Hidden Battles on Unseen Fronts

by Patricia Driscoll

  Although she spent her first two months “crying her eyes out,” Sylvia soon realized that she had the opportunity of a lifetime. As a military reporter she could travel anywhere, write about anything, and the sooner she got involved in her job, the faster the time would pass. By January she was living in the Green Zone in Baghdad.

  “They gave me a lot of freedom. I produced stories for the American Forces Television, and then later the Pentagon Channel. I’d grab my Sony 170, shoot and narrate my own stuff, then come back and edit it on the AVID. I must have done seventy to eighty pieces that year. It was awesome. I rubbed elbows with the best and the brightest of journalism and media—everyone from Jim Glanz from the New York Times to Brian Bennett from Time magazine.”

  There was only one caveat: “We were ordered to tell the good news about Iraq’s reconstruction. They wanted evergreen feature stories that were happy, happy, happy.” She got involved with the Association of Free Prisoners, a coalition that collected Saddam Hussein-era execution orders from throughout the country. She taped footage at the Baghdad Correctional Facility, otherwise known as Abu Ghraib Prison, once before and twice after “60 Minutes” broke the story about prisoner abuse. But there was a dark side to all the excitement.

  “Since I went everywhere I saw, no, I experienced a lot of violence. In places like Mosul and Balad we were bombed every night. I remember one night I was dangling my feet in the swimming pool and a mortar shell dropped into the water three feet away. One morning I left my trailer only to find pools of blood on the ground and splattered waist high on the walls. I saw a severed arm, and went through an IED attack.” She buried her emotions, refusing to admit that anything might be amiss in her psyche. “Death was all around you all the time. It was war, after all. People were being injured, killed; people I knew, friends. But no one talked about the gore. We denied it because if we didn’t deny it we’d mess up our careers.”

  When she returned home in the fall of 2004 to California, she found herself ill at ease with civilian life, even though she delighted in being with her son. By then she and her husband were working out the terms of their divorce, but they remained good friends. Today it is her ex-husband who takes care of Holden. Meanwhile Sylvia started having nightmares and panic attacks in the midst of the most innocuous excursions. “I would freak out walking down the aisle of a grocery story and have to walk out right then and there and go home.” At the end of the year during a medical exam she was given a test for PTSD.

  “The first time I took it I came up with all the symptoms. I told doctors, ‘No way: that cannot be. Let me take it again.’ So they did, and I answered all the questions differently. I wasn’t about to ruin my career. I’m a high-energy person. I figured I could deal with it myself.” Sure enough, the second time around she passed the test. Three months later, in March of 2005, she was back in Iraq working for the State Department’s press office at the US Embassy in Baghdad. She would spend another year and a half coping with her stress and anxiety by herself. “I was a Portfolio Press Officer. I handled the entire anti-corruption effor, plus economic issues and the diplomatic side of health. But my mental condition just deteriorated, and at the end I couldn’t keep busy enough to stay in control. I was always on edge; always in fight or flight mode.” She let it be known that she wanted to come home.

  Once she was back in California she withdrew from the world, hiding in her apartment overcome with anxiety, paranoia and insomnia. Loud noises triggered panic attacks. She was irritable and jumpy. “When Holden threw a temper tantrum I broke one of his toys. I couldn’t eat; I couldn’t sleep. If the AC went on, I hit the floor. I knew I was losing it, but I still didn’t trust anyone enough to tell them what I was going through.” In late September she was hired by the Inspector General’s Office for Iraq Reconstruction and moved back east. But just when she thought she might be able to get back on an even keel, she received orders for a third deployment to Iraq, this time as a public affairs officer for the Inspector General’s office.

  With trepidation she flew into Bagdad on November 25th, 2006, dreading another holiday season “in theater.” But two days earlier, her job had ceased to exist. The official who had demanded she take the position had changed her mind and was herself leaving her job to report to the US Embassy in Baghdad as Director of Communications. “At first no one would tell me what was going on, and then when I found out, I blew up. I can’t describe how angry I felt; how betrayed.” Luckily a good friend, the person at the Inspector General’s Office who had hired her in the first place, came to her rescue. He had emergency orders written for her to go from Iraq to California to visit her mother, who was very ill and in the hospital. By January 14th of 2007 she was back at her old desk in Crystal City. Three months later was when she contemplated killing herself.

  Sylvia is still in the Army. She is still being treated for her PTSD at various VA facilities. “I knew something was wrong for so long, but I didn’t tell anyone soon enough. I was so afraid to admit that I needed help. The thing is, I’m proud I’m in the military and did my part for my country. I got to do something worthwhile. But urban warfare took a lot out of me.” Now she is determined to get the treatment she needs to heal. “You have to get ‘Team You’ together. You can’t be afraid to ask for help. You can’t be afraid to be the big mess that you are because PTSD scatters your brain until your life becomes one constant state of anxiety. It’s horrible. What’s worse is that because it’s a mental state, people don’t see it. It’s so easy to convince them that nothing’s wrong with you, when everything is.”

