How Many More Iraq Veteran Suicides Before Help Comes

[EV_Ares]

Iraq Vet Who Wrote About His PTSD Kills Self, Brother

By Greg Mitchell

Published: May 17, 2008 10:55 AM ET

NEW YORK The epidemic of suicides among veterans of the Iraq war with PTSD continues. The latest that has surfaced involves a decorated vet who wrote about his PTSD for the Marine Corps Gazette-- and this week killed himself and his brother after a long police chase in Arizona.

Police have discovered no motive for the killings, nor why the brothers earlier in the week may have planned to commit suicide by driving into the Grand Canyon -- Thelma and Louise style. Staff Sgt. Travis Twiggs, 36, who enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1993 and held the combat action ribbon -- and met President Bush a few weeks ago -- wrote a lengthy article in the January issue of the Marine Corps Gazette detailing his efforts to deal with post-traumatic stress disorder. Tom Ricks, The Washington Post military reporter, recalls in an online piece today, that he carried excerpts from that piece early this year. Twiggs loved his country so much he named a daughter America, The Arizona Republic reports today. His brother was Willard J. Twiggs, age 38.

"All this violent behavior, him killing his brother, that was not my husband. If the PTSD would have been handled in a correct manner, none of this would have happened," Kellee Twiggs, the wife of Staff Sgt. Travis Twiggs, said. She said he began changing after his second tour of duty in Iraq, and worsened after he returned from his third stint there, when he lost two good friends from his platoon.

"He went and saw a physician's assistant who said that was the severest case of PTSD she'd seen in her life," Kellee Twiggs said, according to published reports. Twiggs had been absent without leave since May 5.

Travis Twiggs was given medications for mood elevation and sleeping to get him calmed down before beginning therapy. But again he was sent back to Iraq "and he was very, very different, angry, agitated, isolated and so forth," upon his return, Kellee Twiggs said, according to the Associated Press. "He was just doing crazy things."

She said her husband was treated in the psychiatric ward of Bethesda Naval Medical Center and then sent to a Veterans Affairs Department facility for four months. But she said she couldn't understand why he was not sent to a specialized PTSD clinic in New Jersey.

"They let him out. He was OK for a while and then it all started over again," she said, according to AP, adding that Travis Twiggs was with the Wounded Warrior Regiment and accompanied a group to Washington a few weeks ago where he met President Bush at the White House.

In his Marine Corps Gazette article, written after his fourth tour, he wrote: "All of my symptoms were back, and now I was in the process of destroying my family," he wrote. "My only regrets are how I let my command down after they had put so much trust in me and how I let my family down by pushing them away." Most recently, Twiggs was assigned to the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory at Quantico, Va.

The AP describes his final hours this way:

"On Wednesday, Twiggs and his brother led law enforcement agents on a chase across more than 80 miles of Interstate 8 after speeding away from a Border Patrol checkpoint in southwestern Arizona.

"After officers with the Tohono O'odham Police Department placed spike strips on the interstate, the car continued for about a mile. Police and Border Patrol agents heard two shots from the disabled car and later found both men slumped forward and dead in a vehicle they had carjacked Monday night within Grand Canyon National Park.

"They are believed to have crashed their car at the canyon's edge and walked away from the scene, witnesses said, hours before the carjacking at gunpoint. Park spokeswoman Shannan Marcak said that investigators believe, based on how the car was hung up on a tree, the men may had tried to drive off the road and into the canyon." Tom Ricks at The Washington Post writes online today that in January he had "carried an excerpt from an article in the Marine Corps Gazette by Marine Staff Sgt. Travis N. Twiggs, detailing his struggle with the post-traumatic stress disorder that resulted from one tour of duty in Afghanistan and three in Iraq. Twiggs pulled no punches about his 'psychosis,' writing that he acted out combat episodes in the halls of the Bethesda National Naval Medical Center.

