department investigator that, earlier, she complained that a more recent hire was given a raise but she wasn’t. She says the supervisor told her that was because she’d been “off playing Army in Bosnia” eight months before getting deployed to Afghanistan.

“Yes, it’s technically illegal to do what they did to me,” Schiff says. “But they sure got away with it. And it wasn’t that hard.”

Citigate Dewe Rogerson did not respond to calls requesting comment.

Exceptions to the law

Schiff complains that the law meant to protect reservists’ jobs shouldn’t allow the exceptions it does — for instance, the Labor Department has allowed employers to cite companywide layoffs or economic hardship in successfully defending themselves against discrimination complaints.

“There are situations where that is possible,” agrees John Muckelbauer, a senior investigator for the Labor Department. But he adds, “It is rare. The employer can claim that it is impossible or that they are unable to re-employ the individual. But that’s not the end of it. They have to prove that that’s the case.”

The law is the federal Uniformed Services Employment and Re-employment Rights Act of 1994, known as USERRA. Enacted after complaints during the Persian Gulf War, it requires companies to reinstate reservists and guardsmen who are returning to work from active military duty — with all the benefits, seniority and pay raises they would have gotten if they never left. It also says reservists and guardsmen can’t be fired or denied promotions because of their military duty.

Claim: fired for being deployed

But Army Reserve Lt. Col. Charles Schlom says in a federal lawsuit that’s just what his former employer did. An Army reservist for 17 years, the 44-year-old Algonquin man was fired from his job as Midwest regional sales manager for Marley Cooling Technologies in March 2005 — after he’d told co-workers he’d soon be deployed to Afghanistan but before he got his official orders and told his bosses

Schlom filed a complaint with the Labor Department.

“It was absolutely, completely worthless,” he says of the agency’s investigation. “I don’t think they did anything.”

The Labor Department initially sent Schlom a letter saying it was recommending its lawyers take his case to court. Muckelbauer says that was because Marley wasn’t complying with an investigator’s requests for information. But when the company finally provided information, the agency decided Schlom had been fired for cause.

“The reasons cited were lack of knowledge of the product, confrontational manner with various representatives and that, overall, he didn’t seem to produce the way the company wanted him to produce,” Muckelbauer says.

Schlom says he received sales awards every year for three years before he was fired and exceeded sales goals every year.

He says the Labor Department never told him of its final decision. So he hired a civilian lawyer, George Aucoin, who is also a colonel with the Marine Reserve.

Aucoin, who specializes in representing reservists and guardsmen in job-discrimination cases, describes Schlom’s firing as a “preemptive termination. When they found out that he was soon to receive orders for Afghanistan, they took that opportunity to wrongly terminate him. They thought they were covered because they did it before he had his official orders in hand.”

Representatives of Marley Cooling Technologies, which is based in Overland Park, Kan., did not return repeated phone calls for comment.

‘Bigger issues to tackle’

Aucoin says the Labor Department doesn’t pursue cases like this, involving just one person. Instead, he says, the agency focuses on bigger cases that it’s more likely to win — like the government’s class-action lawsuit, filed in January, accusing American Airlines of reducing benefits of its pilots who’d taken military leave.

Veterans’ representatives with the Illinois Department of Employment Security say they advise veterans not to tell potential employers they’re in the Reserve — though such advice goes against agency policy.

“If you’re not asked, don’t answer. It’s none of their business,” says one Illinois veterans-employment representative, who spoke on condition he not be named, saying agency officials told him and other reps not to talk to a reporter. “After you’re hired, say: ‘Oh, by the way, I have drill on the weekends once a month.’ Now, let’s see what happens. Now, you have a federal case.”

Difficult decisions

In November 2003, Edgar Montalvo took a buyout from Peoples Gas, where he’d worked for 19 years. He’d been back at work just six weeks after returning from an eight-month deployment to Belize when he was told he was going to receive a negative job review — his first as a manager, he says.

Montalvo says he was criticized for not doing enough — the result, he says, of an additional staffer being hired while he was gone, leaving him less to do.

Instead of staying and filing a complaint with the Labor Department, he asked for a buyout.