  The Armed Forces Foundation helped Sylvia rework her resume and gave her career counseling as well as a four-day all expenses paid trip to the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas in the spring of 2008. Sylvia is in the process of writing two books, one of which is a novel entitled Bitch Chicks of Baghdad.

  MEDALS

  National Defense Service Medal, Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal, Global War on Terrorism Service Medal, Armed Forces Reserve Medal w/m Device, Army Service Ribbon, Army Good Conduct Medal, 2 Overseas Service Bars, Army Achievement Medal, Army Commendation Medal.

  “The Army was unprepared for the high number of suicides and cases of post-traumatic stress disorder among its troops, as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have continued far longer than anticipated. Many Army posts still do not offer enough individual counseling and some soldiers suffering psychological problems complain that they are stigmatized by commanders.”

  —“Soldier Suicides at Record Levels,” Dana Priest, Washington Post, January 31, 2008

  14

  I JUST WANT TO BE BACK IN IRAQ

  By Alice Psirakis, LCSW

  “I wish I was back in Iraq—things were so much easier there.” I can’t tell you how many times I used to hear that statement from soldiers who had returned from combat in Iraq. The statement itself seems like an oxymoron. I remember the first couple of times I heard it, I thought it was completely bizarre. At what point does a combat zone begin to feel safer, more predictable; easier than life back home in the United States?

  Over time, however, it began to make perfect sense to me.

  I was a captain in the US Army Reserve for eight years, serving as a licensed clinical social worker. From 2004 to 2007 I ran the mental health clinic at Fort Dix, New Jersey. I probably saw a thousand soldiers during my tenure. The clinic provided mental health services to soldiers getting ready to deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as to the injured combat veterans who returned.

  What broke my heart and surprised me the most was how isolated in their symptoms were the combat veterans I treated. As a clinician, I heard the same symptoms being described to me over and over again by the soldiers who came in. I just assumed the veterans talked with one another and knew what they were all going through. I couldn’t have been more wrong: most of the time they had no idea that other veterans were experiencing the same symptoms, and they suffered in isolation.

  Soldiers told me
how they slept with box cutters under their pillow because it made them feel safer, but how their wives refused to sleep in the same bed with them out of fear they might use the weapon in their sleep. Soldiers told me about getting up in the middle of the night and conducting surveillance around their house because they could feel the Iraqis lurking.

  Soldiers told me about never calling back a girl they took to dinner because they were horribly embarrassed after jumping in their seat when they heard the door slam, a sound reminiscent of gunfire, mortars or IEDs. Soldiers told me about knocking themselves out with alcohol every night because it was the only thing that made them fall asleep and kept them asleep, giving them momentary relief from their intrusive nightmares.

  Soldiers told me about trying to navigate an impenetrably bureaucratic medical system and wondering how they were going to support their families once they got back home with, say, their sprained vertebrae—one of the most common injuries I saw. Soldiers told me about avoiding going to sleep with their spouses, preferring to stay up and watch TV in an effort to avoid sexual intimacy, not understanding why they just didn’t feel like being close to their wife in that way.

  Soldiers told me about going home to visit their family in Brooklyn on weekends and hearing the neighborhood mosque call its Muslim community to prayer and having a flashback. Soldiers told me about the increasing agitation and rage they felt riding on a New York City subway when someone happened to accidentally bump into them during rush hour. Soldiers told me about the paralyzing fear they felt driving under a highway overpass, afraid something would be dropped down and explode in front of them.

  Soldiers told me about coming home to a factory job in Tennessee, after they had spent twelve months in Iraq serving as a gunner, and still yearning for that adrenaline rush. They told me about volunteering for a second tour to Iraq just to capture that same sense of validation and purpose in their life that, suddenly, only war could fulfill. Soldiers told me about struggling with their faith and feeling tortured by their conscience because they had killed an innocent Iraqi man at a checkpoint, a man they didn’t know was innocent at the time. “I can’t bring myself to go back to church,” they sobbed.

  Soldiers sat in my office crying, head in hands, clutching the disfigured dog tags of a battle buddy who was burned alive after his Humvee was hit by an IED. Soldiers told me they were beginning to think that they liked the killing. “Big,” “tough,” “boys” cried in my office when thinking about their unit members and how much they missed the daily camaraderie that could only be experienced in a combat zone.

  This wasn’t the life they had known before going to war. But it seemed to be the only life they knew now. I heard the same sentiment over and over again: “I had no idea it would be this hard when I got back.” Veterans often confided that their old life seemed a distant memory to them. Though I’m not sure they could articulate it, I believe they mourned the loss of their old selves. So did their families. These soldiers were unrecognizable not only to themselves but to everyone around them.

  Veterans struggled to reconcile their view of themselves and of humanity with what they had done and what had occurred around them during war. They couldn’t just go to a bar and have a drink with their buddies because they didn’t relate to their peers any longer. They were no longer concerned with the latest Porsche model, the pretty girl sitting across from them, or their co-worker’s newborn baby. After all, some of them had missed their own children’s birth while deployed. Truthfully, they could care less—not because they were or insensitive or rude… but because they were simply numb. They didn’t have the ability to feel the way they once did. And their perspective on life had changed, without them necessarily wanting it to.

