The support system and PTSD

Through Iraq. Through the Army. Through everything.

By Brett Orzechowski, Register Staff

GUILFORD — Everything felt right to Steve DeGaetano. He flew to Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport, picked up the woman he planned to marry and cut a path through winding interstates to Fort Hood, Texas, where a justice of the peace planned to marry the couple.

He kept one eye on the highway.

The other looked for roadside bombs.

Kentucky. Tennessee. Arkansas.

Karbala. Al Hilah. Baghdad.

He first thought it was just him. Now he knows it is post-traumatic stress disorder. And memories. And nightmares. And a war he will gladly return to if the book that just dropped behind him did not make him jump out of his seat.

His wife, Jen, says his name and Steve returns to the conversation. They are three years into their marriage. His infectious laugh punctuates her stories. She blushes. They finish each other’s sentences. He shoots her an endearing glance when she tells an embarrassing story. She cuts him off with a “you didn’t say that” when he ends an expletive-laced explanation as to why he refused medication.

They are Archie and Edith Bunker but if Archie ever met the couple his jaw would drop. Steve: Queens-born, big family, white. Jen: Midwest, no family, black.

They had each other in Iraq when Steve returned from missions with a racing heart and wide eyes. They now have each other and Steve says more than anything else in this world, he needs his wife. In the supermarket. On the road. At the Errera Community Care Center in West Haven, where veterans pass through doors for help.


AUDIO SLIDESHOW: The DeGaetanos time in Iraq


And he needs her in the middle of the night, when he says the rosary in his sleep only to have Jen shake him awake to tell him it’s OK. Even then, seconds pass before he recognizes her and realizes he’s in Connecticut and not Iraq.

An Army study released last week showed 40,000 diagnosed cases of PTSD since 2003. Another study released by the RAND Corporation in late April puts the rate at one in five returning veterans from the Middle East with symptoms.

Steve is one. Jen says she has not been screened but plans to in the future. There are mood swings, she says, but not like Steve’s.

“It’s getting worse. I was in the hospital the other day and some nurse told me I couldn’t get on the elevator. I started screaming about segregation and everything. It was unbelievable,” Steve says. “What the ---- is your problem? Let me on the elevator.”

Jen tells Steve he never said that.

He corrects her.

“I was thinking it, though.”

They met on a forward operating base in Baghdad in 2004. Jen served in the Army Reserve as an administrative specialist. Steve enlisted in the Army in 2003 as a truck driver and found himself as a gunner with the 1st Cavalry, 3rd Brigade.

They talked. They stole looks. They attended the Christmas Eve talent show. It was 2004, six months after they first stepped into the sandbox, six months before they were married. A soldier played the national anthem on the electric guitar. Steve and Jen talked and talked until 4 a.m. Now, they sit in the Guilford Library and say the other talks too much. They both knew from that night that the relationship would last but Steve really knew.

Jen made Sanka actually taste like coffee.

Nobody makes Sanka taste like coffee.


REPEATED DENIAL
Steve’s last day in the Army was May 5, 2007. His last day in Iraq was two years before that.

His first PTSD test was January 2008.

While in Iraq, officers told him he had all the symptoms of PTSD. Steve denied it. When he returned home, his mother suggested the same. Jen then suggested that he get tested. Steve said no.

The commissioner of Connecticut’s Department of Veterans’ Affairs, Dr. Linda Schwartz, says the number of PTSD cases released by the Army last week is low. Veterans are tested on the way out. Most say the test is laughable. All just want to return home and answer anything just to move on. States, including Connecticut, are administering follow-up tests. Doctors and health-care professionals say many veterans refuse to acknowledge PTSD. It’s a sign of weakness. There’s denial. There’s a stigma.

During the Vietnam War, veterans thought PTSD meant crazy. Now, Dr. Laurie Harkness, director of the Errera Center, says it is becoming a national health-care crisis.

Anger, frustration, little mishaps turn into arguments. Steve and Jen went to BJ’s to shop in January. They walked through the aisles. A clerk dropped a skid on the floor behind Steve.

He snapped. At the clerk. Jen calmed him down.

“This is the man I looked up to when we were over there because he was different. He was always about doing the right thing. And he would put everything out there for the world to see. That’s so respectable,” Jen says. “When he talks to you, he looks you straight in the eye, like he’s looking through your soul. His eyes tell a lot. There’s a reason why I’m with him.”

He finally walked into the PTSD clinic in Newington, says he answered a few questions and the doctor knew the reason why he walks in the house and checks every room before he settles down. Knows the reason why he walks into the bedroom and throws all his weight onto the edge of the bed, because if you slam the bed down hard enough on a body, he explains, the neck will snap.

The coffee drips. His head turns. People are driving too erratic or as Jen says, “too Connecticut.” He gets flustered and pulls to the side of the road and calls Jen. Even driving gets to Jen. She sometimes pulls over, turns the car off, places the keys on the dashboard and lets Steve take over.

