The day after President Obama announced the Afghanistan surge, Spc. Curt Kelley got a letter from the Department of Defense.
It was a letter he’d received twice before: First, in 2005, foreshadowing a tame tour of central Iraq. And again in 2007, foreshadowing a far more dangerous deployment – the bloody kind that he says still haunts his dreams.
As a former active Army soldier with two years left in the U.S. Army Individual Ready Reserve, Kelley feels honor-bound to go back to Iraq a third time. But his other side, his civilian side, is concerned about how his next deployment will affect his sleeping problems, his anxiety and his changing personality – symptoms he chalks up to self-diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder, commonly referred to as PTSD.
If recent studies are an accurate bellwether, Kelley has reason to worry.
Soldiers who’ve experienced multiple deployments are more at risk for developing mental health problems, according to the U.S. Army surgeon general. A February 2008 study by the surgeon general’s office found mental health problems in 11.9 percent of soldiers with one deployment, 18.5 percent with two deployments, and 27.2 percent with three or four deployments.
Last month, the American Journal of Public Health published a study reporting that service members with previous military experience in Afghanistan and Iraq are more than three times as likely as others to screen positive for major depression and PTSD.
National Guard and Reserve troops are more vulnerable to mental health risks than active-duty troops, according to the study. Researchers didn’t speculate why, but veterans advocates suggest it’s because National Guardsmen and Reservists have to make tough adjustments between military and civilian life in a way that active-duty troops, whose domestic lives are entwined with the military, do not.
The findings trouble veterans advocates who point out that multiple deployments are becoming the norm for thousands of American troops. Of all troops deployed to Iraq since 2003, about 38 percent have been deployed more than once, and 10 percent have been deployed three times or more, according to the American Journal of Public Health.
“I’m really shocked,” said Kelley, a Homestead graduate, about receiving his orders, which instructed him to leave Fort Wayne for Fort Jackson, S.C., at the end of the month. “I’ve been trying to start a business. I’m going to school, putting my life on a successful track.
“There is 50 percent of me that says, ‘This is what soldiers do,’ then the other half of me, the civilian side, says, ‘Are you nuts?’ There’s a real conflicted feeling here.”
A very important article on how the repeat tour of duties may increase risk for PTSD and how some soldiers are going back into combat while currently suffering from PTSD. Unfortunately, the article doesn’t describe the specific treatments that might help these soldiers to cope better.