The Hidden Toll of America's Wars
320,000 brain injuries, 300,000 vets with PTSD, 23,000 treated in NoCal
By: Aaron Glantz
Every year on Memorial Day, Enrique Villa drinks himself to sleep.
It’s been this way the last five years, ever since Villa, a 21-year old San Jose native, watched seven fellow Marines die.
It was Sept. 6, 2004, and Villa, a lance corporal, was riding in a convoy outside Fallujah, Iraq. A bomb-laden car detonated next to the truck directly in front of him. The blast sprayed his friends’ body parts across the desert floor.
“Some were decapitated,” Villa said. “A head over here, a torso over there, an arm or a leg somewhere else.”
Villa hasn’t been the same. He started drinking as soon as he got back to Camp Pendleton and within a month picked up his first DUI. When he got out of the Marine Corps, he came back to San Jose to live with his mother. He had nightmares and flew into rages.
Eventually, Villa went to the Department of Veterans Affairs’ San Jose Clinic, where he was diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, a psychological condition the Rand Corporation estimates affects one out of every six soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Villa is part of the mounting toll of America’s simultaneous wars. Even on Memorial Day, these conflicts – the Afghanistan war is in its ninth year, the Iraq war in its seventh – exist on the periphery of the nation’s consciousness, while the thousands people who have lived these wars continue to bring them home in different ways.
The Rand Corporation estimates more than 300,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) or major depression. Another 320,000 have sustained a traumatic brain injury (TBI) -- brain damage often caused by roadside bombs and mortars.
In Northern California, the VA reports, more than 23,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have gone to the hospital for treatment. Veterans support groups estimate that thousands more go untreated.
“Most people in the Bay Area are very insulated from the war,” says VA spokesperson Kerri Childress, but that doesn’t meant that people from here aren’t serving in the war and aren’t in need of care.
“People need to understand that veterans are the people they go to church with, they’re people they work with,” she said. “We’re on the same streets together.”
Tom Shaker will spend Memorial Day in the woods in Sonoma County. That’s where he spends most of his time these days. The US Army veteran, who served in Iraq from 2005 to 2006, two of the most violent years of that war, has been diagnosed with both PTSD and TBI.
“I just find more peace out there,” he said. “I stay away from all society pretty much.’”
Shaker pitches his tent wherever he can, without paying a fee and without getting arrested. He’ll go to a tire store, buy a big inner tube and float down the Russian River until he finds a quiet spot and pitch his tent.
For a while, Shaker lived at the Pathway House, a transitional housing center for wounded vets in Yountville, which helped him get medical care from the Department of Veterans Affairs. But Shaker says he prefers to deal with his health issues on his own.
He smokes marijuana to calm his symptoms and says he doesn’t have much hope for the future. One of his friends from Pathway, Christopher Cousins, who served in Iraq in 2005, was found dead in Nevada on March 23, having committed suicide.
“The VA didn’t help me; it’s just a long process,” he said. “Fuck everyone. I’m going out in the woods. That way I can look the devil in the eye and say ‘Fuck you.’”
Shaker’s friend, Phil Northcutt, will also be out in the woods this Memorial Day. The Marine Corps veteran, who served in the battleground city of Ramadi in 2004, sustained multiple concussions as a result of roadside bombs and rocket-propelled grenade attacks during his time in Iraq.
“You see things and do horrible things” over there, he said. “You end up with a moral wound, wounding something that’s at the core of who we are. It goes down the root of your identity and what you’re about.”
Last year, Northcutt was sleeping homeless on the streets of San Francisco when he heard about Pathway. The home in Yountville helped him stabilize his life. He’s now living in Calistoga while he studies equestrian sciences at in the agriculture department of Santa Rosa Junior College.
This month, his plan was thrown into doubt, however, when he was busted for transporting a large amount of marijuana by the Sebastopol Police Department.
He has a court date in Santa Rosa June 4th and wants to get out of town to collect his thoughts beforehand. He’s worried about losing his home.
“It’s hard to get people to stop self-medicating,” says Fred Gusman, who runs the Pathway House, “but when they turn to marijuana or alcohol that’s when you really start to lose them.”
Back in San Jose, Enrique Villa is trying to get his life together. Ironically, the event that may have helped him the most was a run in with the law.
In January 2009, he was leaving a bar with a friend when he picked up a second DUI. That landed him in Santa Clara County Superior Court, in front Judge Stephen Manley, one of the few jurists in the country to run a special diversion court for veterans.
“All the problems that we saw with Vietnam we’re seeing again with these Iraq and Afghanistan veterans,” Manley said. “They are showing up in my court room again and again. I’m worried that they’re spending more and more time in jail, having no connection to family, no connection to anybody.”
When Villa came before Manley’s court last year, he suspended his prison sentence and instead put him on probation, with the requirement that Villa immediately join group therapy sessions for PTSD and alcohol abuse at the Vet Center, a store front clinic affiliated with the VA run by and for veterans.
To date, Villa has completed three groups at the San Jose Vet Center. He has stabilized himself. He’s married and gotten work at a fumigation company.
This year, he says, for the first time since coming home from Iraq, he may attend a public ceremony on Memorial Day.
“I think I’ll do that in memory of my friends,” he said. “In the past, I would drink alone and remember them in that way. Now it’s time for something different.”
This chart shows how many Iraq and Afghanistan vets have been using the VA in Northern California (credit: Aaron Glanz):
Aaron Glantz is an editor at New America Media and author of two books on the Iraq war, "The War Comes Home: Washington's Battle Against America's Veterans" (UC Press) and "How America Lost Iraq" (Tarcher/Penguin). He is also co-author with Iraq Veterans Against the War of "Winter Soldier Iraq and Afghanistan: Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations" (Haymarket). He has been a fellow at Columbia University Teachers College and the Carter Center in Atlanta.