NORTHPORT, N.Y. – It happened to Walter Stobe recently as he was watching a television news show.
Filmed close-ups of U.S. troops driving through the streets of Baghdad caught the Americans’ taut, fearful faces as they looked for hidden explosives on the roadside, watched nearby vehicles for suicide bombers and scanned the rooftops for snipers.
That scene served as a “trigger,” said Stobe, so emotionally upset by it that he stopped viewing news about combat in Iraq. “I didn’t know those guys literally, of course, but I knew them. I found myself getting depressed and angry at what I saw.”
Stobe, of Northport, spent nearly a year in Vietnam piloting a helicopter gunship that ferried U.S. troops to and from battle zones. He saw much action, had many close calls and paid a high price. After returning home in 1970, he developed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, a debilitating psychological problem caused by exposure to trauma.
Now, adding to the troubled mix of Vietnam veterans receiving PTSD treatment – which consists largely of support sessions and tranquilizing medication – are thousands of their counterparts from Iraq.
An incurable disorder
Although easy to describe, the effects of PTSD – which is often suffered by combat soldiers and used to be called battle fatigue or shell shock – are incurable. They include recurring nightmares, flashbacks, depression and anger (all of which sometimes are mitigated by lengthy treatment).
According to Karen Fidele, a VA spokeswoman in Washington, more than 12,400 of about 244,000 returnees from Iraq are suffering from a mental disorder. Of those, she said, nearly 4,800 – about 39 percent – have been diagnosed to date as PTSD victims.
Medical experts do not know how many returning Iraq veterans will have PTSD problems. But some say that, because of the different nature of Iraq combat – guerrilla warfare in largely urban settings – these returnees may be in worse mental shape than Vietnam veterans.
“What I see in them is longer exposure and more profound symptoms,” said Dr. Ganesan Krishnamoorthy, 61, a psychiatrist who has headed a five-member PTSD treatment team at the Northport center since 1998. “That’s because their circumstances were potentially much more traumatizing.”
Those circumstances produce among many U.S. soldiers in Iraq a continuing fear of hidden roadside explosives, suicide bombers and attacks from Iraqi insurgents clad in civilian attire. Concern about personal safety extends even into their highly defended military compounds, which are vulnerable to well-disguised enemies.
Of more than 500 Iraq veterans who have visited the Northport center since the U.S. invasion began two years ago, 130 – 26 percent – have been treated for mental health problems. Of those, according to chief psychiatrist Charlene Thomesen, 45 – nearly 35 percent of those with such problems – have been diagnosed with PTSD.
‘VA is not prepared…’
Capitol Hill critics of President Bush’s proposed 2006 budget say the resources are not there. Although Bush requested an overall 2.7 percent increase, up to $71.3 billion, in VA funding, Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, head of the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs, noted that the president’s proposal sought a hike of less than one-half of 1 percent for veterans’ medical care.
Rep. Lane Evans, D-Ill., ranking Democrat on the House Veteran Affairs Committee, denounced the president’s budget proposal as a “cruel mockery” of his State of the Union address, in which he hailed the bravery and sacrifice of U.S. troops abroad.
“What we’ve seen so far is bad,” Evans said recently about Iraq returnees. “And it may get worse. We haven’t yet reached the core of soldiers who will need mental health treatment.”
He added: “The VA is not prepared, at present, to deal with this problem.”
John Berilich, the VA’s acting deputy chief consultant for mental health strategic planning, disagreed.
Berilich, a VA official for 30 years, described himself as “ecstatic” about the proposed budget. “It will allow us to expand our services and provide easier access to the veterans,” he said.
Skeptical about Washington bureaucrats but equally distrustful of politicians, Stobe said he has full faith only in fellow veterans.
He illustrated the point by describing a chance meeting last summer at the Vietnam Wall in Washington, D.C., where he came upon a group of wounded Iraq returnees – all wore hospital gowns, some were in wheelchairs – escorted by personnel from a nearby Army medical center.
Introducing himself as a Vietnam veteran, Stobe walked up to each returnee and hugged him. “I never got that when I returned,” he explained. Although none of them was even been born before the Vietnam War ended, the returnees understood. They knew about the cold reception Vietnam veterans initially received from the American public.
“Hey, we’re here for each other,” one of them responded. “We’re family.”
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