Road to Nowhere: Returning veterans face the worst job market of their lives.

Posted on May 25, 2012 by

By Ken Olsen

(Copyright 2012, All Rights Reserved)

Kai Jorgensen was laid off just before Thanksgiving 2011, the third time the recession has cost him his job since he left the Marine Corps in May 2009. He wasn’t prepared for such a cold reception from the civilian world after four years of keeping troops on the front lines supplied with gear and working as a ground safety officer.

“I didn’t expect this at all, especially coming out in the field of logistics,” says Jorgensen, 25, a Beaverton, Ore., native who has applied for hundreds of jobs. “I’m very discouraged.”

Yet, the fact that Jorgensen has found any employment – even minimum-wage work - makes him one of the more fortunate returning servicemembers. The job hunt has been even more difficult for Oregon Army National Guardsmen like Shad Vaughn. Half of the soldiers in Vaughn’s company didn’t have jobs when they came home in April 2010 after a yearlong deployment to Iraq, he says.

Vaughn’s family has lived off credit cards and hardship grants – and his children are on state assistance – while he looks for work and fights to get medical care for injuries he sustained when an 850-pound armored-vehicle tire fell on him three weeks before he left Iraq. “For guys who have not been hurt, it’s hard,” Vaughn says of the job search. “For guys who are hurt, it’s ridiculous.”

The men and women who have served since 9/11 have the highest unemployment rate among their peers, according to a 2011 congressional study. The magnitude of the problem is often understated, because the most commonly cited government numbers don’t tell the whole story. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics is often quoted as estimating unemployment among returning veterans 18 to 24 at about the same level as nonveterans in that age group.

But Bloomberg News dug deeper into the government data and found a far grimmer picture. Veterans 18 to 24 had a 30.4-percent jobless rate as of October 2011, about double the unemployment rate of nonveterans in the same age range. That’s also a significant jump from the October 2010 unemployment rate of 18.4 percent among the youngest veterans, Bloomberg reported. Black veterans 18 to 24 were faring the worst, with a 48-percent jobless rate.

Fleeting Success

Jorgensen’s initial return to civilian life was more promising. He found work as a loss-prevention agent for a major department store soon after leaving the Marines but was laid off a year later. “Since then, it’s been real hectic and hard,” he says.

He found a no-benefits job driving a delivery truck in September 2010 but was laid off right after Christmas that same year. He turned to a minimum-wage job at a golf course and enrolled in college. Although he was told there was room for growth, Jorgensen soon discovered that people with four years at the golf course were only making an additional 50 cents an hour. “I decided to continue school without that distraction,” Jorgensen says. The decision came after he realized that he was barely earning enough to pay for his gas to drive to work. “A lot of us who spent four years on active duty don’t have a college degree, although when I read the requirements, I know I can do a lot of the jobs (that call for a degree).”

His luck appeared to turn in September 2011, when he found a job as a delivery driver and warehouse specialist. That ended shortly before Thanksgiving because the company lost a major contract due to government cutbacks.

“It’s gotten to the point I’m applying for jobs all over the country,” Jorgensen says.

Vaughn doesn’t have that option. A .50-caliber gunner and mechanic, his six-year hitch with the National Guard runs until 2015. Meanwhile, in addition to looking for work, he is focused on some missing paperwork that’s made it nearly impossible for him to get treatment for back, neck, shoulder and other injuries he suffered when a tire fell 14 feet from a forklift and knocked him unconscious near the end of his tour in Iraq.

The Army put him on light duty and told him to wait to seek treatment until he got home, Vaughn says. Once his unit returned to the United States, he went to VA, where his claim has been stalled because of the missing paperwork, he says. His primary-care physician, meanwhile, dismissed his complaints of neck pain without obtaining a CT scan that would later show fractured vertebrae.

“We’ve been fighting tooth and nail to get records of my injuries the last two years,” Vaughn says. “It’s been rough, especially for my wife and two kids. The sad thing is, I know there are a lot of guys out there with the same problems, but they don’t want to get involved in it. I can’t give up because I’ve got so much invested in it.”

American Legion service officer Gregory Demarais became aware of Vaughn’s case in early December and worked to push forward his VA disability claim. Demarais also secured temporary financial assistance through the Legion to help pay Vaughn’s rent, and obtained donations for Christmas presents for Vaughn’s family through The Salvation Army, American Legion Post 122, the American Legion Auxiliary and VA employees. This is nothing out of the ordinary for Demarais. He distributed $19,000 in emergency funding to unemployed Oregon veterans in the first 10 days of that month alone.

National Attention

Meanwhile, there are efforts in Washington to deal with the problem. The Legion and other organizations successfully pushed Congress to pass the Hire Heroes Act late last fall. The legislation gives private businesses up to $5,600 in tax credits for hiring unemployed veterans, and as much as $9,600 to businesses that hire unemployed veterans with service-connected disabilities.

The Obama administration has also increased the number of veterans working for the federal government, despite an overall hiring decrease. The Defense Department, VA and the Department of Homeland Security employ the most veterans of any federal agencies. In late February, the U.S. Department of Agriculture signed a memorandum of understanding with The American Legion to launch a nationwide veteran-hiring initiative that aims to employ veterans in rural areas. VA has increased its veteran-employee numbers from 59,563 in fiscal 2004 to 101,651 in fiscal 2011. Veterans now make up about 29 percent of the work force at U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), an arm of Homeland Security. CBP added more than 800 veteran employees each of the last two years alone with an aggressive recruiting program, says Judy Hatter, who oversees veteran recruiting for the agency. That includes more than 340 job fairs and other events aimed at attracting applicants with military experience.

USAJOBS, an online application program that is mandatory for most federal jobs, is notoriously confusing and time-consuming, according to many government job seekers. CBP sets up laptop computers at job fairs and walks veterans through the process. The Department of Homeland Security has also established a Warrior Transition Program that allows it to bypass USAJOBS and hire qualified veterans for some positions. The USDA initiative also envisions a more streamlined application process for veterans seeking particular jobs.

Doug Peters, a Marine Corps veteran who participated in the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, found a home at CBP last September. His advice to veterans: “Make every effort to go to school, even if it’s part-time, even if you have to work a job and take night classes.”

Peters’ experience, however, demonstrates that education alone isn’t enough. He earned a bachelor’s degree in history and a law degree after leaving the Marines in 2003. Even then, it took him 18 months and hundreds of applications to find a job after he graduated from the University of Detroit Mercy School of Law in May 2010.

“I was really having a difficult time even getting people to call me back,” says Peters, 32, now a labor and employee relations specialist with CBP in Washington. His break came when a representative from Naval District Washington’s Wounded Warrior Employment Program forwarded his résumé to CBP.