There are no traffic jams in Iraq.

She tells another story. He laughs his infectious laugh. “Too Connecticut,” he says. She blushes. They laugh together. Then someone shuffles behind Steve.

He stops laughing and spins around.


OVER THERE
Returning veterans have a support system when they return to civilian life. Few have a support system in both worlds.

Jen was, and is, Steve’s system.

He was a truck driver before Iraq, hauling explosives across the country before enlisting in 2003 at 32. But when he arrived in Baghdad, he found himself between two units before the HDC 215th FSB took him.

By his own admission, Steve made a mistake. He was no longer a truck driver. He was a gunner in the esteemed 1st Cavalry. He told his unit he was a truck driver, not “a killer.” He says his staff sergeant made note and took the next year to turn Steve around.

He took to the Army culture, made friends in other units, but never appreciated his own. Steve now walks into the Errera Center and notices the camaraderie between Vietnam veterans.

He says he never had that.

“Really, when it comes down to it,” Steve says, “I had Jen. My family was 4,000 miles away. I had her over there when I needed here. I have her here where I need her the most. I could care less about those guys. When we were on missions, I cared about them. Otherwise, I didn’t care.”

For four months, Steve and Jen ate meals and prayed together. They knew the Army strongly discouraged relationships. An interracial relationship was met with more mixed feelings. They went on with their lives. Steve would volunteer for missions just to get away from his unit. He would return, make his way through the barracks to Jen, the end of his rifle banging against the walls. Mortar rounds pelted the outside of their FOB. They talked about a house, kids, plans.

She listened. He would never talk about the missions or his nights in the tower. They would talk about religion and laugh about the time Steve requested a Catholic priest when the FOB chaplain refused to travel because it was too dangerous. The priest arrived. They prayed.

She also listened when Steve told her about his staff sergeant, about the time when they were on a mission and Steve found himself staring at the back of his head.

He thought about one bullet. To the back of the head.

Steve now talks about his disdain for his staff sergeant. The push-ups. The extra work. No promotion but first out on a dangerous mission. Steve says the staff sergeant would say his name like someone choking the ignition on a car just to irritate him during exercises. He says he suffered a head injury during one. First PTSD. Then a traumatic brain injury.

This is what he heard.

“DeG-DeG-DeG-DeG-DeG-DeGaetano.”

So he thought about one bullet. Then he thought about the staff sergeant’s family. He thought about Leavenworth, Kan., the Department of Defense’s only maximum-security prison.

“Over there, over here, you don’t pray for yourself,” Steve says. “You pray for others.”

More than anything, at that moment, with his finger on the trigger, he says he thought about Jen.


NOW

They have two bags filled with photos. There’s Steve with Mr. Mohamed, who ran a local store mostly filled with black-market goods. There’s Jen with a Santa hat.

There’s Steve with Jen.

None of Steve’s staff sergeant.

There were rounds that Steve’s unit took. There were incoming mortars and outgoing fire. Steve endured head and knee injuries and returned to the United States. Jen left Iraq first, leaving more than a month before Steve.

She returned to Cincinnati and found little to do for a month. She joined a gym, went to a club but “watched someone else walk across the room and dance.”

She didn’t feel right. They spoke three times a day and Steve returned home, flew to an airport across the river from Cincinnati in Kentucky, picked her up and drove to Fort Hood through the night, keeping one eye on the highway, the other on the lookout for roadside bombs.

“I didn’t think we’d make it,” Jen says, “but I trusted him.”

He laughs his infectious laugh. They laugh about spending time in Killeen, Texas, where they finished their service. They laugh about a trip to Hawaii. They laugh about the black female soldiers who looked at Steve differently after they started dating.

Jen says it’s too bad. He belongs to her.

Since January, Steve has seen doctors, looking for treatment. He dismissed drugs after a anti-seizure medication made him ill. He turned down the PTSD Residential Rehab Program in Newington, where doctors told him he would be a perfect candidate for — except there was a problem. Steve and Jen would be separated for 90 days.

Great program, Steve says, wrong candidate.

After three years, Jen says she is not going anywhere. She also says that she does not do much for Steve except listen.

“Exactly,” Steve says. “She does everything.”

Six months after the first diagnosis, Steve says he realizes PTSD and TBI trickle into every aspect of his life. There is help. No cure. Just time. They’ve seen doctors yet his main support system consists of one person.

No doctor or family member told them that, though.

Instead it was Jon Pierce at the Connecticut Department of Labor, the man who helped the two reintegrate more than anyone into civilian life. He told them about benefits, about pay and about work.

Pierce took a job a decade ago as a veteran representative for the state. He says few spouses walk through the doors of his New London office. He also says he knows the DeGaetanos are different.

Pierce also served. He knows. He sees the commitment. He’s seen how PTSD changes lives.

He sees it in the eyes.



Brett Orzechowski can be reached at borzechowski@nhregister.com