'Too trapped in war to be at peace'
The Washington Post
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Published: August 24, 2013
After veteran Daniel Somers’s suicide, his family has a new mission: Improve VA services
Shortly before his death on June 10, Army veteran Daniel Somers wrote a note for his family, asking his wife, Angel, to share it as she saw fit.
“I am left with basically nothing,” he typed on his laptop at their Phoenix townhouse. “Too trapped in a war to be at peace, too damaged to be at war.”
His service in Iraq, including multiple combat missions as a turret gunner, left him with severe post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury. But the government, he wrote, had “turned around and abandoned me.”
Somers felt frustrated in his efforts to get mental health and medical care from the Department of Veterans Affairs. An antiquated scheduling system at the Phoenix medical center left him waiting, often in vain, for a postcard with the date of his next mental health appointment.
Read the full article at Stars And Stripes
This makes me so angry. Good people who have done brave, selfless things to protect others deserve so, so much better. The government should be totally ashamed. Don't send people out there if you can't bring them back in the right number of pieces.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree! We conveyor belt our troops through various hell-scapes where either there physical body and/or mentality is tested to the breaking point, then leave them in the lurch when they return home. The US only know how to honor and care for our fallen troops; not the living.
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