Youth Radio - Topic: Reflections On Return

Reflections on Return: Depression after Combat

wilmer — Mon, 17 May 2010 17:46:08 -0500

Army Specialist Abbie Pickett signed up with the Wisconsin National Guard when she was 17 years old. Pickett served as a heavy equipment operator in Iraq for over a year and has been home since May of 2005. She still struggles with her memories of combat:

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Family Ties and Iraq

kara — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 18:06:06 -0600

Youth Radio has been gathering the voices of troops returning home from Iraq since the beginning of the war. Specialist Richard Denny is originally from Knoxville, Tennessee. He is stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina and was deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq for 12 months, returning to the states in November 2004. He’s from a family of military men. Both his father and his brother have done tours of duty in Iraq. But Richard explains that since he returned to his base North Carolina, he’s realized his war experiences are hard to share, even when he’s with his family in Tennessee.

I know when I go back home on leave and I’m with people that I knew before, who don’t really know me now, I tell them a story that’s amusing because it’s not that they don’t want to know the rest of it. They care. It’s just that I don’t know how to tell them.

I had such a tight family unit back home that really wanted to be supportive of me and I’m really just wanting to be left alone about it. Because there’s a huge portion of your life that they’ll never understand.

My brother for instance is in the Air Force and he’s done two deployments to Iraq and I can’t even really trade stories with him because our experiences were so different over there. And even now, the only person I can really talk to about it is my father who is a Naval reservist and he’s been deployed to Iraq. But I saw a little bit worse of Iraq.

You know, if you’d give me the choice, I would rather be deployed than not be deployed. In Iraq, I knew where I was, I knew what I was doing. In Afghanistan, I knew where I was, I knew what I was doing.

I remember the day I got back from both of them, I went and got a hotel room away from everybody, just by myself and I spent an hour making fists with my toes in the carpet. And my cousin, like a brother to me, took me to a club and then the lights went down and I was okay, and the smoke machine goes off and I was okay, and then the strobe light comes on and I just about decked the blonde next to me.

And at that point, I was like, “Okay. I need to step back. I need to reevaluate this. This music sucks anyway. I’m leaving.” It’s hard – there’s a huge portion of your life that no one’s ever going to get.

Related YR Stories:

· Headed Back
· Love and War
· Lost Luster
· Military Voices

Benefits for Military Marriage

kara — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 18:06:06 -0600

Since the war began, troops in Iraq have shared stories of insufficient basic supplies, like food, water, and armor. Some of these same soldiers say they’re underpaid even after they get home. Youth Radio’s Sophie Simon-Ortiz reports on how some young service personnel are improving their financial situations by leveraging something the military does provide: health benefits for soldiers and their families. Family members in this story are not named to protect their privacy.

How can a 23-year-old bike mechanic about to lose her parents’ benefits get full medical coverage anywhere in the world? For this young woman, it was pretty easy. She married her roommate’s younger brother—a U.S. Marine – and a complete stranger.

WIFE
And he proposed to me all down on one knee, rum and coke in hand, and my fiancée kept assuring me that people in his training group were doing the same thing and that it was like tacitly smiled on by their supervisors.

SOPHIE
So these two arranged a trade.
By getting married, he would get a housing stipend and permission to move off base. And as his legal wife, she would get health coverage and a cut of his extra money.

Benefits like these are standard throughout the U.S. military. Married service people can sometimes get more than 1,000 bucks extra every month to support their dependants. And spouses share some of the most comprehensive health benefits out there. At a time when more than 30 percent of young Americans are uninsured, that makes marriage look pretty good! Even if love's got nothing to do with it. This couple decided on a Vegas wedding.

WIFE
Here we are at the altar. And then they put us under this little arch, there we are, he definitely slipped me some tongue, which I was not expecting. (laughter/fades under).

SOPHIE
There was no romantic honeymoon after the wedding, just a breakfast at IHOP across the street from the chapel. The soldier was about to ship out to Iraq.

WIFE
I asked him, “Are you afraid?” And he was like, “Well no, you can't be afraid 'cause you get paralyzed. So, as we were getting into the war, it was like uhhhhh, I don't really feel like an outsider to this quite so much. Like those tax dollars, some of them go to me. I am part of the defense budget.”

