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SALON DOT COM BEGINS WEEKLONG SERIES,
"COMING
HOME" -- You will want to read this riveting
series of
stories by Mark Benjamin and Michael de Yoanna.
This is the first in a series. Please check
in to Salon dot Com every day at the link below to read the rest of the
stories... view a great photo gallery... and participate in the blog.
First Salon story
here...
http://www.salon.co
m/news/special/coming_home/200
9/02/09/coming_home_one/
Story below:
Your comments accepted at bottom of
page.
Share story/email link.
-------------------------
"The Death Dealers took my life!"
Adam Lieberman tried to kill himself when he
returned from Iraq. Only then did the Army take his mental health
seriously.
By Mark Benjamin and Michael de Yoanna
Editor's note: This is the first story in a weeklong series called "Coming
Home."
The day before Halloween 2008, Army Pvt. Adam Lieberman swallowed handfuls
of prescription pain pills and psychotropic drugs. Then he picked up a can
of black paint and smeared onto the wall of his room in the Fort Carson
barracks what he thought would be his last words to the world.
"I FACED THE ENEMY AND LIVED!" Lieberman painted on the wall in big, black
letters. "IT WAS THE DEATH DEALERS THAT TOOK MY LIFE!"
Soldiers called Lieberman's unit, the 1st Battalion, 67th Armored
Regiment, the Death Dealers. Adam suffered serious mental health problems
after a year of combat in Iraq. The Army, however, blamed his problems on
a personality disorder, anxiety disorder or alcohol abuse -- anything but
the war. Instead of receiving treatment from the Army for his war-related
problems, Adam faced something more akin to harassment. He was punished
and demoted for his bad behavior, but not treated effectively for its
cause. The Army's fervent tough-guy atmosphere discouraged Adam from
seeking help. Eventually he saw no other way out. Now, in what was to be
his last message, he pointed the finger at the Army for his death.
It would be a voice from beyond the grave, he thought, screaming in
uppercase letters. The last words, "THAT TOOK MY LIFE!" tilted down the
wall in a slur, as the concoction of drugs seeped into Adam's brain.
Late last month the Army released figures showing the highest suicide rate
among soldiers in three decades. The Army says 128 soldiers committed
suicide in 2008 with another 15 still under investigation. "Why do the
numbers keep going up?" Army Secretary Pete Geren said at a Pentagon news
conference Jan. 29. "We can't tell you." The Army announced a $50 million
study to figure it out.
It is not just the suicides spiraling out of control. Salon assembled a
sample of 25 cases of suicide, prescription drug overdoses or murder
involving Fort Carson soldiers over the past four years, by no means a
comprehensive list. In-depth study of 10 of those cases revealed a pattern
of preventable deaths. In most cases, the deaths seemed avoidable if the
Army had better handled garden-variety combat stress reactions.
Interviews, Army documents and medical records suggest that Adam might not
have attempted suicide if he had received a proper diagnosis and
treatment. His suicide attempt seems avoidable. But the Army's
mistreatment extended well into its aftermath.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
At the last minute on Oct. 30, Lieberman stumbled out of his room and
dialed 911. He lived.
Five days later Adam's mother, Heidi Lieberman, sat opposite the desk of
Lieberman's battalion commander, Lt. Col. Lance Kohler, at Fort Carson.
Nobody from the Army had bothered to call her in Rochester, N.Y., to tell
her about Adam's suicide attempt. There was no requirement to alert
parents of an attempt, the Army said, only a successful suicide.
Heidi had watched her son's mental health deteriorate precipitously after
he returned from Iraq in late 2006. He had suffered from a laundry list of
symptoms typical of post-traumatic stress disorder, including insomnia,
depression, panic attacks and flashes of violent anger.
Two days after he swallowed the pills, Adam called his mother himself from
the hospital. With her son still slurring his words from the effect of the
meds, Heidi could barely understand him. When Heidi asked him where he
was, Adam had to ask someone.
Sitting across from the lieutenant colonel's desk, Heidi wanted to know
why the Army had not moved her son into a unit supposedly dedicated to
healthcare where he might get better treatment.