"But it concluded on what I thought was a generous, upbeat note: 'he PTSD is not completely gone. There can be a helicopter passing by or a loud noise or even certain words and it will remind me of the past. It's just that now I know how to deal with it. . . . If you have any of these symptoms and you can't get help, you can always contact me, regardless of your rank. . . . My e-mail is [e-mail], and I will help anyone in need.' "He sounded like he was getting the help he needed." Then Ricks notes the latest turn of events.
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Greg Mitchell's new book includes several chapters on vet suicides and related issues. It is So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits -- and the President -- Failed on Iraq.

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'Houston Chronicle' Uncovers Another Iraq Vet Suicide -- And His Wife Soon Joined Him

By Greg Mitchell

Published: May 18, 2008 9:40 PM ET

NEW YORK Literally every day now brings a report on a suicide by a veteran of the Iraq war who served multiple tours there and/or suffered from PTSD. In most cases, the stories emerge from small town newspapers, as E&P has chronicles for nearly five years. Today's example comes from a much bigger paper, the Houston Chronicle, and occured last year. And in this case, the soldier's wife joined him as a suicide the following day.

The article by Lindsay Wise on Aron Andersson observes that when he "killed himself on March 6, 2007, he became one of at least 16 Army recruiters to commit suicide nationwide since 2000. Five of those suicides occurred in Texas, including three at the Houston Recruiting Battalion, where Andersson worked after serving two tours of duty in Iraq. "Roughly one in five U.S. troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan reports symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression, but only slightly more than half have sought treatment, according to a recently published Rand Corp. study. Of those who did seek care, only about half received minimally adequate treatment, the study found. "Amid increasing concerns about failure to screen, diagnose and treat soldiers with mental health problems adequately, Andersson's story raises questions about the pressures faced by the growing number of veterans who return from multiple combat deployments to high-stress recruiting assignments back home."
*
Greg Mitchell's new book has several chapters on vet suicides. It is titled So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits -- and the President -- Failed on Iraq.

Link: http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003804988

[jwirr]

1. I do not know that it will come. Our Vietnam vets did not get help with

PTSD and Agent Orange until they started banding together in their own organizations to help each other. I assume that this organization is still out there and willing to help but it is not that easy. Our friend barricaded himself on a farmstead and the only people he would let in was my brother and a hand full of other friends. My brother finally got him some help years after Vietnam.

[EFerrari]

2. Kick

[InkAddict]

3. As soon as they clean up the bodies of the boomer Viet Nam

vets that have been and are becoming homeless, losing homes, and losing jobs and thus healthcare and pensions after a life-time of good citizenship and service, and only a few years before they're due for retirement. It's not the "temporary situation" that the younger ones with "potential" may be able to turn around...we see it more clearly as a permanent spiral to the grave, so why endure the pain of seeing two generations trashed on the GOP altar of global corporatist fascism...lots of tense patient anger and pain, bitter pain, to go around.

[Bigmack]

4. How many more? LOTS more!

The American people are going to want to forget this war ever happened, and one of the fastest ways to do that is to ignore the plight of the veterans. It worked that way for the Vietnam Vets... shit, nobody even said the word "Vietnam" for years. It was a fucking embarrassment. The US lost, fer crissakes! Nothing started until the early 1980's, and then it was the vets themselves that got things moving.

The Gulf War? The US won that one, didn't we? The fact that about 26% of the vets from that winner are disabled, with another 36,000 claims pending. They had to fight their butts off to get recognition of Gulf War Syndrome, and the rightwingnuts still think they're faking.

What's going to happen to the Iraq War vets? They're fucked. They fought - in this combat veteran's opinion - a tougher war than most combat vets do. They're in the shit every minute of the day and put back in the country time and time again.

They'll come home and the people of the US will be too worried about the cost of gas, or who is winning "Dancing With the Fucking Stars" to care about their mental... or even physical... well-being.

How do I know this? Hey, it's a tradition.