SOPHIE
And not a small part. The military is spending 36 billion dollars per year on its health care system for military personnel and their families. That's double what it spent in 2001. And while there's no hard data on how many of these couples are families in name only, most everyone we spoke with said the trend was rising.

KEVIN
It exists and it exists more so than most people would believe.

SOPHIE
That's Kevin Walters, Army Specialist from the 82nd Airborne, who served in Afghanistan and Iraq. He says he wouldn't get married for convenience himself, but he understands why others do it in these trying times…

KEVIN
And if you’re doing something to help yourself and help another, then it's really not such a bad thing. The reaction I saw most often is really a blind eye being turned towards it. Cuz it's common knowledge you don't get paid that much.... It's one of the only things the military can't control, I'm sure they wish they could.

PAO RAINES
Using this illusion of marriage as a means to an end is really inexcusable.

SOPHIE
Lieutenant Kyle Raines is with Navy Public Affairs. He says just last year, some sailors stationed in San Diego were accused of marriage fraud. And after a court martial proceeding, one was demoted and discharged from the Navy. But conviction was only possible because this particular case involved falsified documents. Without that, says Lt. Raines, the military has few weapons.

PAO RAINES
If you have a legally binding marriage, it’s just that, a legally binding marriage.

SOPHIE
And West Point Sociology Professor Morton Ender agrees.

PROFESSOR MORTON ENDER
If I were a commander and someone came to me and said, “Sir, I don’t necessarily love my spouse but we got married for financial reasons,” I don’t necessarily think a commander would have recourse against that. There’s not a rule in America that says you can’t get married for financial reasons.

SOPHIE
So the wife I talked to isn’t worried about any major consequences. But she has faced some awkward moments, redeeming health care benefits with her husband far away.

WIFE
Imagine going to the gynecologist and you’re like "I have my husband's medical insurance and I need this birth control and they're kinda looking at you funny (laughs) like "what are you doing while your husband is off defending our country?"

SOPHIE
She says she didn’t expect these kinds of encounters or that marrying a soldier for healthcare – would somehow bring her closer to the War in Iraq.

Online Resource:

· Number of uninsured young people
·Military health care system budget

Living with PTSD

kara — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 18:06:06 -0600

Twenty-three-year-old Jesus Bocanegra spent four and a half years in the military, including a year as a cavalry scout in Iraq. He’s now out of the military and living with his family in the town of Elsep, TX. But the war is still with him, so much so that he’s been treated for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. He shares this story. (November 23 on NPR's All Things Considered)

In a combat zone, you’re going 100 miles an hour, you’re like a little radar turning everywhere. That’s really hard coming out of a combat environment to a civilized environment. To me, when I was coming out of the military, we actually sat down in a plane and they were like fill out this sheet. And on that little paper sheet, I circled the little thing that said if you want to talk to someone else about your mental health. I thought you know what maybe this was my cry for help. Two weeks later nothing happened and now I’m out of the military, somebody else’s problem.

And back home was, you have all the BBQ, it’s you’re sort of just numbed out. You don’t have no fear and your feelings are numb. It’s like you’re watching a black and white TV; you’re just not there. My mom noticed I was all nervous and stuff. I was sweating and I couldn’t sleep I was like you know mom I need help, I need a see a counselor or something. That night it was so bad I had to go to the ER and to explain it to a doctor, like “what are you going through? [in “doctor” voice] I can’t explain it and the guy was like, here take this medicine anti-anxiety and go see the VA tomorrow.

The thing there is the majority of the groups are Vietnam vet groups barely getting help. Talking in that environment, I held back because it’s just not the same to sit and talk to a twenty year old than to talk to talk to a sixty, seventy year old. That’s not to say that I don’t have respect for what they did in their Vietnam War, but it’s just not the same.

I withdrew from the PTSD program after I sat down with the counselor and said look, the program is not helping me at all. It’s making me think if for me as a 20 year old to look at a 70 year old and he says he’s had PTSD for 50 years so my PTSD is not going to go away.

