On October 4, 2004, Nigel returned to the US. The platoon arrived at Cherry Point, North Carolina, from where they’d departed the previous year. Their weapons were checked in. Then buses ferried them back to Camp Lejeune. Most were met by their families. There was a keg of beer.
Nigel’s parents arrived to greet him. He introduced his family to his buddies. His parents had gotten hotel rooms in town and stayed the night. They went out to dinner. He felt elated. He was glad to be home. The following day, his parents returned to South Carolina. Nigel had two weeks of unpacking before he could go on leave.
Back on base at Camp Lejeune, Nigel didn’t really notice any problems at first.
“America had never looked so good. In Iraq, everything was really brown. In North Carolina there was all this green. It was like going from black and white to colour.” Seeing the ocean was great. Swimming was great.
He didn’t notice, actively anyway, that he was experiencing problems. Except for his startle responses. He reflexively threw himself on the floor every time a door slammed. After about two weeks his sense of unease grew. It wasn’t just him. Lots of the other guys he was around were not really behaving normally. The level of alcohol consumption was unfathomable.
“Marines drink anyway, but it was extreme,” he said. Then there was cocaine use. “A lot of them used it because it clears the system quickly. After three days, the drug is virtually undetectable. You could use as much coke as you wanted on Friday, and have a surprise test on Monday. But coke wasn’t my thing.”
At first, he too thought it was going to be one big party now that they were home. But it wasn’t really a party. The guys were depraved.
“There was all this debauchery, prostitutes – all the things you can imagine. A few guys got arrested for bringing guns into night clubs. One guy who was a heavy drinker stayed out all night and came back for formation drunk. One morning he came back with blood all over his fist and his shirt. He didn’t know whose blood it was. That was one example of craziness going on with the unit,” he said. “It was really intense.”
Now, however, he realizes, the activity was not at all about “partying.” It was about trauma.
The behaviour of his fellow Marines made him want to spend time at home. Nigel decided to visit friends in Austin and in Montana. First he went to see his parents, in South Carolina. But something wasn’t right. He felt constantly uneasy. He realized during dinner the first night that it was going to be difficult to express the intensity of events in Iraq. Even if he could do it, he said, he’d feel guilty. “I felt as though I was putting them through the same experiences, even if it was just in conversation.” He found himself deflecting when the topic came up. “I went to phrases like: ‘it was intense, or ‘we went through some difficult situations.’” He felt a sense of separation between himself and the world at large.
In Austin, he visited old friends who were in college. He felt for a little while at least as though he was having this nice, average experience. But then, something changed. He couldn’t fully be part of what he saw: they had normal lives and he did not. He suddenly felt the need to get back to Camp Lejeune. At least there, the people he would be around had undergone similar experiences. He could talk with them without worrying he was traumatizing them when he talked about Iraq.
Back at Camp Lejeune, he started drinking to get drunk, as a way of numbing his feelings. He did not know how to connect with the life he’d had before the war. At night he drank until he passed out. He suffered from nightmares and cold sweats. He had a recurring dream: he was on patrol in the desert and became separated from his unit. A group of insurgents captured him. They took him away and tied him up. Just as they were about to execute him, he’d wake up.
His mental health was worsening. He began having what he described as out-of-body experiences, where he was completely disconnected from his physical body. They’d last twenty or thirty seconds, and then he’d be okay.
But the emotional numbing continued.
Training recommenced. He got his orders: he’d be going back to Iraq. New recruits came in. Then he went home for Christmas leave. At his parents’ house, he “felt completely out of it.”
Being around people who weren’t military reinforced his sense of alienation.
One evening, he sat out on the porch with friends, drinking. It was a quiet winter evening. Suddenly a car roared down the road past the house.
Nigel leapt to his feet, ordered everyone down and threw himself on the floor. The fact he’d been drinking didn’t help.
“They thought it was joke. They were all laughing. So I started laughing too. I played along. But it was real. It wasn’t a joke. I had a completely different mentality. I didn’t know how to handle it.”
Nigel returned to base. He went to see the battalion medical officer and told him he needed help.
“I said I was messed up and that I didn’t feel right.” Nigel asked to speak to someone about his experiences and asked if there was a counsellor he could see.
The medical officer told him he was depressed and gave him a prescription for Zoloft. Counselling wasn’t a resource offered by the Marine Corps. There were no counsellors available, he was informed. When he was discharged then he could talk to someone if he wanted. Although he’d told the doctor his sleep was disrupted, and that he was upset about having killed the two little girls, his problems were never addressed. “‘You’re a little depressed,’ was hardly an appropriate diagnosis,” said Nigel.
Nigel was leery of prescription medications and had avoided them. His mother had warned him about taking too may pills.
Nigel filled the prescription. The next morning, he saw a headline about a teenager in Florida who had killed his grandparents after he quit taking Zoloft abruptly.
Nigel went back to the doctor and confronted him. He told him he was an asshole. He recalls he may have actually threatened him. He admits to being “maybe a little aggressive.”
The doctor sent him to the base psychiatrist, who spoke with him about what was going on. He thought he was going to be sent to a counsellor.
At the end of the session, the psychiatrist told him: “Go back to your unit and get through your next deployment. Then you can come back and get a counsellor through the VA.” There was, he said, one other option: if Nigel told him he didn’t want to be in the Marines anymore, the psychiatrist could “administratively separate” him. Then he could go see a counsellor right away.
“And so, that was it,” said Nigel. “I could go back my unit, shut up and keep doing whatever they were telling me to do, through the next deployment. Then when it was over, I could get counseling. Or, I could say today ‘I don’t want to be here,’ and get counseling now.”