“I wasn’t going to be in any key position or [on any key] projects because management couldn’t afford to give it to me and risk having me gone,” says Montalvo, who started as a meter reader and, by the time he left, was a cash analyst with an MBA from the University of Chicago.

Montalvo has 25 years with the Reserve. Beside Iraq and Belize, he has seen duty in Honduras, Kenya, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Kuwait. He’s up for a promotion next year, to colonel.

“If I hadn’t been in the Reserves, I’d be a CFO by now,” he says — a company’s chief financial officer.

Rod Sierra, a spokesman for Peoples Gas, wouldn’t talk specifically about Montalvo. But Sierra says the company is supportive of its reservists.

After Montalvo left Peoples Gas, he ended up taking a job for a while in St. Louis, but his wife and two children stayed in Tinley Park. He’d come home to them on weekends. After a year of that, he got deployed to Iraq. When he came home in October, he decided to look for another job. It took five months.

During that job search, his wife, a former reservist, suggested Montalvo leave his military status off his resume. He couldn’t.

“I don’t know that I want to work for a firm that isn’t enthusiastic about me being in the Reserves,” he says. “This is who I am. It’s what I do. I serve my country

As a captain in the Army, Mike Mahon got plenty of salutes. These days, he gets nods and the occasional polite wave as he walks the aisles of his current base — a Home Depot store in Oswego.

Mahon, 29, went to work at Home Depot after four years as an Army signal officer, commanding 50 soldiers in a mobile telephone unit where he maintained communications between tanks and scouts.

On Dec. 26, having completed the company’s two-year store-leadership program, he became a store manager. He was one of 1,142 people hired into the program when it was launched in 2002 for veterans who had been junior officers in the military. More than 100 of the recruits now run stores for Home Depot, which has a reputation as one of the most welcoming companies for veterans.

“I think what the Home Depot is looking for is people who have a high level of execution and leadership,” said Mahon, who was attracted by Home Depot chief executive Robert Nardelli’s reputation for hiring and recruiting vets.

“The number one shared problem for veterans,” says former Marines Lt. Bobby Muller, “is how do you screw your head back on when you come back to society after having fought in a war.”
Speaking before a crowd of Bryant University students at a program entitled “Understanding the Readjustment Challenges of Returning Veterans,” Muller told the audience that coming to terms with memories of the disturbing and horrible experiences of war is difficult enough, but is only a part of the challenge.
The equal or greater challenge for veterans, he believes, is returning to a society that too often cares little and knows less about the sacrifices they and their comrades have made.

“When people ask you what it was like, the first few times you might answer them,” he says. “But you learn, real fast, that people don’t really want to hear it – they’re uncomfortable and they’re disturbed by it. You learn to shut up.”

Muller is the chairman and co-founder of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, and a co-founder of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, which won the Nobel Peace Prize. While serving in Vietnam in 1969, Muller was shot while leading an infantry assault. He was paralyzed from the chest down.

But Muller declares fiercely that it wasn’t his experiences while fighting that made him the “angry, loud-mouthed guy” he is today, but the aftermath.

Muller says that his first-hand exposure to the slipshod handling of veterans’ physical and mental injuries and a general public apathy toward examining the causes and consequences of the war were the affronts that converted the duty-bound soldier into a political activist.

IT took a year in a VA hospital for Muller to recover from his near-fatal wounds – a year that caused him to re-evaluate his feelings about himself and his country.

Conditions and morale at the hospital were so poor that eight men in his ward, including Muller’s best friend, committed suicide.

“I had been a Marine officer, leading men, calling in air strikes, calling in artillery and fire support from the battleship New Jersey – I am God,” he said. “Then I become a veteran, and I’m a throwaway.”

After earning a law degree from Hofstra University, Muller dedicated himself to improving treatment of veterans. He says that at the outset, he had no concept of the nature of the problem, believing that he simply needed to raise awareness of the situation.

“I was naïve enough to believe that if I explained what the problem was, America would respond,” he said. “I believed that if I made my arguments and couched them in terms of justice, and fairness and equity, the Congress would respond.”

“Ha, ha, ha,” he says.