"Well, he has legals," Kohler told her. Legal trouble. She knew Adam was
struggling. Mostly Adam had been silencing his demons with 30 beers a day
plus some Jameson. He'd puke in a bucket and start over. Mental health
professionals call it self-medicating when a soldier comes back from war
and turns to booze when he can't get help, another typical reaction. Just
as predictable is the bad behavior that comes with it.
To Heidi, Kohler's response showed that the Army considered Adam a
discipline problem, but didn't seem particularly concerned about why.
"What legals?" Heidi asked.
Adam had broken into a candy machine, so petty larceny. He had also gone
AWOL for a short time to say goodbye to an Army buddy in Texas headed off
to a second tour in Iraq. The Army denied Adam's request for leave. He
went anyway.
"And defacing government property," Kohler added to the list.
"When did he do this?"
"Within the last couple of days," Kohler responded, staring.
Heidi thought. No. Couldn't be.
"What did he deface?"
Kohler stared. "The wall in his bedroom."
Heidi met his stare, exasperated. "You mean his suicide note?" Kohler just
looked at her.
The next day Heidi called Adam's company commander, Capt. Phelps.
"You know," Heidi fired at Phelps, "I still have a hard time wrapping my
mind around the fact that my son is being charged with defacing government
property and you people are more concerned about your wall than my son,"
she stammered. Then she threatened, half jokingly, "I will paint that wall
and make this stupidity go away."
A pause, and then Phelps snapped, "We'll contact supply and have them
bring you the matching paint."
And so, the Army allowed a mother to paint over her son's suicide note.
Heidi's handicapped sister helped.
"I was kind of surprised that they took me up on that," she said late last
year sitting at her dining room table in her home in Rochester, N.Y.
Heidi's sister took photos of her, paint roller in hand, erasing what was
supposed to be her son's last message. "He agreed that if I painted that
wall that charge would go away," she recalled about her talk with Adam's
captain. "It didn't."
Just before Christmas, MPs fingerprinted and booked Adam for defacing
government property.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
A blondish crew cut tops Adam Lieberman's lanky, lumbering 6-foot-6 frame.
He makes little eye contact. Adam joined the Army at age 17. In late 2005
he deployed to Iraq with the 4th Infantry Division as a forward observer,
a radioman. He is all of 21 now.
More than two years after his return from Iraq, where several close
explosions rocked his skull, his memory sometimes fails him. He carries a
notebook to keep track of appointments. He still writes the occasional
letter backward.
Adam is now at the stage of digesting (or at least sharing) his
experiences in Iraq in a passive tense -- he describes things happening to
him and around him, rather than by him. He arrived at the scene of a
roadside bomb attack on other U.S. troops in Sadr City in Baghdad. "A
guy's face was blown off from his nose to his chin," he said as we sat at
his dining room table with Heidi while he was home on leave recently. The
U.S. soldier was gagging, drowning in blood without a mouth or nose. A
medic performed an emergency tracheotomy. The soldier died anyway.
Adam didn't even bother to inspect the nearby Humvee that took a direct
hit. He could see through the windows that inside the vehicle, "It was
blood soup."
During another engagement a gunner atop Adam's Humvee suddenly collapsed
in Adam's lap. Only a thin flap of skin attached the gunner's head and
torso. Beheaded. Adam vomited.
He once saw the lower half of a friend's body sheared off by a roadside
bomb. In the seconds that followed before he died, his friend still moved
his right arm and tried to talk. He looked at Adam. Adam described the
look in his eyes as "terror."
Adam once took a sniper's bullet to the chest. It shattered his digital
camera and hit his body armor. On two separate occasions he lost
consciousness because of head blows.
Heidi noticed a difference in Adam when she met him at the airport in
December 2006. "When he got off the plane and we were walking, I saw his
eyes shifting through the crowd," she remembered.
Crowds freaked him out. Adam had a panic attack in a Wal-Mart. He started
getting into fights at bars. He couldn't sleep. "You become a new person,"
he explained. "You are raised as a person and they send us over there and
we become a new person."
