Army Sergeant Rick Jones knew something was wrong when he did not want to go home to Dover, New Hampshire, to spend Thanksgiving with his family.
“I really didn’t want to see, necessarily, my family. I was gone for about 10 months, which was a little ways before then. So I kind of felt like I didn’t want to be necessarily around. “
(Sgt. Rick Jones, combat photographer)
Jones, 31, served as a combat photographer in Afghanistan and is now a student in the military journalism program at the S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. He is also one of many soldiers who have struggled to re-adjust to living at home after being at war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A 2008 RAND Corporation study of 1,965 returning service members from Iraq and Afghanistan found about 31 percent have reported suffering some sort of mental-health condition or traumatic brain injury. The same study said that 18.5 percent of returning service members meets the criteria for either post-traumatic stress disorder or depression.
These numbers only count the soldiers with diagnosed mental health problems — not the many more like Sgt. Jones who face quiet struggles to re-adjust to living at home after spending time on the front lines. With operations in Iraq coming to an end, thousands of soldiers will be returning to Central New York and across the country. Some will need help simply coping with the change from combat to home. Some will need intensive care. And some are unlikely to admit they have a problem.
Army Sgt. Ben Hutto of Aiken, South Carolina, has been deployed twice to Iraq. He’s also now a student in the military journalism program at the Newhouse School. He knows many soldiers, he says, who have suffered from psychological challenges. But, he says, one of the major reasons for soldiers not seeking help is the stigma associated with it.
“You have to be able to depend on the person to your right and your left. They are the people that keep you alive and you don’t want your fellow soldiers doubting whether you can hold up when bad things happen. So any weakness — a lot of times soldiers hide because you don’t want your battle buddies worried about what’s going to happen when bad things happen. They want to be depended on.”
(Army Sgt. Ben Hutto, now at Syracuse University)
Hutto says the Army is working hard to remove the stigma about getting help for psychological issues, but it still lingers.
“It’s tough to get rid of that stigma because it’s hard for a younger soldier that’s coming back from his first deployment to complain when you’ve got a soldier that’s been on his third deployment. It’s almost like combat-envy at times. I don’t know it will ever go away.”
(Army Sgt. Ben Hutto)
Sgt. Hutto said that many soldiers do not spend as much time as they should looking after each other and making sure they are okay.
“When you get back you want to see your wife, you want to see your girlfriend. You want to get off as early as you can to make up for all the time you’ve missed. ”
(Army Sgt. Ben Hutto)
Officials at the Syracuse VA Medical Center agree that many veterans try to ignore mental health problems. Some are reluctant take advantage of the services available. Shawne Steiger is the team leader helping veterans with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder — often called P-T-S-D. Steiger says the VA has trouble getting veterans to come in for help because they often times want to get on with their life.
“They sort of think they’re feeling better and they disappear for a while. And then they kind of come back because they’re in crisis and then they disappear for a while. So, it’s really hard to help people because they’re trying so hard to be okay and they just don’t come consistently.”
(Shawne Steiger, clinical team lead for PSTD at the Syracuse VA Medical Center)
With a large number of service members on their way home from America’s two wars, some advocates for veterans worry that the country isn’t prepared enough to help them all. The VA has already been seeing a 34-percent increase in the number of veterans using mental health services between 2006 and 2010. In response, the VA has added nearly 7,000 mental health workers.
The Syracuse branch of the VA already oversees the care of 42,000 veterans in a 13-county region stretching from Binghamton to Fort Drum that contains 150,000 veterans.
David Autry is the deputy national director of communications for the Disabled American Veterans and a Vietnam War veteran. He says that he does not believe the country will be ready to care for the large number of soldiers returning home.
“If they can’t handle the caseload they’ve got now and thousands more coming back from the drawdown in Iraq and later Afghanistan — I think it’s going to severely tax the system. And the country as a whole, I just don’t think has the capacity to provide timely adequate treatment from mental health disorders.”
(David Autry, deputy national director of communications for Disabled American Veterans)
Lauren Love is the program manager for veterans of the military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan at the Syracuse VA Medical Center. She says the VA here will be able to care for the area’s returning veterans. Some will still be on active duty and eligible for care through the military. Others leaving the service can rely on the VA.
“We’ll still see people that are getting off active duty and coming out of the military and we’ll see some coming back from National Guard units and what we do is we do outreach with some of those units. We teach them about their benefits, you know, some of the special things that are there for them as returning combat veterans.”
(Lauren Love, program manager at the VA Medical Center in Syracuse)
For his part, Sgt. Rick Jones now sees counselors at Syracuse University’s Vet Center as he takes classes through the Newhouse School’s military journalism program. Despite being in the United States over a year, he is still adjusting to living at home.
“Even going into a room or what not, I’m always, not necessarily paranoid, but looking at where exits are and always have my back to certain corners verses having my back to the front door or something like that.”
(Sgt. Rick Jones )
Once he completes the program Jones will rejoin his unit. He will be in the military until at least August 2014. Later he hopes to go into filmmaking.
For Democracywise, I’m Matt Phifer.
(Matt Phifer is a senior with dual majors in broadcast and digital journalism and political science.)
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