I wish I would have stayed in the military because when I was with my unit it was sort of a bubble. The outside world does not even get in. The hard part is when you go home and there’s not 10 or 20 guys to talk to in the morning. That’s the difficult part, when you wake up in your own bed and you don’t have that guy and all those people you talk to everyday. Now that I do have a flashback, I sit and think and I analyze myself and think, these things are gonna be with you the rest of my life. I’ve been able to control my PTSD to the point of it’s not overtaking my life and I have it in control.

Military Voices

kara — Sat, 27 Nov 2004 18:06:06 -0600

Numbers released in October by the U.S. Army recruiting command show that in 2002, African-Americans made up 21 percent of enlisted Army recruits. Their latest numbers for 2004 show African-Americans now represent only 15.6 percent of enlisted recruits. This drop in recruiting has happened since the U.S. invasions of Iraq. Since the war first started, Youth Radio has been collecting stories from a variety of young people in the U.S. military. Youth Radio’s Irie Reyes brings us three of their stories.

Let me introduce you to Carl Covington, Terrance Harris, and Charles Handy. Terrance just finished boot camp. Charles enlisted in the Army before the United States invaded Iraq. So did Carl. He was in charge of equipment maintenance and supplies in the field. Six days before he was scheduled to ship back home, Carl was badly injured.

CARL (on tape)
We hit a T- intersection and there was a 155-millimeter artillery shell. It blew up, and the ground was shaking. My friend told me, he said “Man your legs are messed-up pretty bad. Are you hurt, are you hurt?” He said, “You’re bleeding pretty bad from your legs.” I said, “I don’t know, I don’t feel anything.”

IRIE
Carl said from there, it just got worse.

CARL (on tape)
I had a hole in my left leg about a foot long and bout five inches wide on both sides of my calf, and my knee-cap was blown off on my right leg, and I had two holes about the size of a silver dollar underneath my knee. I was happy it was over.

I was like, “If I make it home, that’s cool. If I don’t make it home, that’s cool, too. I’m done. I’m tired. I'm tired of this lifestyle. I’m done.”

Three years of going to war, and there’s not a day that goes by that you’re happy to be there. And my first sergeant told us, “I don’t care what you do. If you see an Iraqi outside past nine o’clock, I want you to shoot ‘em. Shoot ‘em dead because they’re out there planting IED’s out in the roads.” He said his job was to make sure we came home.

IRIE
And that’s where Carl went to recover, lying on his mom’s couch in the San Francisco Bay Area. And then there’s Terrence Harris. He’s passionate about the military. When Terrence finished boot camp, he started working as a hometown recruiter, visiting high schools to get students to enlist. He was a member of the Junior ROTC as a high school student himself. That’s when he went to a recruiting office, where he met Sergeant McGee.

TERRENCE (on tape)
Iraq is in a struggle, but Sergeant McGee showed me how people weren’t eating, they didn’t have clothes, they didn’t have shoes.

IRIE
Terrance signed up for the Army. He’s 19. He knows he may be sent to Iraq. Terrance’s feelings about Iraqis sound similar to what we’ve heard from some other U.S. Soldiers.

TERRANCE (on tape)
The Army, going over there, a lot of things need to be done, and there are a lot of uncivilized ways they have. And, some people ask me, do I have fear, as far as joining the Army and getting hurt. I tell you, when you walk in level faith that I walk in with the Lord, fear is not an option. It’s not an idea. It’s not thought.

If Iraq is where they’d like to send me, I wouldn’t mind going and experiencing it. I believe the benefits of it when you get back are powerful. Money can’t buy what you understand, how you feel, and what you see, how all of that changes when you go on a tour in Iraq. This uniform is powerful.

My first negative experience I’d ever had when I was in uniform was when a man came up to me out of rage and said, you know, “What the F you doing?” It was like his eyes went from clear white to red, bloody red. I told him that’s my decision to make. This is just Oakland, but I plan to see the world.

IRIE
Charles Handy’s already seen what Terrence only dreams about.

CHARLES (on tape)
This is going to sound crazy, but I probably feel more safe over in Iraq than in Oakland...

