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STIGMA HAS BECOME A NIGHTMARE -- "Soldiers
coming
back with PTSD are facing a stigma. I
don't care what
the chain of command has recently said."
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http://www.gazette.com/
onset?id=20547&template=article.html
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Stigma has become a nightmare
By CARY LEIDER VOGRIN, THE GAZETTE
Michael Lemke’s voice betrays his anger. He returned from Iraq suffering
post-traumatic stress symptoms, and he doesn’t think the Army did enough
to help him or those who came after him.
“Soldiers coming back with PTSD are facing a stigma. I don’t care what
the chain of command has recently said,” Lemke said, referring to the
Army’s recently retired surgeon general, who praised Fort Carson for its
mental health programs during a January visit.
“There’s a huge stigma,” Lemke continued, describing a “machismo thing”
in which “seeing messed-up stuff is part of being a soldier, killing
people is part of being a soldier.”
“Let’s face it,” he said. “The military is not a touchy-feely
organization, so when it comes to mental health issues, it’s ‘Suck it
up, soldier, and drive on.’”
PTSD has become a focal point for Lemke, who was in the first wave of
soldiers to enter Iraq in 2003.
He attends a PTSD therapy group at the Colorado Springs VA clinic, blogs
about the subject on the Veterans For America Web site and fields calls
from soldiers across the country.
He’s also working on his master’s degree in counseling at Colorado
Christian University with the intention of helping others who have been
to war.
“It is the only thing I can do with my life to make sense of this
wasteful war, and the ways it sickened my mind and body,” he wrote in an
e-mail that followed an interview. “It is the only way I can turn a huge
and depressing negative into a useful positive. I feel it’s why God
saved my life in Iraq.”
Lemke said he wanted to go to the Middle East, specifically to
Afghanistan. He said that three days after seeing a college
roommate-turned New York firefighter standing in the rubble of the Twin
Towers, he went to a recruiter’s office in Grand Junction, where he was
living. At the time, he had been out of the military for 12 years; Lemke
had been active-duty Army at Fort Carson in the 1970s and then spent
time in the Reserves.
“I wanted to go to war. I was mad,” he said.
In early 2003, days shy of his 44th birthday, Sgt. Lemke was in the
Middle East with a Colorado Army National Guard unit, the 220th MP
Company, which was readying to march into Iraq after the armored
spearhead of the invasion.
What he saw at an Iraqi mass grave filled with the bodies of political
prisoners executed under Saddam Hussein can’t easily be forgotten.
“Bodies everywhere, hundreds of feral dogs eating and feeding off of the
corpses, some of them running around with body parts like an arm or a
hand or a leg in their mouth, like it was a bone,” he said. “One day my
platoon shot 70 dogs.
“It’s certainly one of the most disgusting, abhorring things I’ve ever
witnessed. When you’re there at the time, you have these compensatory
coping mechanisms. You turn it into humor, you joke about it, you know.
We found a body that was just the leg from the kneecap down to the foot
and we named him ‘Skip.’ You do stuff like that.
”Your brain just manufactures a way to handle it at the time,” he said.
“In a military environment, it’s often humor, or it’s often really sick
humor. But it comes back, and it comes back to you in a way that’s not
humorous.”
Lemke returned to Fort Carson in August 2003 with orthopedic problems —
he was having trouble walking — exposure to tuberculosis and a head full
of terrible visions.
For the first three weeks back, he said, he rarely slept — maybe 90
minutes a night. While seeing a nurse practitioner for TB medication, he
confided that he had been drinking every night — “getting obliterated,”
he said — to try to sleep.
“At that point, she said, ‘Well, do you want a mental health referral?’
I said, ‘I believe I have PTSD.’” Lemke said he also saw several
chaplains — in Iraq and at posts en route to Fort Carson — to talk about
how he felt.
In group therapy sessions Fort Carson, he said rules were laid down
about what topics were off-limits.
“We were told in the therapy group we couldn’t talk about the chain of
command,” he said, still infuriated years later. Not only do soldiers
often have issues with their superiors’ decisions in war, the chain of
command also has the ability to stymie soldiers’ efforts to get mental
health help or to label them as discipline problems if they seek it, he
said.
“You think any private practice with their own shingle hanging in this
town would try to tell a client, ‘You can’t talk about that?’ That’s
malpractice in my book.”
Lemke spent a year in medical holdover. While awaiting word on what kind
of disability rating he’d get for PTSD and other medical issues, he
worked as a volunteer for the Red Cross on post, did patient data entry
at Evans Army Community Hospital and supervised soldiers in the
barracks.
He’s angry at the decision that finally came down: A disability rating
of less than 30 percent, which meant a lumpsum payment instead of
lifetime checks. He refers to it as a “30 percent shell game” that
cheats soldiers out of what’s due them.
He also thinks the public isn’t taking notice nearly enough.
“I believe Americans care to the extent that they want our men and women
to stop dying and getting wounded,” he said. “But I don’t know if they
realize how much a soldier faces returning from war.”
He also distrusts much of the local media, which he says hasn’t done
enough to delve into the PTSD issue. He refused to show documentation of
his diagnosis to The Gazette.
“No, I’ve given enough paper to too many journalists. The Army in D.C.
(DA/DOD) and Fort Carson won’t dare deny they diagnosed me with PTSD,”
he wrote in an e-mail.
The post declined to discuss Lemke’s medical status because of
confidentiality laws.
Lemke still takes part in group and individual therapy for PTSD at the
Colorado Springs VA clinic. He now receives disability pay from the VA,
which he said gave him a much higher disability rating of 80 percent. To
draw the $1,319 a month, though, he said he had to repay his Army
severance check of roughly $28,000.
Lemke said he sometimes relies on sleep medications to combat
nightmares, and he’ll take Xanax, a drug to lessen anxiety or panic, if
he knows he’ll be around crowds.
All of these things help, he said, but they don’t get rid of PTSD.
“I benefit going to group,” he said. “I’ll have more dreams and do worse
in my week if I don’t go.”
CONTACT THE WRITER: 636-0236 or
cary.vogrin@gazette.com
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Larry Scott --
