smh.com.
au
T
he five ageing men told war
stories: of the North Vietnamese
soldier, his hands joined in sup-
plication, shot through the chest
with tracer fire; of the wounded
marines, sheltering behind a tank, crushed
when it reversed over them; of death at close
range, delivered by bullets from a handgun
into the head of the enemy, and the look of
fear in the victim’s eyes as he tried to swing
his rifle around.
One by one they took the stage of an audi-
torium at the Camp Pendleton marine base in
California. Their audience of nearly two dozen
marines, home less than a week from a year in
Iraq, listened quietly and intently.
The speakers were in their early 60s. They
were US marines and, to a man, certain they
were never more alive than during those mo-
ments in their youth in Vietnam. To a man,
also, they were haunted by those instants,
which stalked them through addictions,
failed marriages and the grip of depression.
They stood before their younger comrades,
and explained how those moments could ex-
pand and become viral, lodging in the body
and staying there forever.
‘‘When we kill another human being, there’s
a price to pay,’’ said Dave Pelkey, a helicopter
pilot five times shot down over Vietnam and
Cambodia, five times divorced in America.
‘‘We try to put a barrier around our heart and
our emotions, but there is a price to pay.’’
There was a common thread to the marines’
accounts, stories so graphic and intimate they
had not even shared them with their wives:
those memories stayed with them, shaping
and warping their characters, and remaining
dominant decades later.
All five suffer post-traumatic stress dis-
order, an affliction as old as war itself. It was
officially recognised in the US as a war-
induced psychological ailment in 1980. Be-
fore that, it was known by a variety of eu-
phemisms, including shell shock and, most
evocatively, after the American Civil War of
the 1860s, as ‘‘soldier’s heart’’.
The eight-month-old program, organised
by American Combat Veterans of War of San
Diego and Colonel Darcy Kauer, aims to ex-
plain the causes and effects of the disorder.
For returned soldiers, the disorder manifests
in nightmares, depression, hyper-vigilance,
anxiety and memory loss. ‘‘It’s hard when
you’re lining up a putt and you forget what
you’re supposed to be doing,’’ says Bill Rider,
the founder of the group. Now 63, he was
diagnosed in 1999 as 100 per cent disabled
with post-traumatic stress disorder.
T
he Iraq war entered its fifth year
on Tuesday. As of this week,
there had been 3230 American
military casualties, while as
many as 65,000 Iraqis have been
killed in the conflict, according to the Iraq
Body Count site in England. The number of
American wounded stood at 23,417.
For the injured, the road to recovery has
been a waking nightmare of bureaucratic de-
lays and inflexibility and an apparent lack of
concern for their wellbeing from almost any-
one outside their immediate family.
While the official Pentagon estimate is that
between 15 and 30 per cent of returning
soldiers will suffer the disorder, a variety of
reports, experts and those dealing directly
with the affliction suggest the toll will be
much higher – to at least 40 per cent.
Marine Gunnery Sergeant Enrique Bernal
received a double dose of it. He served in
Vietnam, returned to civilian life, then
rejoined the Marine Reserve in 1997.
Bernal, 54, goes by the name of Rick. He
was brought up in Houston, the devout Cath-
olic son of a meatworker. Then he went to
Vietnam. Less than a month after he re-
turned, Bernal was at his parents’ home,
preparing a barbecue with his father.
‘‘He kind of looked at me and said, ‘You’re
not the son I once had,’ ’’ Bernal recalls. ‘‘And I
looked at him and said, ‘Your son died in order
to stay alive.’ I was an altar boy until 20 years
old. I became someone else then. You don’t
understand: I didn’t do that on purpose. You
have to forget your morals and everything else.
‘‘You’re the hunter and they’re the hunted.
If you don’t get them first, they’ll get you.’’
Bernal was an invaluable military com-
modity when he re-enlisted, a seasoned,
smart combat veteran, albeit with dodgy
knees and a dubious back, ingrained with the
marine culture and standards; a man who
could lead by example.
He volunteered for Iraq, despite the mem-
ory of the experiences and consequences of
Vietnam. ‘‘My only answer is I remembered
that war,’’ Bernal says. ‘‘I did not want to let
those kids out there by themselves.’’
One of them, a 19-year-old, was killed
NATIONAL & INTERNATIONAL
Business / Investment
Opportunity
• Multi-billion dollar education industry
• World leading products with huge untapped sales growth potential
We are seeking a partner/s with $500,000+ to invest in our global education group.