Combat Experience Wanted

Customs and Border Protection isn’t the only place where veterans are valued. West Coast-based private employer Vigor Industrial hires veterans because the ship-repair company values their technical skills as well as their ability to think quickly, ask questions and make suggestions.

“Veterans, especially people who have experienced combat training or combat, are well suited for ship repair,” says Daava Mills, a corporate recruiter for Vigor. “Things turn on a dime.”

The company does short-notice ship repair for everyone from oceangoing cargo companies to the U.S. Navy. That can mean showing up at 2 a.m. to get a ship in dry dock. “We have to make our deadlines, or companies have to rent ships,” Mills says.

The company’s employees range from Vietnam War veterans to men and women who recently returned from serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. They hold jobs from general labor to director of operations. Even the laborer jobs are not typical, Mills says. Workers have to be able to read blueprints and perform other technical tasks, such as figuring out how to safely block up a ship in dry dock. Veterans often have these skills.

Many of the veterans working at Vigor were Navy or Air Force avionics and electrical specialists. Because they are doing maritime electrical work, they are not required to get additional state licenses to work for Vigor. That’s an important advantage for veterans, who often find employers don’t recognize their military licenses because of state and federal regulations.

Mills personally understands the challenges veterans face finding work. Her father struggled to find meaningful employment after 24 years in the Air Force, including a tour in Vietnam.

“He went from planning missions and planning wars to packing boxes, so I have an appreciation for what these guys go through,” Mills says. “Unfortunately, we aren’t in a position to hire all of the guys and girls who come home.”

Older veterans are also struggling. Tony Hoffman has applied for jobs with VA in Florida and Indiana for more than a decade, and he’s only landed one interview. Instead of a job, he says, VA offered him a volunteer position passing out magazines and pencils.

“I go up there every time there’s an opening,” says Hoffman, who served as a licensed practical nurse in the Army from 1984 to 1991. “I have an Expert Field Medical Badge. I ran a clinic in the Army for two and a half years. They said they didn’t understand all of that. I can qualify to work as a janitor, but not as a nurse who can start IVs and has skills above and beyond the average LPN. It’s disheartening.”

Hoffman worries about the hurdles facing job-seeking veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. “There’s going to be a whole lot of medics coming home soon,” he says. “I think the young guys are going to get discouraged.”

Robert Randy has been so dismayed by his job searches that he’s considered leaving his four years with the Marine Corps off his résumé to see if it makes a difference. He earned a degree in international business after getting out of the service in 1990, and worked at a variety of companies until opening three cellular telephone retail stores in San Diego. Two of the stores went out of business after the economy soured. He sold the third after his wife landed a job in Oregon in 2007. He hasn’t been able to find a job since, even after applying for work as a state and county veterans service representative.

“I don’t know what I am going to do from here,” Randy says. “I want to work. I need to be able to work for my health.”

Veterans like Vaughn and Jorgensen also find it difficult to be optimistic. “It’s been one battle after another from every which way,” Vaughn says. “There’s no reason for the guys coming back to get this much crap.”

Jorgensen just wants the opportunity to get beyond the typical computer application process to sell himself in person.

“You want to come back, help your community, get an education, start a family,” Jorgensen says. “For me, it would be great just being able to get into the interview process. I think if I could just get face to face with employers, I could get a job.”

This story appeared in the May 2012 issue of The American Legion Magazine.

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A Heart Apart: Interactive book gives children, military parents safe way to share feelings about the difficulty of deployment

Posted on April 28, 2012 by

 By Ken Olsen

(Copyright 2012, All Rights Reserved)

Melissa Seligman knew she had to help her children find their emotional voices. Her daughter’s depression spiked to near self-destructive levels when her husband deployed. Her son’s anxiety was gut wrenching.

“We have never asked military children to go through repeated, continuous goodbyes,” Seligman says. “We need to give them the freedom and opportunity to say, ‘I hurt.’ We don’t know how to help our kids until they can tell us what they need help with.”

Seligman teamed up with Christina Piper to create A Heart Apart, a book that children customize with their own photos and text to reflect what they are feeling when their father or mother goes to war.    

“There’s not a lot out there to tell you what kids are going through,” says Piper, who, like Seligman, is an Army wife and mother of a boy and a girl. “What’s unique about the book is that it gives a child words to talk about what’s happening. And it helped me to talk to them about what they were feeling.”

Children build their own copy of the book in tandem with their parent who is going to deploy. A website guides them through creation and illustration of their story. For example, one page has a child and his parent complete these sentences: “Sometimes I feel (emotion) when (family member or friend) is gone. I also learn new things and enjoy (fun activity) while (he or she) is gone. I know that (family member or friend) is always proud of me and loves me very much.” The child selects a photo to put on the facing page to remind them of something they do that is fun – such as fishing – while their parent is away.

“The process is as important as the product,” Seligman says, “It’s a way for them to tell you how they feel without looking you in the face and feeling intimidated.”

Military children are given vouchers that allow them to access the software to build the books. Civic groups and veterans service organizations have donated funds to cover the cost of most of the books printed to date. Once the book is completed, the publisher prints two copies – one for the child and one for the deploying parent.

“For my daughter, getting her book in the mail and seeing her picture with her dad – the emotions and the conversations that ensued – were amazing,” Piper says. “My son drags his to bed every night.”

Teachers and school administrators near Fort Riley, Kan., where Seligman’s family was stationed when the book was first published in April 2010, praise A Heart Apart.

“It’s all about them and their dad and nobody else,” says Shannon Rolfs, a student support monitor at Spring Valley Elementary School, which received book vouchers for 100 students courtesy of the Junction City, Kan., Breakfast Optimist Club. “It’s a connection that keeps them close.”

Flo Gatsche, who teaches first grade at Eisenhower Elementary School in Junction City, knew she had to get her students copies of the book when she discovered A Heart Apart.

“I wanted a book that explained deployment and the feelings and emotions that went with it,” Gatsche says. “It allows them to put their family member and themselves in a book and yet know that their feelings and emotions and experiences are universal.”

She knows the life of a military child first hand. Her father went to Vietnam with the Army when she was growing up in Kansas.

Gatsche’s students love A Heart Apart as well. “The kids were excited to see a book that dealt with deployment,” she says. “Because it’s not like you can go to the library and get a book about deployment.”

 Future production of the book is uncertain and Seligman and Piper search for a new publisher to keep the project going.

“My dream is A Heart Apart would be in the hands of every military child between the ages of 2 and 10,” Seligman says. “The youngest child can feel loss, can feel anger, can feel sadness. It’s our job to help them through it.”