Through years of lobbying and cajoling, Muller and others eventually made headway in improving the situation. He says that a major victory came in 1980 when the mental health community recognized Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder as a legitimate mental health injury. He recalls that before that shift, psychiatry was unequipped to handle the unique needs of veterans.

During his own convalescence, he says a psychiatrist asked him what his future plans were, “and I’ll never forget what happened.”

“Her opening line was ‘what are you going to do now,’ and I said ‘I think I’ll become a political assassin and kill all the sons of bitches responsible for this war.’ Her response to that gambit of mine was to ask me about my mother.”
Standard-issue Freudian psychoanalysis eventually gave way to the advent of “rap groups,” where veterans could share their frustrations with doctors and with each other. Muller says that’s when treatment started moving in a positive direction.

BUT while attention to veterans’ issues has increased since
Vietnam, Muller says that the underlying forces behind society’s disengagement from returning soldiers have not been confronted.

“As we came away from that experience,” he says, “it turned out that the war had been the wrong war to fight and the verdict finally came in that we lost. That lack of necessity, lack of purpose, and the inability to put a meaning to our experience was like pouring gasoline on a fire.”

What’s worse, he says, is that the society has still not answered those questions.

“We never had the courage, as a people to ask the most basic question – why,” he says. “America simply turned away; Vietnam was a bummer.”

He says that although history has recorded how the nation ended up in Vietnam, the country has never fully explored why.

“We know we were lied to by the president…we know there was a failure in Congress…a failure in the intelligence community…a failure by the military… and a failure by the media, which didn’t report to the American people in a timely way what was really going on,” he says.
But having never figured out what caused these simultaneous systemic failures, he says “it’s pretty obvious we haven’t identified what the remedy is.”

FOR that reason, Muller says he isn’t surprised that the country now finds itself engaged in a conflict which bears many similarities to the one in South Vietnam.

Joining Muller on Thursday was Garett Reppenhagen, a veteran of the war in Iraq. The Army sniper believes he knows the reason that American society is remiss in answering those questions.

Despite the flags and fanfare, Reppenhagen says that he and many other veterans returning from service are dismayed at the cavalier attitude toward the war exhibited by the public and even their leaders.

“I was extremely frustrated when I came out,” he says. “And especially when I saw a clip of President Bush searching his office jokingly for weapons of mass destruction. I was in 21-gun salutes for my friends because they were out there looking for weapons of mass destruction in some of the most dangerous places known to man – they weren’t looking under desks and chairs.”

Reppenhagen says he joined the service in his mid-20s, looking for direction and purpose. Deployed first as a peacekeeper in Kosovo, he says he took pride in his service there, and took pride in his abilities as a solider.

The Army put him through “sniper school,” a series of courses taught by international special forces operatives, where began learning “how to shoot, how to stalk people, and learning the anatomy of how bullets kill people.”

When he finished the course, he was deployed to Iraq in February 2004. His purported job, he says, was to save the life of his comrades by taking the lives of their enemies.

But Reppenhagen says the nature of the fighting was much more complicated.

“I was confident in my abilities to do my job well, but I was questioning whether it was the right thing to do,” he says.

He recounts how a convoy driving through a hostile environment at night reacts to the reported sight of a muzzle flash. When one soldier senses a threat and returns fire, the entire convoy joins in.

“People in the line will have no idea what’s going on, but they start opening up with grenades, M240 machine guns, .50 caliber machine guns, using huge amounts of firepower,” Reppenhagen says.

“Then you raid the house, kick down the door, and there’s mom, dad, and their two kids. An insurgent popped off a couple rounds at the road and ran off, and we lit up a house.”

“When I killed my first civilian,” he says, “I was frustrated and angry, and it started to make me question why I was there.”

Reppenhagen says he doesn’t focus blame on himself or other
U.S. troops for using superior firepower to protect themselves. But he questions whether the American public will ever bear its share of the burden of guilt he now feels.

“Active duty personnel amount to less than 1 percent of the population,” he says. “The majority of the American public are totally insulated.”

Reppenhagen’s and Muller’s goal is to convince the nation to evaluate whether the causes of war is equal to the sacrifices it asks of veterans.