With offices in Australia, USA and distribution in UK & the Phillipines we are set to
launch a new product with in excess of $500,000,000 per annum sales potential. Our
products have been in the market for over 6 years, our distribution model is excellent
and our product is backed by extensive research and testimonials. The short and long
term income and capital gain potential for our partners is enormous.
Please contact Carl on 07 3233 0477 or 0407 627 377 to discuss this
unique opportunity
We are also seeking the right candidates for the following opportunities. Please forward
your resume to csherwin@edussdirect.com.
• State Distributors (NSW, QLD, VIC, SA, WA & NZ) - Income potential $500,000+ pa
($200,000 capital required)
• National Sales Director - Experience in direct sales essential - Income potential
$300,000+ pa
• Regional / Area Distributors - Income potential $250,000+ pa - ($30,000 capital
required)
Shattered lives ... combat is leaving American solddiers mentally, as well as physically, scarred. Photo: AFP/David Furst
Picking up the pieces
In the American Civil War it was called ‘‘soldier’s heart’’. Now known as post-traumatic stress disorder, it is taking a growing
toll on veterans of the war in Iraq, which began four years ago this week. Gerard Wright reports.
when a rocket struck a dining hall. Another
was so riddled with shrapnel Bernal doubts
the man will live to be 50.
Bernal’s deployment ended after seven
months. As his flight left Iraqi airspace, he
wept in his seat, racked with guilt and un-
answerable questions.
‘‘I was saying, ‘Thank you’, and saying,
‘Why Lord? Why am I alive?’ That has
bothered me quite a bit, because I don’t know
why I’m here. I’ve isolated myself from a lot of
people. I don’t like to go nowhere. If I go to a
restaurant I have to have my back to a wall. I
have nightmares and I’ll be crying in my
sleep. I’ll be shouting, but she doesn’t know
what I’m shouting about.’’
‘‘She’’ is Bernal’s wife, Nancy. One night,
soon after his return, a neighbour let off fire-
crackers in the beachside town of Carlsbad,
near Camp Pendleton. Bernal began crying,
then put his wife on a plane back to Houston.
‘‘I told her I didn’t want her around me,’’ he
says. ‘‘[She] said, ‘I cannot live with you again
like this. You were like this when you came
home from Vietnam.’ ’’
T
he causes of and responses to post-
traumatic stress disorder are as
complex as war itself. David
Grossman, a retired army colonel
and professor of psychology at the
army’s officer academy and professor of mili-
tary science, described a process where the
body of a soldier in combat will ‘‘blow its bal-
last’’. This abrupt redirection of nervous en-
ergy can spike a pulse rate of 70 to 200 within
a second, he wrote in a 2000 paper.
A consequence of this physiological con-
vulsion is sleepiness and extreme weariness,
a condition magnified in the case of combat
extending over days, weeks and months.
When he was 22, helicopter pilot Pelkey
flushed a North Vietnamese soldier into a
clearing. The soldier looked up and clasped his
hands in prayer. Pelkey sent a round of tracer
bullets through those hands, into his chest.
‘‘Flying back,’’ he says, ‘‘I had tears in my
eyes. ‘Oh my God, I killed a guy.’
‘‘It’s bizarre, but we aren’t robots. We talk
about how much we want to kill the enemy,
but it’s still going to come back and haunt
you, because it’s an unnatural act.’’
Pelkey was followed onstage by Al Slater.
He was a company commander in the demili-
EDUSS_SMH_0307_1
The Sydney Morning Herald
tarised zone in 1967, when his unit was
sprayed with automatic rifle fire by a North
Vietnamese soldier. Slater sprinted at the
soldier as he looked away to reload his
weapon, shooting him in the face with his
pistol at close range.
‘‘I should have been happy, as a hero, to look
in his eyeballs and kill one of those rotten
bastards, but damn, here it comes again,’’
Slater told the marines. ‘‘I can hear the noise,
feel the adrenaline rush. I look in his face and
I can see the fear in his eyes. I see the blood and
the guts coming out of his orifices and grab the
AK-47 and run. Maybe I could have got him as
a POW. That rotten, no-good bastard is fight-
Recovering ... Iraq veteran Kenneth Sargent
with his wife, Tonia. Photo: Sean Masterson
ing for what he believes, just like me.
‘‘It’s easier to fight from afar. It’s hard to
realise that our enemy, who we hate so bad, is
human. We look at them as an object. They
look at us the same way. It didn’t keep me
from wanting to kill them. I would just rather
kill them from afar.
