[Mb-civic] When Warriors Come HomeBy BOB HERBERT

[michael at intrafi.com]

The New York Times
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May 4, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
When Warriors Come Home
By BOB HERBERT

The list of names on the Department of Defense Web site is ever-expanding:
Sakoda, Davis, Mills, Gomez ...

Like a disease for which there is no vaccine and no cure, the war in Iraq
drags on. American deaths have now passed 2,400. Tens of thousands of Iraqi
men, women and children have died.

The suffering continues to spread like a fire sprayed with gasoline.
Yesterday we heard the tragic story of Jose Gomez, a sergeant in the Army
Reserve whose 21-year-old fiancée, Analaura Esparza-Gutierrez, a private,
was killed by a roadside bomb in Tikrit in 2003. Last summer Sergeant Gomez,
who had served in Iraq himself, was ordered to go back for a second tour.
Last Friday he was killed by a roadside bomb in Baghdad.

The extent of the suffering caused by the war seldom penetrates the
consciousness of most Americans. For the public at large, the dead and the
wounded are little more than statistics. They're out of sight, and thus
mostly out of mind.

The media are much more focused on the trendy problem of steroids in
baseball than, say, the agony of the once healthy young men and women who
are now struggling to resurrect their lives after being paralyzed, or losing
their eyesight, or shedding one or two or three or even four limbs in Iraq.

The truth is that the suffering comes in myriad forms. I spoke by phone this
week with Stefanie Pelkey, a former Army captain who lives in Spring, Tex.,
with her 3-year-old son, Benjamin. Her husband, Michael, a captain with the
First Armored Division, was sent to Iraq just a few weeks after Benjamin was
born. Michael was a big man, 6 feet 41Ž2 inches tall, who loved to play golf
and, like President Bush, ride his bicycle.

When Captain Pelkey left Iraq and rejoined his family in the summer of 2003,
he seemed "really agitated," Ms. Pelkey recalled. He was hyper-vigilant, she
said, and insisted on keeping a loaded 9 mm pistol by the bed in their home
in Lawton, Okla.

In testimony last year before a presidential commission examining the
nation's mental health system, Ms. Pelkey said, "If only the military
community had reached out to family members in some manner to prepare them
for, and make them aware of, the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder,
my family's tragedy could have been averted."

Captain Pelkey's distress intensified over a period of several months. He
became unusually forgetful. He developed high blood pressure and chest
pains. Eventually he began to experience nightmares. He sought medical help,
but it was a long time before anyone discussed the possibility of
depression, or explored a possible link between the captain's symptoms and
his experiences in Iraq.

A civilian family therapist eventually told Captain Pelkey that he was
suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and recommended that he be put
on medication. Ms. Pelkey said her husband seemed hopeful after receiving
the diagnosis, but just a week later he shot himself to death in their
living room.

Ms. Pelkey told me that her husband had been reluctant to discuss his time
in Iraq, but she knew that he had seen soldiers die, and that he had been
affected by the sight of civilian casualties and the suffering of children.

In Ms. Pelkey's view, her husband was as much a casualty of the war as a
soldier killed in combat. "Just as some soldiers perish from bullet wounds
or other trauma of war," she said, "Michael perished from the psychic wounds
of war."

A report published in March in The Journal of the American Medical
Association found that more than a third of the troops who served in Iraq
sought help for mental health problems within a year of returning home. That
high percentage is deceptive, however. The report said it is likely that
"there are still considerable barriers to care." It referred to a prior
study that showed that more than 60 percent of the Iraq veterans who
screened positively for generalized anxiety, depression and post-traumatic
stress disorder had not sought treatment.

War brutalizes bodies and it brutalizes minds, but our culture is programmed
to keep the savagery below the level of our national consciousness as much
as possible. Most of the suffering is done in silence.

I asked Ms. Pelkey, who is trying hard to spread the word about the mental
distress inflicted by this war, how she herself was doing. "It affected me,"
she said. "I'm on medication for depression and anxiety. I probably will be
for a while."