“There’s a huge unawareness of the true cost of war,” Reppenhagen says, “because so few people are sacrificing. People don’t see it in the economy, don’t see it in the taxes, they don’t see it in society. It’s only the select few that are fighting the war that are paying the cost.”

MOBILE, Ala. – Sgt. Milton Caples made it home safely to his wife and daughter after a year in Iraq, but thoughts of suicide bombers, mortar attacks and rapid pops of gunfire haunted him.

The security convoy driver would lapse into soldier mode while driving on rural roads back home in Mobile, speeding up and driving evasively as he flashed back to the streets of Balad and Tikrit, and the dangers that lurked on every rooftoop and around around every corner.

“I would know I was doing crazy stuff. It would seem like I was driving but I wasn’t there. I was looking at myself doing stuff in a video game or something,” he said. “In some cases, I’m glad the police didn’t see me because they would have taken my license away.”

He did nightly security patrols of the family home – checking doors and windows and looking for prowlers.

Eventually, his anger and inability to lose the images of war ate away at his relationship with his wife and daughter, who struggled to reach the fun-loving man they once knew.

Three years into the Iraq war and almost five years after the invasion of Afghanistan, American families like the Capleses are increasingly becoming part of its collateral damage. Learning from the mistakes of Vietnam, the military has long encouraged returning soldiers to seek counseling. Now its leaders are trying something different – reaching out to the soldiers’ families.

Although treatment and medication have evolved since Vietnam, the warrior mentality still prevents most returning soldiers from getting the help they need, said Rick Weidman of Vietnam Veterans of America.

“Real men don’t eat quiche and they don’t have problems like this – hooah,” he said, giving the shout soldiers make.

Milton Caples began working with a psychiatrist at Pensacola Naval Hospital after his wife demanded he get help. He started taking antidepressants and the couple began marriage counseling.

The Naval hospital placed advertisements in civilian newspapers this fall to make families aware of its counseling programs. Navy hospitals are also reaching families through a series of online videos about post traumatic stress syndrome.

In the videos, a Navy psychiatrist interviews a Marine medic, his family, a Marine commander and others about the problems of returning from combat.

The medic tells of gunbattles, his helpless attempt to save a child run over by a Humvee and the surprise of opening a body bag and realizing the body inside is a friend.

A lieutenant colonel encourages Marines to enter counseling. By seeking treatment Marines can avoid problems including domestic violence and DUIs, the videos say.

The videos were designed not for service members, but their families.

“The goal was to bring in the family in hopes that if the individual wouldn’t come in on their own, we would reach them through the family. We made thousands of copies and distributed them to all kinds of places,” said retired Navy Capt. Jennifer Morse, the San Diego Naval Hospital psychiatrist featured on the videos. The Navy began producing the videos in 2004 and is releasing a re-edited version of the project in the coming months.

“The intent is to get people help, not to fix them over the Internet. (To tell them that) they shouldn’t be ashamed of their feelings after they have served in these situations,” said Bill Hendrix the Navy’s Pentagon-based coordinator of the Lifelines video project.

The videos have been so successful that the Air Force and the Army are also using them to encourage families to seek counseling for veterans of both Iraq and Afghanistan, Hendrix said.

Weidman, of the Washington-based Vietnam veterans group, applauded the efforts to reach troops by reaching out to families.

“The military, under significant pressure, has made some significant efforts,” he said.

Vietnam Veterans of America has long pushed the Department of Defense to develop such programs, he said.

But Capt. Jeffrey Weyeneth, a psychiatrist at Pensacola Naval Hospital, estimates continued counseling programs still reach only 10 percent of troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

“A lot of guys, they see it as a nick in their armor, ‘If I want to do 20 (years) or more, I don’t want to be seen as a nut case’. And confidentiality is difficult with the military because mental health can affect your ability to function in the military so confidentiality is not as absolute as it is in the civilian world,” he said.

Returning soldiers who go without treatment often hide their stress from co-workers to avoid ruining their careers and instead take their problems out on their families, Weyeneth said. Stress should be deal well otherwise it can affect to bad for that people should interact with each other which is the best way to reduce stress.  There are many resources to have even cam to cam conversation with anyone.

“A lot of these guys come back from war but never get out of the combat, the enemy just changes. They direct their anger at other people,” he said.