IRIE
When Charles returned home to Oakland, he got a hero’s welcome. He never saw combat in Iraq, but his time at war made him realize something crazy about combat...in his own neighborhood.

CHARLES (on tape)
Being over there, I had ammunition and Kevlar, and being over there, I knew I had the license to kill somebody if they wanted to pulled a gun on me or something.

When I got here. When I got to America, I wanted to kiss the ground, but I didn’t. I just hugged everybody and I almost cried and stuff. But my little cousins, they say ever since I came back from the army, they say I don’t like to play with them so much. They say I’m too serious.

I think in some ways, since I’ve been back, I am a little bit more serious. But I see that being back in Oakland, I like Oakland, I love Oakland, and I’ve got friends and family. But at the same time it’s a lot of bad things here too, but I just try to stay away from all that stuff.

My best friend probably experienced more combat in Oakland than I experienced down in Iraq. He was telling me one night how he almost got shot and he dodged two bullets. I was over there with M-16s and going on convoys and things like that, but nobody ever shot at me. And he was over here just walking home one day and somebody shot at him.

IRIE
Charles made it clear--he doesn’t plan on going back to Iraq. Terrence is now working as an x-ray technician at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Carl is recovering at Walter Reed Medical Center. After he is released next spring, he won’t be sent back to active duty because he has permanent nerve damage to his injured leg.

If I make it home, that’s cool. If I don’t make it home, that’s cool, too. I’m done. I’m tired. I'm tired of this li

The Story of a Wounded Soldier

kara — Thu, 22 Apr 2004 19:06:06 -0500

By Chris Kotch

In September 2003, 21-year-old Corporal Chris Kotch was hit by an improvised explosive device while on routine patrol near Al'Fallujah in Iraq. His left vocal chord is now paralyzed, due to a procedure following his injury, and you’ll hear the effects of that damage in his voice. Youth Radio brings us Corporal Kotch's reflections on return from the war, starting with the moment the bomb detonated.

I couldn’t hear the boom. I saw shower sparks like someone lit off a big fire works. Then I fell into the truck from the blast. My driver told me to get back to the gun because he didn’t know I had an injury. I climbed up, fired a couple of rounds, then lost strength and collapsed back into the truck, bleeding from neck and left arm wasn’t functioning.

I can sleep well at night, but I’ll wake up pretty abruptly. A couple of instances, my mom walking in my room for something, and she said that I’ve woken up, and followed her around the room, watching her, watching what she did, and she says, only a mom could say, it’s not like having her son watch her, it’s like someone really on edge, watching what they’re doing, sort of paranoid I guess, I don’t know, if that’s the term to use.

My friends, they are behind me 100 percent. After they heard what I’d been through, what I’d done, it’s a pretty big thing for someone my age to go off and say I fought in a foreign war, was injured in battle and survived and made it back home.

The siblings on the other hand, I have two special needs, one’s a brother, one’s a sister, and they don’t quite grasp what I’ve been through. I’ve snapped at them a couple times since I’ve been home, and they take great offense. My mom would talk to me afterwards, because they’d run to mom, she wouldn’t yell at me or anything because she knows I’m going through a big phase, and she just reminds me they’re not gonna ever understand why I act the way I do now.

Corporal Kotch is recovering from his injuries in his hometown, Brunswick, Maine, and plans to continue in the military reserves. His commentary is part of a special Youth Radio series "Reflections on Return".

The Story of a Wounded Soldier

kara — Tue, 06 Apr 2004 19:06:06 -0500

In September 2003, 21-year-old Corporal Chris Kotch was hit by an improvised explosive device while on routine patrol near Al'Fallujah in Iraq. His left vocal chord is now paralyzed, due to a procedure following his injury, and you’ll hear the effects of that damage in his voice. Youth Radio brings us Corporal Kotch's reflections on return from the war, starting with the moment the bomb detonated.

I couldn’t hear the boom. I saw shower sparks like someone lit off a big fire works. Just yellow sparks shooting up about ten feet in the air. Then I fell into the truck from the blast. My driver told me to get back to the gun because he didn’t know I had an injury. I climbed up, fired a couple of rounds, then lost strength and collapsed back into the truck, bleeding from neck and left arm wasn’t functioning.