This story appeared as a sidebar to The Hardest Year: Children Endure the Stress of Parent’s Deployment. Read more of Ken Olsen’s stories about the challenges military families face on this website, including America’s Forgotten Military Families, Guard and Reserve Families Serve in Isolation, Family Considers Leaving Military After Enduring Multiple Combat Deployments and other stories from the Behind the Blue Star series.

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The Hardest Year: Military Children Endure the Stress of Parent’s Deployment

Posted on April 19, 2012 by

By Ken Olsen

(Copyright 2012, All Rights Reserved)

Jack Crider hit a wall during his father’s third deployment.

It wasn’t just his father’s absence, or the prospect of him dying in Iraq. It was the unexpected move, from Virginia to Georgia, that meant the young boy was dealing with his fourth new school just as he started second grade. It was leaving his friends again. It was being the new kid in an unfamiliar neighborhood again. It was the stress of being a military kid who has never known a time without war.

“It was a collision of all of these factors – the perfect storm – at a time when he needed to be connected to his dad,” Jill Crider says of her son, who was 8 when his father, Col. Jim Crider, left for his third combat tour in 2009. “He went from a child who loved school to a child who would wake up crying and beg me not to take him to school.”

Soon, she was dropping him off at the school and, by the time she returned home, someone was calling to say that Jack was in the counselor’s office, distraught. “I never saw it coming until it was full in my face,” Crider says. “I was brokenhearted.”

The difficulty the Criders faced resonates with military families across the country as children deal with repeated deployments and the stress borne by parents who are left behind.

“The deployment of military parents is taking a toll on the mental health of children,” says epidemiologist Alyssa Mansfield, who analyzed the medical records of more than 307,000 Army children in the most comprehensive study to date. “The longer the deployments, the more problems children experience.”

No one knows what the long-term consequences will be. “I’m just afraid we don’t know how much is too much,” Crider says, “until it is too much.”

Stress Points

The medical community is noticing the strain. Active-duty Army children whose parents deploy are more likely to experience depression, anxiety and other mental health challenges than children whose parents don’t deploy, according to Mansfield’s analysis of their medical care from 2003 through 2006.

Overall, there were more than 6,500 additional mental health cases among children of deployed parents during the four years of the study. The results are conservative, given that Mansfield’s study was limited to children 5 to 17 whose parents had been in the military for at least five years, and only included children who had received diagnoses for mental health problems. “I wouldn’t be surprised if this number was three or four times higher,” says Mansfield, who conducted the research at the University of North Carolina before taking her current job with VA’s National Center for PTSD.

Boys appear to handle the strain of repeated deployments worse than girls. Older children have a tougher time than younger children. “Older children probably have a better understanding of exactly what’s happening when their parent deploys,” Mansfield says.

Crider saw her son’s reactions change over time. When he was 5 and his father was serving his second deployment in Iraq, Jack matter-of-factly asked her, “What happens if Dad gets killed?” Although she nearly ran off the road when her son lobbed that question from the back seat of their car, Crider was able to reassure Jack, and he never broached the subject again. But when his father was back in Iraq three years later, her son’s resilience evaporated.

“At 8, it’s different,” Crider says. “He starts to feel the responsibility of being a young man. I think his security was threatened when I had a bad day or felt sad. And I never realized how much he would miss his dad.”

By the time her husband came home on R&R, the situation was serious. “Nothing says ‘welcome home’ like ‘Get in the car, we’re going to see the school counselor,’” Crider says.

The strains Jack Crider and other military children experience go far beyond what most civilian children face.

“People should be very cautious in trying to compare military children to civilian children, because deployment is unique to military children,” says Mansfield, whose study of military children appeared in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine. “Trauma and stress are not unique to military children. But deployment is a very different kind of stressor. It’s chronic, and it’s repeated, and it involves long periods of time. It also potentially involves the stress of their caretaker.”

Crider can relate. She worries that Jack absorbed her stress from previous deployments. Her father died, and her nephew and a close friend were killed in accidents, during her husband’s first combat tour in Iraq in 2003. Her 80-year-old mother was also hospitalized. During the next deployment, Crider served as Family Readiness Group leader for her husband’s battalion, part of a brigade that had more than 100 soldiers killed during its 15 months in Iraq. She also fell down a flight of stairs and broke her ankle. Then on the eve of her son’s birthday party a month later, Crider was hospitalized with a brown-recluse spider bite.

“I think there also was a delayed response to all of the stress of the (previous) deployments,” Crider says of her son reaching his limit. “I sat there and I wondered, ‘How much of this is my fault because I’m not handling this deployment well? How much of this is because I’m tired at the end of the day?’”

Separation Anxiety

Some children experience problems as soon as their military parents begin deploying. Maj. Vinston Porter’s daughter broke down the first time he went to Iraq.

“She was aware of the dangers of Iraq, and she knew that it meant Daddy was going away for a long time,” Porter says about Rylei, who was 4 at the time.

Porter’s wife, Stacey, found a private counselor to help Rylei. That counseling continued after Porter returned to Fort Stewart, Ga., and throughout his second deployment. He participated in the sessions with his wife and his daughter when he was home. “It was helpful to get tools and to address the situation for my wife and I and our daughter,” he says.

Porter’s son Blake, then 2, didn’t have the same outward emotional reaction to his father’s absence. But it took nearly all of the two weeks of Porter’s R&R that first deployment for his son to warm up to him.

The second deployment, Porter was able to have weekly contact with his family via Skype. That virtual contact helped. His daughter’s face lit up at being able to see her father, and his son wasn’t standoffish when Porter came home on R&R. “Skype helped me keep up with the kids’ progress better than simply reading and viewing pictures in emails,” Porter adds.

Other military families give Skype and similar tech tools mixed reviews. In some cases, it keeps the family bonds alive. In others, it’s a painful reminder a mom or dad is gone. And when there’s a communications blackout, mandatory when there’s a combat casualty, anxiety increases as families wait to find out whose loved one is injured or dead.

Meanwhile, the aftereffects of the deployments linger. Rylei Porter experiences separation anxiety, especially when family and friends visit.

“She always asks them when they are leaving and why they have to leave,” Porter says. “These emotional events have left their mark on both kids,” he adds. “In my opinion, reintegration will take at least a year.”

Porter’s family has moved to California, where he is spending a year at Google as part of the Army’s Training with Industry program. That’s created some new challenges for his daughter, including getting used to her father being around again and entering a new school for the first time.

“Unlike Georgia, the new school and surrounding community are less populated with military families, especially those who’ve endured deployments,” Porter says. “There have been incidents that spark thoughts about being back in Georgia, where she didn’t have these problems.”

Suddenly Military

National Guard and reserve children, meanwhile, face particularly difficult challenges.

