Redeployed soldiers in Afghanistan still coping with PTSD Diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder is not a barrier to being redeployed Thursday, August 22, 2013 Comment Email Print inShare.0 FORWARD OPERATING BASE ARIAN, Afghanistan — The soldiers of the 10th Mountain Division were among the first Americans to arrive in Afghanistan in 2001. Now, they will be some of the last to leave.They have served as many as seven combat tours each, with the accompanying traumas — pulling a friend’s body from a charred vehicle, watching a rocket tear through a nearby barracks, learning from e-mail that a marriage was falling apart. But a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder is not a barrier to being redeployed. Not when the Army needs its most experienced soldiers to wrap up the war. Instead, the Army is trying to answer a new question: Who is resilient enough to return to Afghanistan, in spite of the demons they are still fighting? As the Army has knowingly redeployed soldiers with symptoms of PTSD — and learned of the remarkable coping skills of some — it is now regularly embedding psychologists with units in the field. They are treating men and women recovering from 12 years of relentless combat, even as the soldiers continue to fight. On FOB Arian, there is the young sergeant whose previous tour in Afghanistan — a relentless blur of firefights and rocket attacks — has left him unable to sleep. There is the officer who returned home from Iraq and screamed in nightmares for his men to take cover, until his wife woke him up, bewildered. There is the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Daniel Morgan, who watched as his marriage nearly disintegrated over the course of several deployments and who found himself sitting at a beach house in North Carolina a few years ago, stung by his inability to communicate. “I wasn’t ready for it,” he said. “My head was still over there. Full Story: In Afghanistan, redeployed U.S. soldiers still coping with demons of post-traumatic stress
Posted on: Fri, 23 Aug 2013 09:25:26 +0000
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