Granted, it’s one of those million dollar wounds, you get to go home. But I miss being over there, I miss what I did, and until they get back I don’t think I’m really gonna be at one with my old self.

I can sleep well at night, but I’ll wake up pretty abruptly. A couple of instances, my mom walking in my room for something, and she said that I’ve woken up, and followed her around the room, watching her, watching what she did, and she says, only a mom could say, it’s not like having her son watch her, it’s like someone really on edge, watching what they’re doing, sort of paranoid I guess, I don’t know, if that’s the term to use.

My friends, they are behind me 100 percent. After they heard what I’d been through, what I’d done, it’s a pretty big thing for someone my age to go off and say I fought in a foreign war, was injured in battle and survived and made it back home.

The siblings on the other hand, I have two special needs, one’s a brother, one’s a sister, and they don’t quite grasp what I’ve been through. I’ve snapped at them a couple times since I’ve been home, and they take great offense. My mom would talk to me afterwards, because they’d run to mom, she wouldn’t yell at me or anything because she knows I’m going through a big phase, and she just reminds me they’re not gonna ever understand why I act the way I do now.

- Corporal Kotch is recovering from his injuries in his hometown, Brunswick, Maine, and plans to continue in the military reserves. His commentary is part of a special Youth Radio series "Reflections on Return".

A Soldier's Reflection

kara — Tue, 17 Feb 2004 18:06:06 -0600

Twenty-year-old Gaurav Taneja fought with Second Battalion, 23rd Marines Fox Company when they invaded Iraq. He spent his childhood in India, and joined the U.S. military at 17 years old. Now, Taneja is a college student and a veteran, like thousands of other young U.S.-soldiers who are coming home after completing their first tours. These "Reflections on Return" come from Youth Radio.

I was in Iraq for just three months, but I got used to that state of being. When I was in Iraq, I was always carrying so much weight on my body. I had a weapon on me at all times, even when I was sleeping and doing my business. Back here in the states, I feel naked, with no armor, and no weapon. Sometimes my hands crawl up my body, as if I’m reaching for my weapon, but there’s nothing there.

And I still don’t like loud noises. I can’t listen to loud music at all. It makes me jumpy. I don’t like people coming up from behind me. A waiter did that to me at a restaurant, at a birthday dinner for a friend, with a bunch of other people I hardly knew. The waiter just wanted to fill my water glass, but I didn’t see him coming. I asked him not to do that again, and everyone at the table looked at me, like “What’s up with this guy?” I couldn’t really explain—I just said, “War can do that to you.”

Now I’m a junior studying business at UC Riverside, where I don’t know many people. This one girl in my poli sci class knew I was a Marine. But she wasn’t afraid to tell me she thought we went to war for oil. Still, talking to her made me realize, I came back to a society that at least shows me some respect, even when people don’t agree. My struggle is nothing compared to Vietnam Vets, who came back to a society where a lot of people hated them.

I tell people a lot about my experience in war, but I don’t tell them everything. I don’t talk to anybody about the emotions. It’s too hard to talk about.

I still remember when we were four or five days into the war, our superiors said our supplies couldn’t catch up with us. We were on one meal a day—food supplies were that short. But a young man in combat is supposed to have at least three meals a day just to keep going, digging holes all day, ready to fight at all times. I got so sick over there from hunger. It might sound strange, but I think that was the only time I was scared I might not make it. Even during one of the fiercest battles I experienced, I wasn’t scared.

But now that I’m here in the States, I think about that big fire-fight all the time. My buddies getting hurt, playing chess in the desert, just everyday life in Iraq. That’s the kind of stuff that goes through my mind—especially late at night.

When I first got home, I slept fine, but these days, my sleep patterns have been totally messed up. In Iraq, there were nights when I didn’t sleep at all. Maybe my body kind of got used to that. Now, I try watching TV, reading books, whatever I can think of to get myself tired.

But the thing is, when I tell people I was in Iraq for the war, they say, “Oh, I understand,” as if they know.

But they don’t know.

Gaurav Taneja returns to his Marine unit one weekend a month for reserve duty. His commentary is part of a special Youth Radio series "Reflections on Return".