  As the daily nuisances of life became an exhausting mental and emotional struggle, the soldiers began to yearn for the simplicity of the combat zone, with its regimented schedule, established chain-of-command, automatic bonds among a band of brothers (and sisters, of course) like no comparable bonds in the civilian world, pre-prepared meals (ok, maybe not those), and lack of time to process what was happening. Things happened because they had to happen, without conscious effort on the soldiers’ part. Otherwise, they would not have survived.

  But when soldiers come back home, they find that neither their old ways of living nor what they learned in war serve them well. In fact, wartime instincts only exacerbate their problems. Anger and rage are useful techniques in conquering your enemies, but not so popular when dealing with your family and co-workers. And being stuck between two worlds—the world you knew before the war and the world you lived in during the war—leaves you nowhere but burdened by your post-traumatic stress disorder. Or your depression. Or your alcoholism. Or your bereavement. Or your sprained vertebrae. Or your traumatic brain injury.

  So when the soldiers I treated looked at me and asked, “You probably think I’m crazy for wanting to go back, don’t you?” I was able to look them straight in the eye and respond, “Not at all.”

  I finally understood it.

  15

  AT HOME OUTSIDE THE WIRE

  The Story of Marine Corps Corporal William Berger

  “We’d divide into SWAT teams, go house by house, kick in the doors, shout… when you’re clearing rooms, getting shot at, you’re in fight or flight mode. But there’s no place to run to. You don’t really think about it. I’d kill some guy and then I’d rush right on through. Sometimes when I realized later what I’d done I’d throw up.”

  Besides securing towns and doing construction, 20-year-old Marine Corporal William Berger had other responsibilities when he was deployed with the Army’s 420th Engineer Brigade in February 2004. “We were attached to the 8th Engineer Support Battalion but then our unit got sent over to the 420th to provide security while they were building bridges outside of Balad, right in the middle of the Sunni Triangle. The convoy would go out for two or three days at a time.

  “They were supposed to have gotten one of those high-tech mobile robots that neutralize IEDs, but the DoD, I don’t know; they’d run out or something so we had to improvise. When someone thought they saw an IED in the road, two Marines would run up and toss a grenade on the supposed IED and then we’d just run like hell to get away.” The typical charge of an IED was 16 sticks of C4, a significant blast. “You had to time it just right so that you didn’t get blown up yourself,” William confides. “But it was impossible to miss the shock wave.”

  By June the convoy faced daily blinding sandstorms amidst 150-degree heat. “It was like dry wall dust. There was no place, no crevice on your body it didn’t get. We were all coughing up blackish brown mucous because of that sand.” Travel became a balancing act between being comfortable and being safe. “The Army guys liked to drive with the AC on and the windows up, so that became a problem. When I’d ride shotgun I’d roll the window down and the guy driving would say, roll it up. I’d say, hell no, I’m not going to be a sitting duck, so he’d get pissed, I’d get pissed, but in the end I was going to have my rifle ready to go.” However, when it came time to secure a village, everyone was on the same page. “We’d divide into SWAT teams, go house by house, kick in the doors, shout… when you’re clearing rooms, getting shot at, you’re in fight or flight mode. But there’s no place to run to. You don’t really think about it. I’d kill some guy and then I’d rush right on through. Sometimes when I realized later what I’d done I’d throw up.

  “On the base the Army and the Air Force lived in trailers but us Marines, we lived in tents. It was so damn hot in there, at night you didn’t want to stay inside even when the sirens went off and the mortar rounds would start… even when the explosions got closer and closer. I remember one night they hit the satellite dish 20 feet from where I was sitting in line to talk on the phone.”

  William doesn’t remember how many confirmed kills he had or people he injured but he has recurring nightmares about them which got progressively worse as time went on. “They’re not normal nightmares like
the boogey man is going to get you. They’re big and awful. I wake up and the bed is soaked. I get up, take a shower, eat a sandwich and wait for daylight. I don’t go back to sleep after one of those nightmares.”

  Tami Berger, William’s mother, lists her son’s symptoms in the matter-of-fact tone of someone who served as an Army Medic for six years and as a Registered Nurse since her time in the Army. “He has short-term memory loss. You tell him something and he’ll forget it two minutes later. He’s lost his sense of smell entirely. He flies off the handle occasionally for no apparent reason. And then there’s the depression and the migraines. But it’s his seizures that are frightening. I remember one time a year or so after he’d gotten back from Iraq, he was taking a shower while getting ready to go to the funeral of a fellow Marine. I heard a big bang. I went in and he was face down in four or five inches of water having a seizure. He could have drowned. I turned him over; he was blue in the face. I called 911. By the time the EMS got there, William was standing in the bathroom, both legs in one leg of his PJ bottoms. He didn’t want to be humiliated.”

  The seizures began after William was apparently exposed to a nerve agent, although no one in the military will verify the incident, and William’s not quite sure himself exactly what happened.