“As a Guard child, I think you may feel isolated,” says Kerri Beckert, who supports Guard and reserve families as a program manager for the Military Children Education Coalition (MCEC). “They may feel like they are the only ones going through this.”

The transition is also more abrupt. “Until Mom or Dad or big brother deploys, these children often don’t think of themselves as part of the military community,” Beckert says. “With deployment, they are suddenly military.”

Trusting military children with information about their parents’ deployment can help ease their stress. So does giving them a sense of control. “When we let them make decisions about what papers to send him or what questions to ask him on the phone, I think that helps children understand they have the ability to get through it,” Beckert says.

MCEC encourages Guard and reserve families to notify a child’s support network when a mother or father is about to be deployed. “It’s important to let the school know, so there’s communication between the counselor, the teacher and the principal,” Beckert says.

The coalition helps military families become effective advocates for their children’s education, in part by helping smooth the frequent moves that are standard fare for military families. It backed the Interstate Compact on Educational Opportunity for Military Children, an agreement that prevents military children from being excluded from schools, advanced-placement classes and sports tryouts because of the timing of a move, “so you don’t have that kid who can’t graduate on time because he only has half the gym credits he needs,” Beckert says.

The coalition teaches classes on resiliency and helps parents prepare long-term academic plans for their children. “We’re just giving them a toolkit – here’s what works for other parents, here’s what may work for you,” says Beckert, who, as a mother of two and an Army wife of 23 years, knows the challenges firsthand.

The coalition also encourages parents to market their kids as military children when they are applying to college, because they bring a global perspective, are goal-oriented and are quick to make friends. “Most military children can say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ in three languages,” Beckert says. “Civilian personnel need to understand that there is more that is wonderful and courageous and strong about military children than is broken.”

They also need to realize that military families are also committed.

“Nobody wants to go to war,” Crider says. “You also don’t train for 20 years not to. What got me through was my faith and my choices every day.”

She also knows that, as a commanding officer’s wife with another deployment on the horizon, her family stands as an example for others facing the same struggles with their children.

“It’s really at the point that we just try our best - that’s all anyone can really do,” Crider says. “If we don’t make a way – if we don’t show how - I think we do a huge disservice to the families just starting their lives in the military.”

Read more of Ken Olsen’s stories about the challenges military families face on this website, including America’s Forgotten Military Families, Guard and Reserve Families Serve in Isolation, Family Considers Leaving Military After Enduring Multiple Combat Deployments and other stories from the Behind the Blue Star series.

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Richard Christian Jr., champion of Vietnam veterans in battle for Agent Orange and PTSD claims, to be buried at Arlington

Posted on March 30, 2012 by

By Ken Olsen

(Copyright 2012 All Rights Reserved)

Richard S. Christian, Jr., who endured withering hostility from the Reagan Administration for his meticulous and tireless work on behalf of Vietnam veterans exposed to Agent Orange, died of cancer at a Virginia hospital on Jan. 20. He was 80.

Burial will be at Arlington National Cemetery on April 26.

Photo courtesy of Don Hakenson

Christian was the first director of the Army’s Agent Orange Task Force, which later became the U.S. Army and Joint Services Environmental Support Group. He provided military records and analysis that were key to the groundbreaking Agent Orange research conducted by Columbia University professors Jeanne M. Stellman and Steven D. Stellman. Christian continued to press the Agent Orange issue as The American Legion’s deputy Veterans Affairs & Rehabilitation director after leaving the federal government in the late 1980s.

“Without Dick Christian, no veteran would be getting compensation for Agent Orange,” says Jeanne Stellman, professor emeritus and special lecturer at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. “He’s the person who kept the issue alive.”

For Christian, that meant working long hours and nights and weekends – and never backing down.

“He was dedicated to finding the reason that veterans coming home from Vietnam were getting sick,” says Don Hakenson, who worked for Christian and later became director of the Joint Services Environmental Support Group. “He was the right leader for the right organization at the right time. He had exceptional integrity.”

Christian was a records management specialist who served two tours in Vietnam before retiring from the Army as a lieutenant colonel. The Pentagon sent him back to Vietnam as a civilian in the early 1970s to retrieve military records as the United States prepared to pull out of Southeast Asia. Christian recovered thousands of records that his group used to reconstruct U.S. troop exposure to the more than 20 million gallons of Agent Orange sprayed during the war.

“He was everyone’s go-to person on Agent Orange, including the American Legion, and he never took credit for it,” Stellman says.

Christian’s willingness to provide information to scores of veterans who were trying to prove Agent Orange exposure set him apart from other government officials, says John Sommer, former executive director of The American Legion. “He believed that people who had served their country in the armed forces should be compensated for the disabilities and diseases they suffered as a result of that service,” Sommer says.

“At a time when Vietnam veterans weren’t treated very well by the VA, here was a guy who tried to make sure they got a fair shake in the disability compensation system,” says Bart Stichman, joint executive director of the National Veterans Legal Services Program, which has represented Agent Orange victims since the 1970s. “That took courage.”

Christian became the Defense Department’s representative to the Agent Orange Working Group assembled by the Reagan White House. His work made him a target for intense criticism from administration officials who wanted to derail Agent Orange exposure studies even as Vietnam veterans developed non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, soft-tissue sarcoma and other diseases at an alarming rate.

“The White House and the executive agencies were out to kill the studies,” Stellman says. “It was a no-holds barred situation.”

Christian went head-to-head with the Centers for Disease Control, which opposed an Agent Orange epidemiological study on the grounds there wasn’t sufficient data. “At the same time, Christian is saying, ‘We’ve got good records as to where the troops were and where they sprayed,’” Stichman says. “How could the VA ignore its obligation to assist the veteran if he was saying we can help get that information.”

The epidemiological study was never conducted. But Christian persevered and his Congressional testimony later helped generate support for the Stellmans’ study. “We could not have developed our exposure methodologies without him,” Jeanne Stellman says.

Christian also was called upon to search the Vietnam records he retrieved for evidence to support veterans post-traumatic stress claims beginning in the early 1980s.

He left the Joint Forces Environmental Support Group in 1988. Christian continued his work on Agent Orange and post-traumatic stress disorder as deputy director of veteran’s affairs and rehabilitation for The American Legion from 1989 to 1995. He also helped families of POW/MIAs and oversaw Legion’s Vietnam Veterans Family Assistance Program. “There is so much that would not have happened if not for Dick Christian,” Sommer said.