Many of the 1.28 million servicemen and women who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001 are getting at least some mental health treatment.

A Pentagon study released this year found that more than a third of U.S. soldiers received psychological counseling soon after returning from Iraq. The study, done by doctors at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, found that 35 percent of Iraq veterans received mental health care during their first year home. In addition, 12 percent of the more than 222,000 returning Army soldiers and Marines in the study were diagnosed with a mental problem.

Milton Caples said his time at the Army’s Camp Anaconda near Balad, Iraq, was life-altering.

“They got mortared 10 or 12 time a day and every time there was a mortar attack you’d have to get in the … bunkers. It was safer going out on the missions than it was living there. I was glad to go out because there were more people dying at Anaconda,” he said.

His wife, Michelle, struggled to understand her husband when he returned home.

She changed her nursing shifts at an area hospital to avoid leaving him alone with their 14-year-old daughter because the father and daughter argued so often.

“Milton couldn’t relax and that meant no one could relax,” she said.

He credits counseling and medication with saving his marriage and helping him to start to rebuild his life.

“If I hadn’t gotten counseling and stuff I don’t know where

THE widow of a Carlisle soldier who committed suicide after a six-month tour of duty in Iraq has vowed to sue the Ministry of Defence.

Donna Mahoney, whose husband, 45, gassed himself in the family car in August last year, believes he would be alive today if the Army had done more to help him.

The mum-of-four, of Botcherby, Carlisle, believes he was suffering from post traumatic stress disorder yet he was given only a two-hour debrief in preparation for his return to civilian life.

Donna believes the MoD failed in its legal “duty of care” to her husband.

In an emotional interview with the News & Star, she told how Mr Mahoney, who served in Iraq for six months during 2003, had been haunted by his experiences.

Among the horrors he witnessed was the lynching of an eight-year-old Iraqi girl by fanatics because she had accepted chocolate from British soldiers.

She goes on to speak of the impact Peter’s suicide has had on her family.

The full story

Donna Mahoney is haunted by the memory of finding her husband’s body.

It was 3.10pm on August 3 last year and she’d just returned from the Lonsdale cinema in Carlisle with her two youngest children, six-year-old Vicky and 10-year-old brother Ben.

They’d seen the latest Disney film – a school holiday treat that left them all feeling in a good mood.

But seconds after arriving at their Mount Florida home in Botcherby Donna sensed that there was something dreadfully wrong – her husband Peter was missing.

When she tried the garage door she realised it had been barricaded. Reaching behind the door she felt the stepladder that had been jammed against the back of the door and managed to pull it aside.

Inside she found the family’s navy blue Rover car, a pipe leading from the exhaust into one of the windows.

Lying dead in the driver’s seat was Peter, immaculate in his khaki TA uniform, his shaven head tilted back against the seat, and his eyes staring blindly upwards.

The car was strewn with poignant personal reminders of Peter’s life – pictures of him and Donna, their Valentine’s Day cards, photos of the children, beaming smiles for the camera in happier times.

“The memory of finding him will never go away, and even now I sometimes have nightmares,” said Donna, who is convinced that Peter, who served with the Territorial Army as a Private, was suffering from post traumatic stress disorder linked to the horrors of Iraq.

Ironically, in the car with Peter when Donna found his body was an MoD leaflet on psychological therapy, torn in half and tossed aside.

Donna is now planning legal action against the MoD, alleging that they failed to live up to the legal duty of care that they owed Peter after he returned from a six-month tour of duty in Iraq in 2003.

Her action comes as her family – including her two older children, Matt, 21, and Ashley, 19 – continue to feel the painful emotional fallout from their father’s suicide.

Looking back, Donna says she can now see clearly how her husband was changed dramatically by Iraq.

One experience he never forgot was the awful fate of an eight-year-old Iraqi girl, lynched by fanatics because she’d accepted chocolate from British soldiers.

“His work included collecting casualties from the front line, but it was seeing that little girl hanged that got to him the most,” said Donna, 38.

“He talked about it. Peter would have nightmares and wake up startled and panic stricken in the night. What he’d seen disturbed him deeply.