It was one of the lowest points in his life. He felt hopeless. He didn’t like the way he was being treated just because he was trying to get help. He recognized there was a problem, only “nobody else would see it.”
Nigel could not envision remaining in the Marines. What he now recognizes as PTSD was coming out in ways that were neither good for him, nor his unit.
Nigel opted for the discharge. At the time, he did not fully understand the nomenclature and what “administrative separation” really meant. The psychiatrist signed a paper and sent him back to his unit.
Legally, an administrative separation can occur for any number of reasons, including a pattern of poor conduct, drug abuse, or poor performance. In some ways, it’s like being fired from a civilian job—except it’s more complicated, administratively. What he also didn’t fully take on board at the time was the lengthy discharge process. Instead of getting his walking papers directly, he was sent back to his unit.
“I didn’t get it, except that it was a long process. The psychiatrist didn’t tell me how long I was going to remain in Marines.” That day Nigel learned after the fact that he was back in his unit again until his tour of duty was over.
He was not offered any counseling or medical care.
Looking back, Nigel believes the psychiatrist did not bother to describe the details of his discharge to him because, at the time, the Marine Corps didn’t have any resources for troops with PTSD.
“The Marine Corps denied its existence,” said Nigel. “Later on they had to adopt more compassionate measures.” By 2010, anybody who complained about symptoms like his would have been sent to a Wounded Warrior Battalion to decompress and figure out what was going on. Counseling and medical care would have been made available.
Instead, Nigel’s discharge orders added insult to injury. His discharge labelled Nigel as suffering from “passive-aggressive personality disorder.” The diagnosis could not have been more damning or more of an insult to the notion of medical ethics.
The term “passive-aggressive personality disorder” was coined by Army psychiatrist Colonel William Meninger during WWII to characterize objectionable behaviour and attitudes – pouting, sullenness, complaining about conditions of service—on the part of US servicemen on the front lines. Meninger’s diagnosis created the military’s legendary double-bind, the infamous “Catch-22” after the title of the 1961 novel by Joseph Heller: anyone who objected or reacted to the terms of service had a personality disorder. Anyone who had no problems fighting, killing and taking abuse from superior officers was right as rain. The only way to be sane was to be insane.
The psychiatrist had finessed Nigel’s experience during his soul-murdering Iraq deployment into a diagnosis that excluded service-induced PTSD. The military psychiatrist goose-stepped along in the Freudian tradition of gaslighting and emotionally annihilating the victim, the defining feature of psychiatry since its inception. According to its definition, a personality disorder was something a soldier brought with him at the time he enlisted. It was part of who he was. The diagnosis placed Nigel’s problems squarely into the category of maladies commonly known to those of us who have battled with US health insurance companies as a “pre-existing condition.” It allowed the Department of Defense to let itself entirely off the hook for his treatment. Soldiers’ complaints about their mental and emotional health could now be dismissed using the service-approved diagnostic nomenclature.
In 2012, the Vietnam Veterans of America analysed thousands of veterans’ records they obtained in a federal Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. Their investigation revealed that between 2001 and 2012, the military had discharged over 31,000 service members on the basis of the same ridiculous diagnosis. It was an excuse to separate any soldier whom they didn’t want to deal with, giving them legal cover to deprive soldiers of treatment for emotional wounds caused directly by events that took place during their tours of duty. These were men and women who could not escape from the horrors of war even when the war was over.
Back in the unit, Nigel became truly depressed. Everything he’d worked for got wiped out in an instant “just because I’d admitted I was suffering and asked for help.” He could not make sense of his situation. Senior officers made an example of him by making him do all the menial work around the unit.
“I went from being one of the very best to be being viewed as the problem, within a day. I went from leading a mortar section to mopping the floors.” Although his superiors treated him derisively, “the other enlisted men were cool during those last months while I was getting fucked. They didn’t look down on me. We still had the relationships we’d built.”
The Marine brass delayed his discharge just long enough for him to see his unit return to Iraq without him. He was discharged the day after they deployed. Then, he heard, “most of the unit got slaughtered.” Four out of six men in the section he’d trained with were killed directly and two sustained major injuries when they’d unwittingly parked their Humvee on top of an IED, which exploded. By then, the enemy’s IED skills had improved.
Nigel ended up with an honourable discharge. “I could get VA benefits, but it was still under the narrative of this “personality disorder.” It was a release with a black eye: the VA was under no obligation to provide anything but the most minimal medical care. No counseling. No mental health follow up.
“It’s mind blowing to this day,” said Nigel. “They thought they were so clever figuring that out. Supposedly they’re a reputable organization. It was fucking crazy.”
Years later, a not-for-profit legal group called Lawyers Serving Warriors connected Nigel with a Colorado-based attorney who is helping him pro-bono. Once the lawyers got involved, Nigel saw the doctor’s notes from his first appointment at the base, when he felt he could no longer cope. The doctor had written: “Patient is describing symptoms of PTSD.”
They’d had the diagnosis all along and lied about it.
During the past year, Nigel’s counsel has presented his case to the Board for Correction of Military Records demanding that his discharge be upgraded. They’re recommending the Board convert his discharge to “medical retirement” to replace “administrative separation” due to “personality disorder.” That is what should have happened in the first place. They’re arguing that Nigel’s record shows he has PTSD because of the IED blast. Nigel will, at minimum, be able to get medical care through the Department of Defense, rather than the VA. He would be eligible for a health plan like that of civilians, where he can choose his own provider. The standard of care will be superior. He won’t have to wait as long for services. Once his discharge is changed to a medical discharge, he hopes he’ll be able to have his possible traumatic brain injury addressed. As of this writing, the VA has not even carried out the most basic diagnostic testing, not even an MRI.