Christian also distinguished himself as a soldier. Born Feb. 26, 1931 in Newark, N.J., he lied about his age and joined the Army in 1946 when he was 15. He went to Korea as a platoon leader with the 7th Infantry and was wounded September 26, 1952, according to his wife, Julita Christa Christian. The Chinese pounded Christian’s platoon with an estimated 500 artillery and mortar rounds before trying to overrun the hill they were holding. Christian refused to be evacuated until the enemy withdrew after six hours of hand-to-hand combat. He was belatedly recognized for his heroism with the Silver Star in October 2000, Julita Christa said.

Christian met and married his first wife during a deployment to Austria. The couple had a son, Richard Christian III. Adelaide Christian died of cancer in 1963. Christian met Julita Christa Arzt in Heidelberg, Germany a year later. They were married in 1965 and returned to the United States in 1972 and settled in Virginia. The couple had two daughters, Karin Christian and Melanie Hendricks. Christian also is survived by three grandchildren.

A version of this story appeared in the April 2012 issue of The American Legion Magazine. To learn more about this topic see Toxic Legacy: A Brief History of Agent Orange Exposure in Vietnam.

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Post-Traumatic Stress and a Traumatic Brain Injury strain a marriage

Posted on October 15, 2011 by

By Ken Olsen

(Copyright 2011, All Rights Reserved)

Some days, Tammara Rosenleaf would give anything not to be a combat veteran’s wife.

She loves her husband. He is kind, generous and unflappable – the perfect contrast to her stronger, more emotional personality. But the Sean Hefflin she married 13 years ago didn’t come back from Iraq. He can’t remember the smallest task. He can’t focus. He totaled her car and shattered her shoulder during one of the times he mentally checked out.

“Traumatic brain injury has a huge impact on our relationship,” Rosenleaf says. “It’s like being a mom with a 7-year-old.”

Rosenleaf and Hefflin met at a private college in Washington state where he was studying history and criminal justice. They later moved to her home state of Montana. Hefflin joined the Army in 2004 after tiring of the low-wage, low-skilled work available in Helena. In addition, the Army offered training and a way to pay off his college loans.

Hefflin describes his 13-month Army deployment to Iraq with indifference. “I did a little bit of a lot of things. (Truck) gunner, support to division, escorting foreign nationals who came on base to work.”

His camp in Baghdad was a favorite enemy target. “There were mortar rounds coming in daily,” he says. “I don’t necessarily believe my combat experience was that traumatic. Odds are better I would die in a car accident here.”

Every day of that deployment was agonizing for Rosenleaf. She sent him messages encouraging him to sleep in his body armor. She traveled whenever possible, in part to avoid a visit from casualty assistance officers, as if that would keep her husband alive. “I had this illusion if the men in the dress uniforms couldn’t find my doorstep … ”

Hefflin’s grandfather died as he was coming home from Iraq. The night of the funeral, Rosenleaf realized that her husband had PTS. The couple was driving along a foggy, winding road near Olympia, Wash., when an approaching car flashed lights to signal there were deer on the road. Hefflin grabbed Rosenleaf’s arm, then grabbed the steering wheel and yelled, “Don’t slow down! Don’t slow down!”  She barely kept the car from careening into the ditch. Her arm bore the bruise of her husband’s grip for weeks.

Hefflin later freaked out when Rosenleaf pulled into a parking spot next to an empty Chinese takeout container he feared might contain a roadside bomb. He still goes to great lengths to avoid driving by cars parked under underpasses.

Rosenleaf insisted Hefflin get help for his PTS. He was treated by a former military psychologist near Fort Hood for 18 months.

As Hefflin’s symptoms eased – he says the Army diagnosed adjustment disorder, not PTS – Rosenleaf started to see signs of TBI, especially after they left the structured military life at Fort Hood and returned to Helena, Mont. Hefflin loses to-do lists. He has a smart phone with an electronic calendar and a reminder function but misplaces the phone.  He leaves the house to meet his wife for lunch and returns without ever arriving at the restaurant.

Nonetheless, he is extremely bright. “If there was a particular thing Napoleon said on the eve of whatever, Sean would know that,” Rosenleaf says. “What he’s supposed to do today? He can’t remember.”

One spring day while he was driving, “Sean was living in his sleep like he normally does.” He threaded his way through cars at an intersection and into the path of an oncoming SUV. Rosenleaf, who was sitting in the passenger seat, went to the hospital with a shattered shoulder.

“There’s no way I can continue living with a person who can’t come back from wherever he’s gone,” Rosenleaf said a few days after the accident. “I would give anything to get out from under being a combat veteran’s wife … I’m talking about leaving a really good man because he can’t remember anything.”

Somehow she finds new resolve and goes on.

Rosenleaf’s frustration is not simply about Hefflin’s memory. She works full time as a case manager for developmentally disabled clients and takes care of most things at home. It’s exhausting. “He’s starting to realize it has serious effects for me,” Rosenleaf says.

VA is trying to determine what is causing Hefflin’s attention problems. Rosenleaf recounts two incidents in Iraq that could have inflicted TBI. In one case, she and Hefflin were conversing online through instant messaging when a blast from a mortar round blew him out of his bunk.

Today, Hefflin remembers a hooch two doors down being blown apart but has no memory that the blast knocked him to the floor. Nor does he recall being hit in the head by a portable toilet upended in a different mortar attack.

A VA neuropsychologist pinpointed evidence of TBI in the left temporal lobe of Hefflin’s brain in February, and a follow-up MRI was scheduled for July. VA has not yet decided if the brain injury is service-connected. Rosenleaf is less concerned with her husband’s disability rating than she is with his prospects for regaining independence.

“I want him to be able to function,” she says. “I lost part of my partner. The military owes me half of my partner back.”

This this story appeared as part of a special report on post-traumatic stress in the September 2001 issue of The American Legion Magazine. Other stories in the series can be found on this blog, including: The War Within and  A Marine’s suicide shows that even the unlikeliest veteran can fall through the cracks.

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When doing everything right isn’t enough: A Marine’s suicide shows that even the unlikeliest veteran can fall through the cracks.

Posted on September 28, 2011 by

By Ken Olsen

(Copyright 2011, All Rights Reserved) 

Jake Wood, (left) and Clay Hunt at 29 Palms shortly after returning from Afghanistan.

Of all the questions raised by Clay Hunt’s suicide, perhaps the most perplexing is this: why did a 28-year-old former Marine who was receiving VA health care, taking medications for post-traumatic stress and publicly pushing fellow veterans to get help, give up?

“I think if Clay can lose his battle with PTSD, anyone can,” says Jake Wood, Hunt’s best friend from the Marines. “He was taking all of the right steps to get help, and he fell through the cracks. The VA system failed him in a very dramatic way.”

John Wordin, executive director of Ride 2 Recovery and another of Hunt’s friends, says Clay’s death “tells us we’re not doing enough. It will haunt myself and Clay’s mother for a long time.”