“Before Iraq he was a real family man who loved doing things with the kids – walks in the park, playing football with the lads; weekends away; boat trips on Windermere.

“He loved taking Ashley to see Arsenal play in London. He was the life and soul of any party. On Bonfire Night he was always the first one out with the sparklers. Well when it is about bonfire or cooking then definitely wood briquette are best choice. You can find best quality wood briquette at https://www.xn--dkbrnde-pxa.dk.

“We used to foster kittens for the Cats’ Protection League and he’d pet two-week old kittens on his knees. After Iraq he changed.”

Peter became withdrawn, wary of crowds and volatile, said Donna.

She first realised there was something wrong six weeks after he returned from Iraq. The family were camping in Silloth at Stanwix Holiday Park. Unable to stand being part of the crowd in the clubhouse there, Peter sneaked away. Donna found him in the tent in darkness, a book in his hand.

Over the following weeks he took to disappearing for hours on end, taking long solitary walks. He and Donna argued and in the final weeks agreed they should separate.

“He worried that the Iraqis were going to do something to us. He slept with a length of lead piping under the bed.”

It was only after Peter’s death that Donna became aware of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

She said: “He landed in Britain at Brize Norton to get demobbed. He spoke to somebody for two hours during his debriefing session.

“That was it. It just wasn’t enough,” said Donna, whose family life has been turned upside down.

She recalled her daughter Vicky’s sixth birthday party shortly after Peter’s return from Iraq – a house full of kids, raucous laughter, the birthday cake, presents, and a double celebration.

Peter – always a doting father – stayed upstairs, out of sight. Donna recalled coaxing him down to wish Vicky happy birthday.

“Vicky still hasn’t cried over losing him,” said Donna, who fears for her youngest.

Donna suspects Vicky may have stirred memories in Peter of the Iraqi girl who was a similar age, and whose death on the end of a rope was etched into his memory.

Ashley, whose ambition is to own his own hairdressing salon, also remains deeply wounded.

“He finds it so hard,” said Donna.

“He drinks. But he’s no longer depressed about it all – he’s angry.”

Matt, 21, has embraced religion, initially moving to South Africa to do charity work but now working for a Christian organisation in Cumbria.

Ben ploughs much of his time into schoolwork.

So far Donna has received £1,450 in compensation from the Army for Peter’s death – £500 towards the cost of his funeral, £150 to help pay for the children’s first Christmas without their father and £800 for replacing the marital bed Donna could no longer face.

“It’s disgusting,” says Donna. “Peter joined the Army because he wanted to give something back to society.

“He knew he was depressed when he came back but he wasn’t sure what was going on.

“It wasn’t until after his death that I read about PTSD – and the symptoms of it were exactly what I saw in Peter. That’s why I’ve campaigned about this ever since.

“I’ve been left on my own, with two small children at home and no husband.

“If he had died in Iraq we would have been treated better. Like other widows, I feel that the Army has failed in its duty to care for Peter. If they hadn’t failed, he’d be here now.”

here is no disputing the number of American troops who have died in the war on terror. At press time, more than 2,590 soldiers had lost their lives, according to U.S. Department of Defense numbers.

But the number of wounded is not clear-cut. In fact, that count is elusive. DoD numbers have tallied 17,702 wounded.

“Basically, that’s everybody who has been through the major military hospitals, like Walter Reed Army Medical Center,” said Kryn Westhoven, spokesman for the New Jersey Department of Military and Veterans Affairs. “There are some who are not counted in that roll-up, and the numbers are not broken down by state.”

New Jersey Gov. Jon S. Corzine has asked the department to track the number but the task is “nightmarish,” according to Westhoven, particularly since the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (known as HIPAA) does not allow patients’ medical information to be reported because of privacy issues. HIPAA covers both the civilian and military populations.

“Let’s say a soldier comes back and he’s the walking wounded. He just needs physical therapy, but he is nonetheless wounded,” Westhoven said. “Let’s say he comes back to Fort Dix. He might go to a local doctor for two to three months for physical therapy and then be on his way. He might receive a 10 percent disability. He might have no disability. He might be fine afterwards. The point is, he’ll never truly be tracked.”