‘‘The Marine Corps trains you to armour-
plate yourselves. But your mind records that,
and will play it back. You carry some of this
emotional garbage in your head. You can’t
explain to anyone who wasn’t there ... You
don’t want to open up yourself and talk about
it. I’ve never talked to my wife about this.’’
It is this fact, the absence of explanation and
honest recollection from a husband to a wife,
that Stefanie Pelkey wrestles with. Her hus-
Australian Government Envirofund
Grants for as little as a few hundred dollars or up to $50,000 are available from the Australian Government Envirofund – the community component
of the Natural Heritage Trust – for community groups and individuals to undertake small on-ground projects tackling important local natural resource
management problems.
Eligible activities
Examples of activities that are eligible for Round 9 include:
• Planting native vegetation
• Fencing to protect remnant vegetation
• Rehabilitation of coastal dunes
• Works to manage access to coastal areas
• Controlling stock access to water courses to protect streamside
habitat and improve water quality
• Passing on or applying Indigenous caring for country techniques
and traditional knowledge focused on natural resource management
For more information on all the eligible activities and for application forms
visit www.nht.gov.au/envirofund or telephone 1800 065 823
Applications close 5.00pm Friday 27 April 2007
band, army captain Michael Pelkey, commit-
ted suicide in 2004, days after he was
diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.
He was based at Baghdad International Air-
port for five months. ‘‘He really wasn’t recep-
tive to talking about things that happened
over there,’’ Stefanie says. ‘‘He would get
really defensive. ‘‘ ‘Did you ever see anybody
die over there?’ ‘Yes, but we don’t need to talk
about that.’ He wasn’t someone to use harsh
words with me.’’
Later, looking through her husband’s
journal, she found a bloodstained patch
from an Iraqi uniform. He had been at-
tacked and almost pulled out of his
Humvee. He saw the bodies of children
who had been run over by the military
vehicles, an especially painful image be-
cause their first child, Ben, had been
born the year before.
At home, Pelkey was hyper-vigilant, sleep-
ing with a loaded gun next to the bed. De-
spite his symptoms, he wanted to make a
career in the military.
There were options for treatment, Stefanie
says, through clinical help and medication, but
‘‘the shame of that is overwhelming’’.
‘ ‘ We were goi ng to ta ke ma r r iage
counselling and my husband was eager to,
but at the same time he was wary of doing
that. He was working with so many high-
ranking officers and he said if they found
out, ‘my career is over’.
‘‘Unfortunately, he was suffering at such an
extreme level, he decided to take his life.’’
Stefanie Pelkey is now an advocate for
early treatment of the disorder. When she
talks to veterans and their families, she states
her case in the simplest terms.
‘‘It’s a matter of life or death with the severity
... Is it your life that you want, or your career?
‘‘I would rather have my husband working
at WalMart and being by my side, than endur-
ing that mental anguish of trying to hide his
[disorder] from his command.’’
Marine Master Sergeant Kenneth Wayne
Sargent is in training to become the man he
used to be before the loss of five centimetres
of his temporal lobe, before the removal of his
inner ear and the replacement of his nasal
passage, before the shattering of a palm-sized
piece of his skull, back when his cognitive
abilities and attention span were those of a
35-year-old man who was whole: 50-plus
Now open for applications
Round 9 Grants
Weekend Edition March 24-25, 2007
situps, 40 chin-ups of his 92-kilogram body, a
five-kilometre run in under 28 minutes.
He sees himself as wounded and recover-
ing, but nothing more. His young colleagues
at Camp Pendleton lionise him as a war dog,
and the ultimate warrior.
But when he and his wife, Tonia, sleep
away from home, he barricades the door of
their hotel room because he feels the lock
isn’t secure enough. He doesn’t like being
outdoors among crowds. He pulls away from
family and friends, from society and social
life. He feels guilty that he survived.
‘‘He’ll tell you that marines don’t cry,’’
Tonia says, ‘‘but he cries.’’
In 2004 Sargent was standing partly out of
a hatch of an armoured personnel carrier A
bullet fragment struck him below the left eye,
exiting through the left side of his head.
We try to put a barrier
around our heart and
our emotions, but there
is a price to pay.
DAVE PELKEY, Vietnam veteran
Tonia’s energy and enterprise in guiding
her husband’s recovery have transformed
how the military treats and accommodates
the families of its wounded, and landed her
on national television. Still, she notes, ‘‘I
often feel more like a mother than a wife.’’
‘‘I see him as inspirational,’’ Tonia says. ‘‘He
has the ability to continue to live life and
function. Having nurtured him from road-
kill state to a loving, compassionate human
being, to see him dealing with secondary
issues and see him deteriorating in front of
me. He died that day as the marine I knew,
and was reborn as the guy I know now. How
do you grieve for someone that’s alive?’’
T hen she jokes about t he m issi ng
five centimetres of Sargent’s temporal lobe,
the section of the brain that processes sight,
hearing and memory. ‘‘That left room to
retrain him.’’
• Controlling weeds and feral animals to protect threatened native plants
and animals
• Demonstrations of new techniques for sustainable farming, forestry
or fishing
• Monitoring water quality, species, habitats or other natural resources
• Developing skills and knowledge related to on-ground work
• Raising awareness of local natural resource management issues
31
The next
battle is in
the mind
Jane Lyons
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
A LONE table stood in the wrecked Baghdad
restaurant, four white soup bowls cupping the
remains of its diners. For Catherine*, a US
Army forensic specialist sent to investigate
the insurgency bombing, it was the image
that pushed her over the edge.
But while Iraq was her undoing, going
back proved her salvation. Catherine is one
of the first US veterans of the war to
re-experience the sights, sounds and smells
of Iraq with the help of a virtual reality
program being tested by the military to treat
veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder.
At the Naval Medical Centre San Diego,
where the program has been in a clinical
trial since July, participants wear
headphones and virtual reality goggles
mounted on an army helmet. The equipment
takes soldiers back behind enemy lines.
A road, pitted from shelling and lined
with sand-coloured houses, stretches before
them. The only sounds are the whistling of
wind, the crackle of a burning overturned
vehicle and the keening call to prayer from a
nearby mosque.
But as the soldier walks or drives through
these streets, sights and sound crescendo: a
plane roars overhead, soldiers shout, a bomb
explodes metres away and machine-gun fire
seems to be coming from a nearby rooftop.
There is even the occasional insult in the
distance: ‘‘Go home, cowboy. American pigs!’’
A shaker box under the seat mimics the
vibrations of a Humvee or the force of an
exploded bomb, while a machine pumps out
smells including body odour, cordite, burning
rubber, diesel fuel, rotting garbage,
gunpowder, smoke and Iraqi spices.
Twice a week for five weeks, soldiers return
to the streets of Iraq as a psychologist monitors
their progress on a computer, slowly
introducing an insurgent here, a whiff of
rotting garbage there, and counselling them
through the entire ordeal. The clinician
measures the soldier’s stress level by
monitoring heart rate, breathing and sweating.
‘‘The one thing that we definitely do know,
which this [program] has confirmed, is that
memory and experience are very tightly
linked, and if somebody has a very powerful
memory, there are things that can make
them relive it,’’ says Lieutenant Commander
Robert Mclay, the psychiatrist in charge of
the project.
The treatment is based on the concept of
exposure therapy, which asks patients to
repeatedly and incrementally visualise the
original trauma in a therapeutic
environment. Patients can then process their
emotions and decondition their responses.
But the difficulty sufferers have in
imagining what they fear most is what led
Albert Rizzo, a clinical psychologist at the
University of Southern California and the
creator of the virtual reality program, to
improve on what he saw as the flaw in
conventional exposure therapy.
‘‘If you look at post-traumatic stress
disorder, one of the cardinal symptoms is
the avoidance of cues and reminders of the
traumatic event, so it is a pretty tall order to
ask someone to imagine the thing that
traumatised them,’’ he says.
In 2003 Rizzo came across the game Full
Spectrum Warrior, which the army had built
to train soldiers, and he quickly realised the
potential of turning its training graphics into
treatment. ‘‘We use the best possible
technology for training and conducting war.
Why not use the best technology for treating
the aftermath?’ he says.
The Office of Naval Research approached
Rizzo in 2004 for a three-year research
project. Rizzo has spent two years testing the
software at the university’s Institute for
Creative Technologies, with the help of the
technology company Virtually Better, the
Naval Medical Centre, Camp Pendleton and
nine other veterans hospitals and universities.
Several hundred soldiers are scheduled to
take part in treatment or projects to develop
the program. Mclay says: ‘‘The next step is
large-scale use – to start disseminating the
technology, to train people how to use it.’’
* Not her real name.
hmaC057875
FBA 031