Hunt grew up riding his bicycle and collecting turtles on the banks of Buffalo Bayou in west Houston. He attended Memorial Drive Methodist Church, where the youth pastor inspired him to volunteer by repairing homes in poor neighborhoods across the South. Hunt played sports and scored well on college-entrance exams, but didn’t have the class rank to gain entrance into first choice Texas A&M. After four on-and-off years of community college, he finally earned admission to Texas A&M, but instead decided to join the Marines.

“He said, ‘I want to do something bigger than myself, something that is not just about me,’” says Hunt’s mother, Susan Selke. Her son explained it all in a telephone call in the spring of 2005. “It was hard to get that phone call, but it was a good decision for Clay to make at that point in his life. He definitely excelled in the Marines.”

Hunt and Wood became friends after being assigned to the same infantry platoon a year later. They were about the same age, had both attended college and had similar interests. “He was a loyal, caring person,” Wood says.

The pair deployed to Iraq in January 2007. By early March, they had lost two good friends. Hunt’s bunkmate, Blake Howey, was killed by a roadside bomb. Nathan Windsor was mortally wounded when their convoy was attacked. Hunt, pinned down by enemy fire, couldn’t help Windsor and couldn’t return fire. Windsor died while being airlifted to a hospital.

Those deaths changed Hunt, says his father, Stacy, who received a call from his son soon after Windsor was killed. “For the first time, I could sense a real fear in his voice.”

Then a sniper’s bullet ripped through Hunt’s wrist in March. He was sent back to the United States to recover. “He hated leaving his buddies there,” Stacy Hunt says. “He knew what those guys were going through outside of Fallujah.

Selke says that’s when the PTS started – “the trauma of being shot and being separated from his group.”

A Purple Heart and PTS did not end Hunt’s combat days, as the family expected. Instead, he rejoined Wood and became one of the Marine Corps’ elite scout-snipers. He got married just before his platoon was sent to Afghanistan in March 2008. Soon after his arrival, two close friends from his former platoon were killed.

“He was starting to get disillusioned with the mission and the war, and it made it really tough for him,” Wood says. “We felt pretty impotent sitting back there in Kandahar twiddling our thumbs while our guys are out there getting killed.” Hunt’s platoon returned to the United States in October 2008, and he left the Marines the following spring.

Re-entering the civilian world was rough. Delays in getting GI Bill benefits forced him to live off his credit cards when he enrolled at Loyola Marymount University.

“It puts stress on every aspect of your life when you have $15,000 in credit-card debt, you aren’t making any money, your wife isn’t making much money, you’re standing in line four hours to get a counseling appointment, struggling with your transition, and you have to beat your head against the wall to get your benefits,” Wood says.

Hunt’s frustrations mounted. VA lost his disability-claim paperwork, forcing him to revisit doctors and reconstruct his 200-page file. That exacerbated his PTS, anxiety and exhaustion. “Clay told me, ‘I have to grovel for my benefits,’” Selke says.

Hunt also struggled to understand why he had been spared. The vivid memory of being unable to help his mortally wounded friend, lying on the road in front of him in Iraq, tortured him.

“He told me, ‘It’s like a bad movie on rewind. It plays, it rewinds, plays, rewinds,’” Selke says. “The medications he took didn’t help.”

Still, Hunt openly embraced his PTS and survivor’s guilt. “He said, ‘I’ve got a wicked case of PTSD, and I’m going to work on it,’” Selke says.

Hunt appeared in public-service announcements for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) encouraging other veterans to get help. He went to Haiti and Chile with Team Rubicon – a volunteer group Wood co-founded – to aid earthquake victims. He volunteered with Ride 2 Recovery, a Los Angeles-based group that builds bicycles and organizes rides for wounded veterans. He appealed for a higher disability rating from VA.

“He was two different guys,” Wordin says. “He was Clay Hunt, happy-go-lucky guy, who loved to ride bicycles. And he was Clay Hunt, haunted man, dealing with issues of watching his buddies die in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was quite straightforward about it: ‘John, there are some days I just want to kill myself.’”

Hunt filed for divorce in late spring 2010. Two weeks after returning to college, depression overtook him. He called his mother and told her he was almost unable to function. She talked him into going to VA for help. He briefly lived in Wordin’s guest room before deciding to move back to Houston.

Hunt landed a job with a construction company, found an apartment and bought a new truck soon after returning to his hometown. He started dating again. He registered at the Houston VA, and in mid-March, a psychiatrist agreed to switch him back to an antidepressant with fewer side effects. But after a two-hour wait in the pharmacy, Hunt was told that VA didn’t stock Lexapro because it was a name-brand drug. The pharmacy told him it would mail the prescription, and sent him on his way without the antidepressant/antianxiety medication he desperately needed, his mother says.

Hunt left the VA more dispirited than ever.

“Antidepressants take time to start to work,” Selke says. “He didn’t have time to wait for a mailout to reach him.  I don’t know why his medication was not considered an urgent need. I guarantee you our members of Congress have better medical care, with a less cumbersome system. It is not fair for our veterans to have anything less than the best medical care our country has to offer.”

VA says it cannot comment on Hunt’s case. A spokeswoman at the Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center in Houston says its pharmacy began carrying Lexapro within the past year, at the request of psychiatrists. It’s not clear if the pharmacy had the medication on hand the day Hunt tried to fill his prescription.

Hunt shot himself in his Houston-area apartment on March 31. Five weeks later, his mother received a letter from VA saying he had won his appeal for a higher disability rating.

“It was like a kick in the gut,” Selke says. “He was gone.”

Family and friends are left with questions and doubts. Even if there are no clear answers, the suicide leaves them convinced that the nation must do whatever it takes to ensure that the tens of thousands of troops coming home with PTS, depression and other invisible wounds get the help they need, without delay.

“We are trying to have Clay’s story punctuate a problem,” his father says. “His death tells me there are many more like him who are very frustrated and may do what he did. We’ve got to find a way to save more lives.”

This story is part of a special series about post-traumatic stress titled The War Within that appeared in the September 2011 edition of  The American Legion Magazine.

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The War Within: The battle against post-traumatic stress

Posted on September 11, 2011 by

By Ken Olsen

(Copyright 2011, All Rights Reserved)

Melissa Seligman started shaking when her husband described the aftermath of a suicide bombing he witnessed during his first deployment to Iraq. She had heard that same flat, detached tone from her father, when he described seeing a helicopter gunner’s leg blown off in Vietnam.

Iraq veteran David Seligman and his father-in-law, Vietnam veteran Paul Sutton have helped each other deal with post-traumatic stress. (Melissa Seligman photo)

“There’s something so horrible about somebody being so traumatized … there’s no emotion attached,” Seligman says. “My dad would talk like that. My entire insides would shake until I didn’t know what to do.”

