Army National Guard veteran Fabian Martinez left Baghdad in March, and he still feels skittish about loud noises, or being around people. Even a piece of trash lying on the ground is enough to put him on guard. In Iraq, it might have been an explosive.
“You don’t kick trash like you would have,” Martinez said. “You keep away from the trash.”
A couple of weeks ago Martinez said he got together with a bunch of men from his unit, and they started talking about being back home.
“Pretty much we’re having all the same problems,” Martinez, of Española, said. “Like anger problems, being around other people — we find that we like being alone more. I thought it was just me that was having that.”
Martinez said sometimes he feels lucky that he’s single, and lives alone. Some of his fellow soldiers find it therapeutic to be around family, but others are having trouble communicating, he said. A lot of them have resorted to drinking regularly, Martinez said.
Martinez said domestic violence is an issue.
“I myself, personally, haven’t seen it, but I’ve heard it is happening.” Martinez said. “A lot of soldiers get referred to counseling.”
In the scheme of things, Martinez’s unit was lucky. They were only deployed for 11 months, because their replacements arrived early. But like all combat veterans, they’re still feeling the effects of their experiences.
“Anybody that comes back is different,” Martinez said. “It took a toll on a lot of the soldiers.”
Distress Signals
New Mexico doesn’t have any hard numbers on how many of its military families experience domestic violence. But mental-health clinicians say post-combat stress generally involves a cocktail of symptoms that can set the stage for trouble.
“There are reports of higher rates of domestic violence and abuse happening when there’s Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD) involved,” Santa Fe Rape Crisis and Trauma Treatment Center therapist Kate Latimer said. “There are higher rates of substance abuse, higher rates of unemployment. It’s really something to be aware of.”
Veteran and Family Support Services Clinical Supervisor Hoyt Roberson said the symptoms of PTSD can lend themselves to incidents of domestic violence.
“Some of them are irritability, some of them are reliving the event, always being on the alert, those kinds of things,” Roberson said. “So is it possible that somebody that suffers from PTSD would be involved in domestic violence? Well the answer to that is yes, and so we do see some of that.”
Roberson said of course, not every soldier has a diagnosis of PTSD. But every returning soldier has to adjust and reintegrate, and deployments are tough on the family as a whole, he said.
“When they come back, we think it’s great, it’s wonderful,” Roberson said. “We should all be able to relax, enjoy ourselves, go to the lake and play golf. Well they can’t, because for a year, or a year and a half or two years, they have been keyed up the entire time, and it is very difficult for some of them to turn that off.”
Roberson said regardless of how the family functioned before, it’s important to help everyone adjust to that new reality.
“What we tell the families is they don’t need to panic,” Roberson said. “What’s going on with their children is normal, it’s not the family’s fault.”
Vet Center Team Leader Farrell Udell said often family members have to renegotiate their roles after a deployment.
“It’s probably about third or fourth on the list of reintegration problems,” Udell said. “While the husband’s gone, the wife gets used to doing things on her own that she may not have done before. When they get over their honeymoon period, unless they make active attempts to reintegrate, then there can be difficulty.”
Roberson said it’s also more than just the acute combat trauma, which manifests itself in previously simple tasks like driving on the highway. Being in a war zone can also effect a more fundamental change in a soldier’s outlook, he said.
“If you’ve seen people be decapitated or killed, or limbs lying in the streets, you can become much more reflective,” Roberson said. “You learn that a lot of stuff that people like to argue about isn’t really that important. So some soldiers come across as being detached, as being not interested in day-to-day stuff.”
Nationally, there are myriad studies documenting the psychological impacts of wartime deployments, particularly among female soldiers who experience sexual trauma while in the military. But there are fewer studies documenting the experience of military families during and after a deployment.
Some do hint at the depth of the problem. A 2007 paper in the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy described PTSD-like symptoms in the wives and girlfriends of returning veterans with PTSD. Also in 2007, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a paper stating that among Army families with known episodes of child abuse, Army wives were much more likely to practice abuse and neglect during their husbands’ combat-related deployments.
Getting Help
Army National Guard veteran Frank Cordova, of Española, knows first-hand what returning soldiers go through. He returned from operations in Iraq a few years ago.
“Families don’t understand PTSD,” Cordova said. “We didn’t come back the way we left.”
Cordova said he’s found help, and is now in intermittent counseling with the Santa Fe Rape Crisis and Trauma Treatment Center.
“It’s hard to find people up here who deal with PTSD,” Cordova said.
To alleviate that, Cordova is attempting to start a charter organization for veterans of Desert Storm, Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom, in Afghanistan.
“The Vietnam Veterans of America are helping us start a charter so we don’t fall by the wayside like they did,” Cordova said.
Cordova said he wants to support and guide veterans as they deal with health care, education and compensation issues. He said he knows the “roller coaster ride” that comes with navigating the system. Mainly, he said, he wants to play a preventive role to head off some of the troubles that returning veterans face.
“Those are my concerns,” Cordova said. “Domestic violence, alcohol abuse, just the anger that goes with PTSD.”
The Rape Crisis and Trauma Treatment Center, which has been treating victims of sexual trauma for three decades, recently decided to expand its free services to anyone dealing with a traumatic event — including veterans.
“It just felt like there was a growing need for a wider scope of trauma treatment,” Latimer said.
Latimer said treatments for different types of trauma are similar, even though the individual symptoms and triggers can be widely variant. Like nearly everyone interviewed, Latimer said the first hurdle is getting veterans to seek help.
“That is really our biggest challenge right now,” Latimer said. “No one’s breaking down our doors for treatment.”
Martinez said he’s also talking to his fellow vets about the importance of getting signed up for veteran services, and seeking counseling when necessary. First, they have to admit that they’re having difficulty, he said.
“The soldiers themselves don’t see it,” Martinez said. “It’s gonna take somebody else to tell them.”
This is the second of a four-part series to mark Domestic Violence Awareness Month.