When Michael White, a database/Web designer for a Georgia cell phone company, heard conflicting news reports about casualties in Iraq, it bothered him enough to create www.icasualties.org, a Web site that has become a national reference point for war statistics. White, who calls the continuous effort to keep up the site a “labor of conscience,” does so on his own, for no compensation.

A few other people at other locations in the country and the world have joined him in combing through all available data to get the very best information. White has been working for the past two months on a way to pinpoint the number of wounded because he will not post any casualty without verification.

“The DoD says its does not release the names of the wounded out of respect for the individuals,” said White, who searches a variety of places to find names of the wounded and is struggling to nail down a reliable method of gathering such information. “I’ve been trying to codify exactly what we know about names of wounded and how they were wounded and where they were wounded. Boy, it’s just eating me up.”

The DoD Wounded in Action numbers confound him for other reasons, too.

“It doesn’t include non-hospital wounded, but there’s more to it than that,” he said. “It’s also possible that a soldier is wounded, goes back to battle, is wounded again and that gets counted twice. So as to what the actual numbers are, it’s anybody’s guess. Then that soldier could die. He could be counted twice in the wounded and then be among the dead.”

Yet another question confounds the count: What is a wound? While soldiers with closed head injuries and amputated limbs — areas of the body left unprotected by Kevlar vests — tend to be taken to the major hospitals, there are other serious conditions treated at local medical centers.

The incidence of respiratory illnesses, endemic diseases and mystery illnesses outnumber the incidence of the brain and limb wounds, according to Stephen Robinson, a Desert Storm veteran and executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center. Yet these conditions are more or less off the media radar.

“Iraq is not an OSHA-approved workplace,” Robinson said. “So people are having extreme environmental exposures. Extreme heat and extreme cold and fine sand. The sand in Iraq is approximately two microns. It’s respirable. If any bacteria, any petroleum products, any chemical or biological agent lands on or bonds itself to that silica, it then can be ingested through the fine sand into your lungs.”

Soldiers also are contracting endemic diseases in Iraq, such Leishmaniasis, a blood-borne disease transmitted by the bite of a sandfly. It can linger in the bloodstream for years and may manifest itself initially as fatigue and malaise, Robinson said. Or it can lay dormant for a long time and tamper with the immune system.

A question just as large is whether the medical services budget of the federal Department of Veterans Affairs can handle the rush of young veterans into the system.

The budget is up 69 percent since President Bush took office and it would rise by 11 percent next year under Bush’s budget, according to Associated Press reports. But the White House budget office is assuming the budget can absorb cuts for three years in a row after that.

Currently, the budget is set at $24.5 billion and would increase to $27.7 billion in 2007 under the president’s budget, the AP reports. But it would take a 3 percent cut in 2008 and stay below $27 billion for the next four years. Though war on terror veterans constitute only 2 percent of the VA patient caseload, many have complex wounds that require expensive care.

So far, so good with the New Jersey VA Health Care System, according to spokeswoman Sandy Warren, who reports there currently are 970 returning veterans from Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom enrolled in the system. A total of 873 have been seen and treated “for a variety of medical issues.” There are no waiting lists, she said.

A big question, though, according to John Rowan, national president of Vietnam Veterans of America, is whether the system can withstand the influx of both War on Terror veterans and Vietnam veterans who are filing belated Agent Orange-related claims as fallout from their exposure manifests in their older years.

“They don’t understand how the Vietnam veterans are seriously affected with diabetes and prostate cancer so many years after the fact. We’re twice as likely to have prostate cancer if we’ve been exposed to Agent Orange,” he said. “All these things are coming out now when we’re in our 50s and 60s.”

He has been lobbying in Washington, D.C., for more dollars for Vietnam veterans, he said, and he always will because caring for veterans is part of the cost of war.

Andrew Best of Evanston enlisted in the military on his 18th birthday, two months after his graduation in 2002 from Evanston Township High School. He returned to Iraq in November 2005 for his third deployment.

By the end of his four-year enlistment this year, he will have spent 27 out of his 48 months in the Army with his “boots on the ground” in Iraq.

