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AFTER THE SHOOTING -- "Sir, we need some help. I don't

think people understand some of the things we're going

through. Me and my boys aren't doing so well at times."

For more about military and veterans' mental health issues, use the VA Watchdog dot Org search engine...click here...
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Story here... http://www.registerguard.com/csp/cms/
sites/dt.cms.support.viewStory.cls?cid=20231&sid=1&fid=1

Story below:

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-------------------------

After the shooting

By Karen McCowan

Easter Sunday was not a good day for Devin Nuszbaum.

The Oregon National Guard staff sergeant had expected to feel safe back home in Tualatin after a nine-month stay in Iraq, where mortar rounds struck his base more than 300 times. But, three years after returning to civilian life, he remained anxious and agitated. He drank heavily. He lost his job as a railroad conductor.

He’d already had one run-in with police after speeding down the freeway at 90 miles an hour, his emergency flashers on and three loaded weapons in his car. Now, instead of joining his family’s holiday gathering, he was again panicked, armed and intoxicated, and behind the wheel.

This time, he phoned 1st Sgt. Vince Jacques of Albany, a fellow Iraq veteran and founder of the Oregon National Guard Reintegration Team.

“I told him, ‘I’m in trouble,’ ” Nuszbaum said. “He told me there was help available. He told me he knew someone in my area who would meet me at the VA emergency room.”

Nuszbaum had previously called a veterans hospital psychiatric worker, but the exchange had only made him angrier. His conversation with Jacques, however, was a turning point.

“It makes a difference, talking to somebody that’s been over there,” he said. “They know how you’re feeling without you having to say it. You’re not all alone going through this.”

At the urging of the reintegration team, Nuszbaum enrolled in a residential post-traumatic stress disorder treatment program at the Roseburg Veterans Administration Hospital. There he learned that his problem behaviors — from drinking to road rage to the need to carry a weapon — were classic responses to the trauma of living in an urban war zone. There he learned that he could predict — and manage — his triggers for such behavior. He still has work to do, Nuszbaum said, but he’s found hope again.

He is among hundreds of veterans helped by a team created when some of the first wounded Oregon Guardsmen came back to a state that they said was completely unprepared for them. They vowed to change things by the time the rest of their Eugene-based unit returned from the largest deployment of citizen-soldiers since World War II.

The five-member team is available by phone round-the-clock to soldiers in crisis. On 15 occasions in the past four years the team has successfully intervened during suicide attempts or police standoffs. That alone is no small accomplishment, with Army suicides at a 40-year high and Oregon veterans taking their lives more than twice as often as the general population. But the team also has worked to solve the daily medical, educational and employment barriers confronting soldiers and their families.

“There’s no door we can’t or won’t kick in to try to find an answer,” team member Sgt. Phil Maas said.

“We know for a fact that we’ve helped around 300 of our Guardsmen get family wage jobs,” said Oregon National Guard Brig. Gen. Mike Caldwell.

In the top-down culture of the military, the reintegration team, which works with veterans of any conflict, is a bottom-up anomaly. So it may be fitting that Caldwell traces the team’s beginnings to the Eugene Armory four years ago this month. Then, it was Jacques who was in trouble.

“I was down there for a meeting,” Caldwell said. “The majority of the (Eugene-based) 2nd Battalion of the 162nd Infantry was still in Iraq, But Vinni was there with two or three other guys who had been wounded. Toward the end of the meeting, he pulled me aside and said, ‘Sir, we need some help. I don’t think people understand some of the things we’re going through. Me and my boys aren’t doing so well at times.’ ”

Caldwell knew such a plea couldn’t come easily for a proud soldier and Purple Heart recipient. Jacques had suffered crushed legs, shrapnel burns and a concussion when an improvised bomb blew up his humvee, killing his driver and badly wounding his other men.

“I realized, ‘Oh, Lord — we’ve been so busy pushing people out the front door for this war, we haven’t really thought about their return,’ ” the general said.

There was no national model for a program to address the reintegration needs of civilian soldiers returning from combat, much less any funds for one. So Caldwell “robbed from this fund and that fund to make this thing go.” He asked recently retired Col. Scott McCrae to oversee the operation, knowing that he, too, had a first-hand understanding of the high cost of this war: The colonel had lost his son, 1st Lt. Erik McCrae, in Iraq. Scott McCrae was determined to provide the kind of assistance he would have wanted for his own boy.

McCrae’s passion was matched by the wounded soldiers who had approached Caldwell. Itching to help their fellow soldiers still in Iraq, irked by the inadequate medical and other support they encountered, the men banded together and vowed to force improvements by the time their comrades returned.

The original “Blasted Bastards” included Jacques; Sgt. Shane Ward, who lost part of a shoulder to an IED, or improvised explosive device; Staff Sgt. Andy Hellman, shot through the knee by a sniper; and Staff Sgt. Travis Sigfordson, whose back was broken in an IED explosion. All had been shocked by the military’s lack of preparation for their return.

