Fort Carson – Facing national scrutiny over the support given to troops returning from Iraq, officials here are defending their treatment of soldiers who seek or may need mental health help.
Officials at the mountain post say they screen every soldier who returns from the war, have a walk-in clinic for people who need immediate mental health care, and have an adequate number of mental health professionals on staff.
Several soldiers recently told National Public Radio, however, that they were denied help, ostracized because they could not cope and ultimately kicked out of the Army for misconduct or a “personality disorder” – often losing some of their benefits – after they were diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.
“I’m not seeing that at Fort Carson and it disturbs me,” said Lt. Col. Laurel Anderson, a psychiatric nurse for 40 years.
“These professionals at Fort Carson are awesome,” Anderson said. “They worry about these guys. They take their calls at all hours of the night.”
With the number of soldiers diagnosed with PTSD on the upswing – 628 predicted this year compared with 572 in 2005 and 356 in 2004 – critics say Fort Carson isn’t doing enough.
“They’re not getting the programs that are supposed to be available to them, at least the ones I’m talking to,” said Steve Robinson, director of government relations for Veterans for America, a program of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation.
Robinson said soldiers who suffer from combat stress and PTSD should be provided the maximum opportunity to recover – not kicked out when they have difficulty coping.
He said he is disgusted to hear of soldiers being dismissed who have not been provided either mental-health screening, traumatic brain injury screening or drug and alcohol rehabilitation.
“But if you have provided them all of the resources that exist and they continue to be a drug abuser, then we can all say ‘We did what we were supposed to do for this soldier and he could not recover and therefore we have to let him out of the military.’ But we’re not doing that,” Robinson said.
The NPR report prompted Democratic Sens. Barbara Boxer, Barack Obama and Republican Sen. Christopher Bond to ask the Department of Defense to investigate Fort Carson’s mental-health treatment.
The senators have asked for a count of all discharges from Fort Carson for the past four years – and how many among them were diagnosed with PTSD.
Fort Carson, home to about 17,000 soldiers, has kicked out 368 soldiers since January of 2004 for patterns of misconduct. Statistics on how many of them also had PTSD were not immediately available.
In that period, Fort Carson has discharged 56 soldiers who had a personality disorder and mild to moderate PTSD, said Dr. John Cho, commander of Evans Army Community Hospital.
None of those soldiers had severe PTSD, Cho said, so they were not permitted to go directly to a medical board, where they likely would have received full medical benefits.
Interviews with soldiers at the mountain post turned up soldiers who said they were urged to seek mental health treatment and others who said they were denied care.
Sgt. John Villa, 26, said his squad leader encouraged him to get help almost immediately after he returned from Iraq in August 2005.
“I got help to the point where it hurt,” said Villa, who is going before a medical board because he has severe PTSD.
Villa said that when he visited his home in New York in the weeks following his tour in Iraq, he could not adjust. He scanned the tops of buildings, eyeballed passing cars and examined the crowd.
“All of a sudden, I had a panic attack. I couldn’t breathe. … I was scared. There were too many people to keep account of,” he said.
Villa returned to Fort Carson and despite the encouragement of his fellow soldiers, he waited 13 months before seeking help.
But Pvt. Tyler Jennings, 23, said he was denied treatment and instead of Fort Carson trying to help him get better, the Army charged him with criminal offenses: drug use, failure to report, being AWOL and making false statements. Jennings, who was one of the sources in the NPR story, said his problems stem from emotional fallout from Iraq.
Jennings said he had trouble coping after he got home from Iraq, where he saw a fellow soldier cut in half by bullets, another decapitated, and a third – a friend – commit suicide.
Jennings, who earned a Purple Heart in Iraq, said he was drinking a fifth of whiskey a day after returning to Fort Carson in August 2005.
He snorted cocaine and when he failed his urinalysis test, his commanders sent him to a mental health counselor.
Jennings said he was diagnosed with PTSD and given Prozac and Paxil, but the drugs made him so tired he could not make it to work. He said he was ostracized in his unit for his inability to cope.
“After my initial evaluation, I would literally be denied treatment. I was like, ‘I have a mental health appointment’ and they would say ‘we have a range.’ And I wouldn’t be allowed to go.”
“I don’t feel like I’m being acknowledged for PTSD because they do want me out of the Army, but they don’t want me out of the Army labeled as PTSD because then I’m entitled to certain things and they don’t want to give those to me.”
Erin Emery can be reached at 719-522-1360 or eemery@denverpost.com