She eventually realized that the post-traumatic stress that had haunted her father now dogged her husband.

Hundreds of thousands of military families face similar dilemmas as combat troops suffering from PTS come home, attempt to get jobs, reintegrate into society, mend fractured personal relationships and get help from VA’s overwhelmed mental health care system. It’s a dilemma that reopens invisible wounds for Vietnam veterans who don’t want today’s generation to endure the same mistreatment they faced when they came home from war. It’s also a cautionary tale for a nation too often insulated from the mental-health consequences of wartime military service. The Vietnam experience demonstrates that the price of not treating PTS is paid in suicide, substance abuse, homelessness, unemployment, divorce and domestic violence.

“We’re sending our people over there with a very high risk they will come back with psychological problems, and we’re not prepared,” says Susan Selke, whose son, Marine Corps veteran Clay Hunt, committed suicide after battling PTS and survivor’s guilt.

“Substantial unmet need for care.”

Some 300,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans – nearly 20 percent of returning troops – are coming home with PTS or depression, according a 2008 study by the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research group. Roughly half have sought treatment from VA. There is “substantial unmet need for care,” RAND reports.

This spring, a federal appeals court declared VA’s mental-health care system broken, and ordered a lower court to find a way to end delays in care delivery that may be costing veterans their lives. Nearly 86,000 veterans were languishing on VA waiting lists for mental-health care as of April 2008, “a number that may significantly under-represent the scale of the problem both then and now,” the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said. The court blamed gross inefficiency, not a lack of funding, for VA problems that leave veterans “suffering and dying, heedlessly and needlessly.”

Statistics, however, only capture a snapshot in time, says Dr. Julie C. Chapman, director of neuroscience at VA’s War Related Illness and Injury Study Center in Washington. It may be years, or even decades, before the mental-health toll of the current wars is known. “Symptoms can submerge and then re-emerge many years later, sometimes during stress or life change.”

“Knowing what war  is all about … it was hard for me to see him go through that.”

The Vietnam nightmares grew steadily worse for Melissa Seligman’s father after his son-in-law, David, began deploying to Afghanistan and Iraq in 2003. “Knowing what war is all about, it was hard for me to see him go through that,” says Paul Sutton. “You live with it for the rest of your life.”

Sutton joined the Air Force on his 17th birthday, and went to Southeast Asia 18 months later. He served four months rescuing downed U.S. pilots, and another year with a unit that provided air-to-ground radio support for allied forces. Coming home in 1966 was worse than he imagined. He says the civilian world either hated him, didn’t understand him, or both.

“There was no support and no appreciation at all for serving my country,” Sutton says. “I did not want to be around anyone. It is still hard for me to be around people.”

He returned home to Kentucky, where he raised his daughter in the outdoors – canoeing, flying and rappelling. She learned to sit quietly with him for hours, seeing things in her father she did not understand. “I knew the war had impacted him,” she says. “But I didn’t have any words to describe it.”

She remembers how his jaw would clench and he would go silent whenever he saw a photo of a buddy from Vietnam. She remembers his startled reactions whenever she touched him.

She remembers telling the story of a little Vietnamese girl who visited his camp. He gave the girl candy and invited her back. She returned with a grenade, pulled the pin, and blew herself up. A few years ago, Seligman’s father told her the rest of the story, the part that most torments him.

“He sat there and cried and said, ‘I did that to her.’”

“I was getting eaten alive by things I didn’t understand.”

When U.S. troops returned from Vietnam, America largely failed to welcome them home and could not grasp the magnitude of their mental wounds. Ken Jones felt no connection to life in the States when he came home in 1968 after a year as a scout-squad leader with the 11th Cavalry. He wanted to return to Vietnam, where he understood his place. “You come to the question of core identity,” Jones says. “There’s a cultural displacement when you come back and realize, in a very short time, the place you thought of as home no longer exists.”

Eight months later, Jones started suffering severe anxiety. His blood pressure skyrocketed. “I was getting eaten alive by things I didn’t understand,” Jones says. The trip-wire anger he unintentionally brought home from Vietnam had one benefit: it triggered adrenaline rushes that vanquished his bouts of depression.

Jones threw himself into his work as a financial adviser and pension-management consultant. He went running at night to exhaust his demons. In the late 1970s, he started writing about his nightmares, which became the basis for his book “When Our Troops Come Home.”

Thom Paca unraveled before he left the war zone. Nine months into his tour as an infantry-weapons squad leader, he “whipped a fellow pretty good with a machine gun,” told off his lieutenant and fled into the jungle. Paca’s buddies tracked him down and persuaded him to return. His commander decided he had battle fatigue, and shipped him to Japan for a psychiatric evaluation.

“I was found ‘physically fit but not responsible for my actions,’” Paca says. That was all the mental-health treatment he received. He returned to Vietnam and spent the last three months of his deployment confined to camp without a weapon. He finished his Army hitch stateside, and left the minute his discharge papers were signed, declining to stay even one extra day for a medical evaluation.

Thirty years, two failed marriages and a string of jobs later, Paca was diagnosed with PTS after a fellow Vietnam War veteran encouraged him to get help. Today anxiety, mood swings and stress are straining his third marriage. “I tell him we have a 50-50 chance,” Paca’s wife, Sharon, says. “But we’re still trying.”

Such stories are familiar to retired nurse Arlene Lynch, who worked with Vietnam War veterans in the Seattle VA Medical Center psychiatric ward in the late 1990s.

“These were kids who should have been driving around in cars looking at girls” instead of going into combat, Lynch says. “They didn’t know what to do with the rage and the anger. It’s no surprise they melted down.”

Coming home to a nation that didn’t want to hear about the war exacerbated the trauma. “They learned to keep their heads down and their mouths shut,” Lynch says. “But they couldn’t keep all that stuff inside. It manifests itself in suicide, drinking, drug abuse, murders, not being able to do jobs or keep relationships. It was common knowledge among the guys on the psych unit at the VA that twice as many Vietnam vets died from suicide as died in battle.”

Indeed, Jones thought he was going to kill himself or go crazy when he finally went to a VA vet center in Anchorage in 1980. He showed some of his Vietnam writings to a counselor, who read six pages and told him, “You’ve come to the right place. We speak this lingo.” Even then, it would take years of work for Jones to get a handle on his stress, depression and anxiety.

“We said, ‘We don’t know what we are, but we aren’t that.’”

The medical community had trouble understanding what Vietnam veterans were going through, even though references to combat trauma and survivor’s guilt date back to Homer’s account of the Trojan Wars. They met with everything from skepticism to misdiagnosis to ridicule.