The Army "screened" Adam for mental health problems upon his return from
Iraq, a process Adam describes as, "You stand in a line and go to a bunch
of tables where people are sitting." He filled out some forms. Some
soldiers aren't yet aware of their problems at that point. Some lie
because they just want to go home with their wives. Others say they report
problems but receive little follow-up.
"Nobody is willing to help anybody," he said about his experience at Fort
Carson after returning from Iraq. "You have to understand. We are just
pieces of equipment."
The Army says it is working hard to erase the stigma of seeking mental
healthcare. It isn't working at Fort Carson. Adam says he was actively
discouraged from looking for help.
"If you have a problem, you are going to be a problem," he explained. "You
don't ask for help -- ever. That is just the Army's way. Always will be."
A document obtained from another unit at Fort Carson supports Adam's
description of a culture that discourages "weakness." Someone in the 3rd
Brigade Combat Team prepared a mock official form called a "Hurt Feelings
Report," and left a stack of copies near a sheet where soldiers sign out
to see a doctor. (View it here.)
"Reasons for filing this report: Please circle Yes or No," the Hurt
Feelings Report directs. Options include: I am thin skinned; I am a pussy;
I have woman-like hormones; I am a queer; I am a little bitch; I am a cry
baby; I want my mommy; All of the above. A blank appears after, "Name of
'Real Man' who hurt your sensitive feelings."
Maj. Gen. Mark Graham, the Fort Carson commander, admits that the attitude
of Army personnel toward mental healthcare needs work. "Because of the
focus we have had on behavioral health, we have seen an increase in
soldiers coming forward to get help," he told me. "Is it as many as we
think are out there? No, it is not. Do I think that we still have a stigma
challenge here? Absolutely, we do."
By December of 2007, Adam was getting increasingly violent. "I fucking
punched a guy," he recalled about a fight in the barracks. "I dragged him
out of my room and threw him down the stairs." On Dec. 20, 2007, he filled
out an Army "PTSD checklist." He checked off being "extremely bothered" by
flashbacks, nightmares, bad memories, emotional numbness, insomnia and
angry outbursts. He also reported panic attacks and jumpiness, among other
things.
Col. Elspeth Ritchie, the Army's top psychiatrist, ticks off a series of
initiatives to improve Army mental healthcare, including the hiring of 250
new mental health providers through civilian contracts and more than 40
marriage and family therapists since the spring of 2007. Ritchie said an
August 2007 Army directive ensures PTSD screenings for soldiers with
disciplinary problems so serious the Army wants them out. She added that
the Army surgeon general issued a memo in May 2008 requiring additional
review of any diagnoses short of PTSD to make sure the Army gets it right.
"We've really tried to enhance our access to care," she said in a
telephone interview.
Though Adam filled out his checklist in late 2007, the initiatives Ritchie
describes did not trickle down to him. Throughout this entire period,
Adam's medical records show, the Army focused almost completely on his
misbehavior, like drinking and fighting, and demoted him from specialist
to private, but did not address the root cause. The Army enrolled Adam in
an Army substance abuse program he called a "joke." The Army wanted him to
work on anger management. "I was like, 'I don't have anger problems. You
people are causing me to be angry.'"
By the spring of 2008, Adam's condition had deteriorated. "He called me in
April and said he really wanted to die," Heidi recalled. "He told me he
had his Mustang up to 120 and pointed at a cliff. I told him he needed to
get help now. No more dealing with it on his own."
This time Adam checked himself into a private facility. A doctor soon
informed him he had PTSD from his experience in Iraq. "That's when I
started figuring it out myself," Adam told me. "I realized I was not an
alcoholic, I was just self-medicating."
After a few weeks, however, Adam had to return to Fort Carson, where the
Army still basically considered him a drunk and a discipline problem.
That's contrary to proper treatment of PTSD. "The best way to treat it is
to identify it appropriately," said Dr. Anthony Ng, a psychiatrist and
board member of Mental Health America.