Following are excerpts from an essay submitted to the Review by Andrew’s father, attorney Robert Best:

For many Americans, one of the most grim and horrifying moments of the war in Iraq occurred one year after the invasion, on March 31, 2004, when four American contractors drove their trucks into an ambush in Fallujah. After they were murdered, an angry mob set the bodies on fire and hung two of them from a bridge. The images were shocking and unforgettable.

This “moment” brought about the most grim moment (out of many) of the war to date for our family, too. It occurred as our son, Andrew, was nearing the end of his first one-year deployment in Iraq.

While we shared the world’s horror at the gruesome events on March 31, trouble was brewing south of Baghdad, where loyalists of the anti-American shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr had laid siege to holy cities like Najaf and Karbala. The whole country seemed to be dissolving into chaos.

On April 7, we received from Andrew the following e-mail that allowed us to experience in the space of about 30 seconds the widest imaginable range of emotions — first elation that he was out of Iraq, then despair that he may have to go back, then anger at individuals and events we had no control over, and finally, pride at the depth of his character.

April 7, 2004. Hello from Kuwait. Well, I made it here safe and sound at Camp Arifjan. It took about five days just to get here, and the whole brigade has worked its ass off out here. We all had to pull 12 hour wash rack shifts to get all 200 vehicles into the sterile lock, but we got it done in about a week…..

“I hope everyone has heard what is going on in Fallujah. Soldiers dying right and left. Well, because of that some units are getting a 90 day extension. Sadly, I may also get extended. If that does happen, I’ll tell you, but we have no definite word on anything yet.

“I’ll definitely make it home sometime, just now it may not be until my birthday in August.” – Andrew

Easter Sunday, April 11, 2004. As I have said in my previous e-mail, things look very grim for the next three to six months. Right now we don’t know when or where we will be going, but I can say that we are probably going to be facing some rough opposition. People will be in harm’s way and may get injured or killed. I will do my best to stay alive and well. – Andrew

I’ve wondered from time to time what led Andrew to join the Army. He never got into a single fight growing up. He never held a gun in his hand, real or otherwise, until he enlisted. In fact, his nickname at ETHS was Jesus, due to the long straight hair that flowed over his shoulders.

I’ve drawn some insight from his days as a Little Leaguer. He never got overly excited about a big win or upset with a tough loss. He usually played better hurt than when he was healthy. If we were getting clobbered or it was freezing out, I knew I could hand him the ball and ask him to pitch the last couple of innings. Mostly, he just wanted the lousiest job, because he knew someone had to do it.

Ultimately, I’ve concluded, he decided to enlist because he recognized that someone must be willing to die for something larger than himself.

The fact that this is a war that neither he nor I would have started does not diminish the nobility of that calling.

More than 1,600 severely wounded servicemembers have received cash payouts through the new Traumatic Servicemembers Group Life Insurance program in its first three months, according to program officials.

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The payouts so far total more than $103 million and include 66 troops who have been injured since Dec. 1 and already received their cash. Officials at the Department of Veterans Affairs said they’re pleased with the quick turnaround thus far.

“That was really the intent of the law,” said Stephen Wurtz, the deputy assistant director for insurance at the department. “The idea was to get them a quick infusion of cash over this transitional period, to help them cover expenses. So far, we’re very gratified that it’s working that way.”

When Congress approved the coverage, they made all troops on active duty eligible for the protection, but also included provisions to retroactively pay servicemembers who had been injured in Iraq and Afghanistan since combat operations started there.

So far, 1,543 troops have received the retroactive payments, Wurtz said. Defense officials estimate about 5,000 troops total are eligible under those guidelines.

Wurtz said they also anticipate about 900 new payouts each year.

Last week, during a Senate Veterans Affairs Committee hearing, Chairman Larry Craig, R-Idaho, told members of the Paralyzed Veterans of America he is pleased with the results thus far. Craig had sponsored the bill creating the new insurance program last year.

“These are young men and women with amputations, severe burns, total blindness, total deafness, paralysis and a host of other disabilities sustained in defense of America,” he said.

“Going forward, the ‘wounded warrior’ insurance will help close the gap in financial help these heroes need during their convalescence.”

The $1 premium is not expected to cover all costs associated with the new insurance program, but Congress has mandated any additional expenses come from the Defense Department budget, not from additional rate increases.