“One of the most important contributions of Vietnam veterans was they refused to accept the diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia from VA or civilian doctors,” Jones said. “We said, ‘We don’t know what we are, but we aren’t that.’”

Similar symptoms may have caused confusion, Chapman says. “One of the potential diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia are hallucinations. A soldier’s description of flashbacks might have led a clinician to consider hallucinations, associated with schizophrenia. Similarly, when an individual is exhibiting strong hypervigilance, it might look like paranoia – particularly before PTSD was well-understood.”

The experience of Vietnam veterans brought post-traumatic stress to the attention of the medical community and the nation. “Although combat exposure increases the risk of PTSD in any conflict, a greater number of veterans of the Vietnam War experienced PTSD than have been identified in other conflicts,” Chapman says. “Awareness was raised, and attention was focused.”

The American Psychological Association recognized post-traumatic stress disorder as a distinct diagnosis in 1980. Three years later, Congress mandated a government study on the prevalence of the condition. The National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Study found that 15 percent of the war’s male veterans had PTS, compared with 5 percent of the civilian population.

Fourteen years later, 1,400 Vietnam combat veterans who belonged to The American Legion participated in a follow-up study that showed that PTS had dropped only slightly over that time. “It was important to characterize the lifetime course of this condition – whether it would resolve, remain, or reappear periodically, to what degree, and in what form,” Chapman says.

The Legion follow-up study also found that Vietnam veterans with PTS experienced higher rates of divorce, cardiovascular disease, fatigue and compromised immune systems. “The distinction between physical health and mental health is artificial,” Chapman says.

While society and the medical community were coming to terms with PTS, small groups of Vietnam veterans began to meet in informal gathering spots, such as the empty room above the Flower and Dragon restaurant in San Francisco. At first, no one spoke. “They didn’t have a word for what they were experiencing,” Jones says. “They drew strength from each other. At least they knew they weren’t alone.”

That informal effort gave rise to the storefront Vet Centers – later adopted by VA – that would help Paca, Jones and many other Vietnam veterans manage the trauma that followed them home from war. “The tag line,” Jones says, “was ‘Help without Hassles.’”

“You are freaked out until the next thing happens that freaks you out more.”

Thirty years later, Oregon Army National Guard veteran Jeff McDowell turned to the Vet Center in Eugene, Ore., for help dealing with his brutal combat tour in Baghdad. His counselor, the son of a Vietnam veteran with severe PTS, quickly concluded that McDowell also had the condition.

McDowell’s scout platoon conducted approximately 270 missions during its year in downtown Baghdad. That included investigating IED blasts and providing security for government ministries and hotels, as well as occasional forays into Baghdad neighborhoods. “We’d go to check something out, hear a big boom, and just keep going, mission to mission,” says McDowell, who served as platoon sergeant during a 2004-2005 deployment.

Enemy identification was mind-bending for U.S. troops who patrolled Iraq, as it was for those who fought in Vietnam. Insurgents and civilians dressed alike. The rules of engagement changed rapidly. “You are freaked out until the next thing happens that freaks you out more,” McDowell says. “Three-hundred and sixty-five days of that, and you fly back home.”

Like Vietnam veterans, soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan often feel out of place when they try to return to civilian life, so they return to the military and re-enter the war. Job-hunting is arduous. Relationships can be impossible.

“We did an unofficial poll of 300 or 400 soldiers who went over with us,” McDowell says. “We had an 86-percent divorce rate. I can count on two hands the number who don’t have at least one divorce. Some had two, some three.”

McDowell was 40 when he came home from his deployment. The transition was difficult. His contracting business had withered. He was short-fused with his wife and children. He no longer cared about hunting and fishing, which he had loved before his deployment. “I lost my joy,” McDowell says. His wife encouraged him to get help, and he’s parlayed that into a career helping others.

After retiring from the National Guard in 2007, McDowell entered a master’s program in counseling to assist other veterans. “I started seeing some of my guys fall apart,” he says. “I felt responsible for them. I thought, if I can figure some of this stuff out for myself, maybe I can figure it out for the other guys.”

He’s already seeing veterans as part of an unpaid internship with a private, nonprofit counseling group. He hopes to put his skills to work at the Eugene VA Vet Center.

McDowell made careful choices. He got counseling. He participated in a neuro-feedback treatment program. He also decided to never carry a weapon of any kind, knowing that he couldn’t shut off his combat instincts.

“You start thinking about the things you did, the way you reacted, the training you got, and you know you are not the same person,” McDowell says. “I spent a lot of time thinking about this … about whether I was going to like this (new) person.”

Families struggle with their own stresses caring for loved ones with PTS. “A lot of times, spouses become the sponges,” Melissa Seligman says, “and have nowhere to release it.” They often face their own secondary PTS.

Seligman started convulsing when her husband described the carnage from that suicide bombing in the same flat, emotionless tone her father used to tell his story about the helicopter gunner losing a leg in Vietnam. David had the same startled reaction as her dad when Selignam touched him. And he exploded with anger for no apparent reason. It would be three years, including another combat deployment and a year at Officer Candidate School, before they could confront his PTS.

Like most military spouses, Seligman was reluctant to seek help for herself, worried that she would be taking resources from people in greater need. Then she came across Ken Jones on Twitter, and started talking to him about her experiences with her husband and her father. Not only was Jones a Vietnam combat veteran, but he had grown up in the shadow of his own father’s World War II post-traumatic stress.

“For the first time, I had a translator,” she says. “Ken Jones opened up the world for understanding both men.”

Understanding David’s triggers helps her to realize that his reactions aren’t personal, to negotiate the difficult moments, and to foster his relationship with their children.

Soon, Seligman and Chris Piper – who together co-founded the “Her War, Her Voice” blog – were recording their conversations about combat stress and military families with Jones and posting them on the Internet. David Seligman decided to seek counseling after hearing just one of those conversations.

Even this victory comes with caution, a question about whether too much healing will dull the edge that keeps her husband alive. “To an extent, I need David to stay trigger-ready,” Seligman says. “I need him to be numb to the horrors of war. Because without that numbness, he may make mistakes.”

Inspired by his son-in-law and encouraged by his VA doctor, her father started getting help for his PTS a year ago. Seligman is relieved that the most important men in her life are healing; she no longer shakes when they talk about the events they witnessed. Still, she wishes she had the power to reach into the past and find a way to end her father’s nightmares.

“I always wanted him to be better,” Seligman says. “As a wife and mother, it makes me wonder how I could have changed things if I had just asked him. I wonder who he would have been if someone had listened.”

This story is part of a special series about post-traumatic stress titled The War Within that appears in the September 2011 edition of  The American Legion Magazine.

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