In addition to hundreds of pages of medical records he gave me, Adam
agreed to hand over a copy of his illustrated journal. An undated entry
from after his private hospitalization notes that, "Since returning from
the hospital my ball of twine has been unraveling fast. ... The woman at
[Fort Carson's] mental health dismissed me as if I were a bum asking for
money," he wrote, and then recorded one of those flashes of anger common
to soldiers with PTSD. "I wanted to rip her jaw off and scrape the skin
off her face with her Goddamn teeth."
"But I wasn't surprised," Adam's entry continues. "That's Army health
care."
In June or July 2008, he got a call from an Army psychologist. "She didn't
even know my name," he told me. "I'd seen her three times. How is she
going to help me if she can't even remember my name?"
The Army also seems to have resisted recognizing Adam's likely traumatic
brain injury, given his head blows in Iraq and subsequent memory loss and
other symptoms. The Army put him through a battery of tests on Oct. 15 to
determine if he might be eligible for disability pay for a brain injury.
Adam tested "within normal limits," his medical records show. "There is no
evidence of clinically significant cognitive impairments."
(Civilian neurosurgeons generally say that doctors should stash the tests
and MRI exams for the most part, since TBI is notoriously difficult to pin
down that way, and look to behavior instead. Patients with a history of
head trauma who present with obvious symptoms should receive swift
treatment for TBI).
Adam's Army medical records from Oct. 30, the day of his suicide attempt,
look similar to all of his Army medical records. The Army psychologist
noted "alcohol dependence with continuous drinking behavior," depression
and anxiety disorder -- his problems, not the Army's.
A diagnosis of PTSD from combat would require the Army to pay Adam a
lifetime of benefit checks. The Army would not have to pay if a doctor
were to find instead that his mental problems were preexisting and/or
unrelated to his Army service. Adam said his Army psychologist "has been
trying to give me a personality disorder since Day One, that I wanted to
kill people before I got into the Army." Soldiers also don't get benefits
if they are ushered out the door with dishonorable discharges for
misbehaving.
On Oct. 30 the Army psychologist noted "homicidal ideation," or thinking
about murder, but "no homicidal plans." She also noted "no suicidal
ideation."
Adam admitted he lied on that one. He had made up his mind. "I didn't want
her to interfere," he said. "I was thinking about killing myself, but I
was restricted to post for drinking on duty so I could not get my gun. I
went to my room and swallowed all my pills."
Adam painted his note on the wall. And then he changed his mind. An
ambulance rushed him to the hospital. He "remember[s] them trying to get
me to drink this charcoal stuff" at the hospital, but not much more. "I
woke up and I was chained to the bed."
Nine days after Adam's suicide attempt, the Army psychologist changed her
diagnosis, according to Adam's medical records. He had "chronic
post-traumatic stress disorder." It was the first time the Army seemed
willing to admit that a year of war caused Adam's problems. "It took me
trying to kill myself for her to put it on there," Adam told me.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Unfortunately, the problem likely goes beyond Fort Carson. Maj. Gen.
Graham, the Fort Carson commander, makes noted efforts to recognize and
address the problems. "Our goal is to get in front of this," Graham said
in a telephone interview. "Instead of doing the investigation following a
suicide, to find out how this happened and how we could have prevented it,
what we want to do is actually prevent them and get in front of this and
figure out how you help a soldier before it gets to a point of critical
mass and something horrible is going to happen," he added. "Are we
perfect? No. Are we trying? We are. Can we do better? Of course we can."
Graham's power to do better is limited, however. The Army Medical Command
runs medical care at Fort Carson and other Army posts. MEDCOM reports to
the Army surgeon general, Lt. Gen. Eric Schoomaker, not Graham.
And some Army fighting units, or "line" units, stationed at Graham's post
have failed to incorporate the prevention, recognition and treatment of
combat stress into their wartime mission. At Fort Carson a mental problem
from combat is still a scarlet letter.
Meanwhile, the deaths keep coming. At least three Fort Carson soldiers
died in apparent suicides in January. (Fort Carson quibbles with this
statistic, claiming that one of the three had not completed the paperwork
to be officially stationed at Fort Carson. The death of a second soldier,
found dead in his home from a "drug interaction," is still under
investigation.)
-------------------------
posted by Larry Scott
Founder and Editor
VA Watchdog dot Org
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