Jacques recalls his treatment at Fort Lewis, Wash., not his time in Iraq, as “the worst five weeks of my military career.” Wounded men were housed in a run-down barracks, left to help one another up and down the stairs. But the biggest indignity was disrespectful treatment, he said.

Still badly injured, Jacques managed to get himself from the barracks to an office he’d been told could transfer his medical records to his Albany doctor. There he sat, unacknowledged, while a lieutenant “made personal phone calls and typed on his computer like I wasn’t there.”

When the lieutenant finally spoke, he scolded Jacques for being out of uniform and told him he was in the wrong office.

“He’s rattling off all these other places I needed to go, when I could barely walk. ... I told him, ‘The reason you sit in that desk is because guys like me are in theater, protecting your ass. Maybe you could show me a little respect and help me out.’ ”

Though he later got his records transferred, Jacques still gets angry recalling the exchange.

“I don’t ever want to see a soldier get treated like that,” he said.

Improving soldier access to local medical care was an early team goal, after one of Jacques’ men, a Blodgett resident who nearly lost his arm in the same IED blast, was forced to travel to Fort Lewis to see a hand specialist when one was available in nearby Corvallis.

The key was getting private medical providers to accept the soldiers’ insurance.

At one point, Jacques, Maas and two former team members took a three-day road trip, cold-calling on top executives at six Eastern Oregon hospitals.

“We just walked in wearing our desert camo (uniforms), a bunch of us still licking our wounds, and asked to speak to their presidents and CEOS,” Jacques said. “We’d say, ‘A bunch of our soldiers are coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan. ... They’ve been away from their families for a year, and I can’t tell you how proud I am to have served with these guys and gals. They will have medical coverage for six months with Tri-Care, and it will help them get back on their feet if you accept that insurance.’ ”

In every case, they won on-the-spot commitments, he said.

Team members don’t wait until wounded soldiers get back home to begin providing support.

“I was still in a Germany hospital bed when Staff. Sgt. Kevin Coady called to check on me,” recalled Sgt. Ben Hier, who was injured in Afghanistan. Hier has since joined the reintegration team and this fall opened Oregon’s first on-campus veterans center at Lane Community College.

The team also has helped veterans find good jobs. The Oregon National Guard recently reported that nearly 37 percent of its returning soldiers are underemployed or jobless. Maas and team member J.D. Baucom work with military, state and local employment agencies — as well as directly with Oregon employers. “Our goal is simple: family wage employment for our service members and their families,” Maas said.

Individual services for soldiers include “helping them write résumés that translate their military skills into civilian jargon — a lot of times our troops don’t know what they know,” he said. “We also videotape them in practice interviews and hook them up with 174 employers registered with the team.”

This fall, the group began taking those services to soldiers’ communities, holding job and benefit fairs in Medford, Klamath Falls and at Clackamas Community College, where 200 employers met soldiers last weekend. A similar event is planned in Eugene next year.

Among the team’s proudest moments, Baucom said, was helping to broker an agreement with Oregon’s trade unions, improving veterans’ access to apprenticeship programs by giving them credit for general military service and trade-related experience. While all states have job programs for veterans, Oregon is unique in putting Maas and Baucom literally in the same room with the rest of the reintegration team.

The goal is to go the extra mile for soldiers by trouble-shooting often interrelated problems. Hier’s recent interaction with a Eugene-area veteran was a case in point.

The soldier faced a crisis when he came into Hier’s office at the Lane Community College Counseling Center: He’d quit his job to attend school full time this fall, planning to pay his living expenses with a government stipend for student veterans. He didn’t realize that he wouldn’t receive his first such check until the end of October. Unable to pay his rent, he faced immediate eviction.

“I spent three or four hours helping him get some funding from the Coalition for Troop Support,” Hier said. “Within seven hours, his landlord had received payment for two weeks’ rent until more benefits come in. When somebody comes to us with a problem, we see it through. We don’t want them calling some 1-800 VA number and listening to Kenny G ‘hold’ music.” The reintegration team has been good at breaking through the stigma over seeking help for post-traumatic stress disorder, said Greg Andersen, who runs the in-patient PTSD program at the Roseburg VA Hospital.

Soldiers are still getting “double messages” from the military, with treatment still unofficially, even openly discouraged, Andersen said.

“But Vinni and the others provide linkage for us,” he said. “They’re aware of the guys that are having trouble. They’re a liaison between this bureaucracy of government and the soldiers and their families, and I believe Oregon is the first state to do this. They can communicate to that individual soldier: This is not just you. A lot of guys are going through this. There’s help. There’s hope.”

-------------------------

Larry Scott  --

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