HiddenMysteries: Bush and his Khristian War on Women (part 2)

By Sara Corbett
The New York Times Magazine

On the morning of Monday, Jan. 9, 2006, a 21-year-old Army specialist named Suzanne Swift went AWOL. Her unit, the 54th Military Police Company, out of Fort Lewis, Wash., was two days away from leaving for Iraq. Swift and her platoon had been home less than a year, having completed one 12-month tour of duty in February 2005, and now the rumor was that they were headed to Baghdad to run a detention center.

Part 1 here:
http://hiddenmysteries.net/geeklog/article.php?story=20070318221828586

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Two weeks after arriving in Menlo Park, she was still baffled by how excruciating family life had become. When her 9-year-old daughter had started shouting playfully while being chased by her 11-year-old in the yard outside, her mind flashed instantly to Iraq. Kathleen said: "It just goes through me and brings me right back. I have a lot of flashbacks. And then I'd have nightmares, afraid that they'd hear me talk in my sleep or yell out, moaning." She added, "Me and their dad have had nothing but conflict after conflict, because he wants me to be a certain way, and I can't." Her children, she said, had begun avoiding her in order not to upset her, asking their father to drive them places, speaking quietly in her presence.

Kathleen started seeing an Army psychologist daily, something she found to be extremely helpful. A social worker at Fort Sill introduced the idea that she might be further helped by the women's residential program in Menlo Park. Yet having already left her children for most of the last year, Kathleen was resistant to going.

And then came a turning point. One day, when her husband was not around to do the driving, she had the girls in the car on their way to somebody's team practice, when her 13-year-old daughter tried to offer some encouragement. "She said, 'Mama, you can get through this; it's not like you killed anybody,' " Kathleen recalled. "I started crying, and she goes, 'Oh, my God, you killed somebody!' I went into another panic attack right in front of my kids." She welled up at the memory, saying: "That was enough for me. I was like, I'm ready to go. I'm getting through this."

So far, however, treatment had been a mixed bag for Kathleen, mostly because she was homesick and afraid. She had, however, fostered a great deal of empathy and respect for the other women she'd met, understanding that some had lived with debilitating PTSD for 20 years.

"I came close to leaving here the other day," she told me. "But the girls just surrounded me. They were like, 'Don't leave."' The women then went on to describe how they lived before treatment - one with security cameras and a security fence at her house, another locked away in her apartment, several having lost their marriages and distanced themselves from their kids. "They said: 'You don't want this life. I would give anything to go back to when my trauma was new and to get help with it,'" Kathleen recalled. "And I could see myself 20 years down the road; I would be them. And I don't want that," she said. "I love these girls, but I don't want that."

VIII. What the Future Holds

Six weeks later, I flew back to California to attend the Women's Trauma Recovery Program graduation. It was held on a Thursday morning in a wide recreation room on the building's ground floor. Someone had moved the Ping-Pong table to one side and dragged a number of chairs into neat rows. A modest buffet lunch was laid out along the room's back wall.

The residents took their seats at the front of the room, having clearly primped for the occasion. They then read poems, held hands, made grateful speeches to the staff and, at the end, played some pensive music on a boombox and bowed their heads, many of them weeping. It was, of course, impossible to know what was in store for any of them. Clearly, they had benefited from the cohesiveness of the group, having met others who were wrestling with the same demons.

There was one notable absence - Kathleen, who, it turned out, left treatment not long after I met her, presumably to return home to her family and military life in Oklahoma. Over the next few months I sent several letters to Kathleen, hoping to speak with her, but got no response. Finally, a couple of weeks ago, she called me, apologizing for her silence. She'd only just received a medical discharge from the Army and felt comfortable talking. She had mixed feelings about leaving the military, since she loved her work as an Army nurse, but felt that the PTSD symptoms kept interfering. She'd spent much of the fall giving vaccinations to soldiers, but after a soldier passed out one day, causing her to panic, she realized she was a long way from being able to handle an urgent medical crisis.

Kathleen also told me that she left Menlo Park last summer after one of her daughters was involved in a minor car accident. "I left treatment because my children were more important than my needs," she said.

What struck me again and again, meeting and talking to female Iraq veterans grappling with PTSD, was their isolation. So many, like Kathleen, seemed uncertain of what to do next. It was as if their mistrust of the world had led them to mistrust themselves. Most were on antidepressants and were receiving some counseling through the V.A., but few had a sense that their symptoms were going away. In Colorado, Amorita Randall was working to regain custody of her daughter - a process that she found discouraging. "Just because I'm disabled doesn't mean I can't care for my daughter," she told me. Recently, after months of waiting, