Footprints in the Sand
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Fifty-one thousand American troops have come home from Iraq or Afghanistan diagnosed with brain injury. What’s become of them?
Many have worked with military or VA specialists to learn to overcome or compensate for deficits in memory, speech, organizational skills, reading, finger dexterity — everyday skills we take for granted. Tens of thousands of other Iraq and Afghanistan combat veterans were never diagnosed with Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) and may be struggling without knowing why. The VA’s shortage of therapists and difficulty reaching rural veterans means even those diagnosed may not get all the help they need.
But even those who were diagnosed and treated find that at some point, therapy has done all it can do. More sessions won’t necessarily help. “If you’ve gone through physical and occupational therapy, you reach a plateau,” said Adam Anicich, who was injured by an exploding mortar shell in Iraq in 2006. “You don’t get better.”
From that point on, veterans say, their lives become a matter of coping: working harder to get and keep a job, to sustain and repair relationships, confronting small daily challenges. Many feel slow to pick the right words, slow to put names to faces, have difficulty remembering where they parked or whether they turned off the coffee pot. Some find it harder than before to master their anger at a boss or coworker.
In a sense, they become unseen. Out of uniform and not visibly wounded, many avoid social situations because they feel they can’t keep up. Or they don’t want to talk about painful war experiences. And while some credit the VA with caring and effective treatment, once they’re finished it’s not clear what more the VA can do, even if it had the resources. Little is known about the lingering effects of brain injury once veterans finish therapy and are out on their own.
Some, like Brian McPherson, adjust and adapt. After a bomb blast, he found his memory of childhood was gone. But he taught himself how to ride a bike again, went back to college where he found ways to focus and organize, and has become a champion athlete.
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They were lied to. How is a young person having gone through us ed system supposed to know anything? They are told they are going to liberate and protect.
Someone needs to be telling them differently.
Some jobs are high risk for carpal tunnel, others for black lung disease, others for becoming obese. The military is all voluntary and when a person decides to join presumably he/she is aware certain risks go with the job. One is having something lousy happen to the body and having to depend on the VA to diagnose and treat it. Those of us who were in the military during the conscription era might have grounds for complaint. But when adult human beings decide to do something dangerous and get bitten while doing it there’s not a strong case for a lot of dissatisfaction.
Maybe they need more medical care than is being provided, which ought to be fixed. But if it’s just the fact they’ve ruined their lives by volunteering to serve in a war we shouldn’t be fighting anyway, tough gig. We’ve all made mistakes and had to live with the consequences.
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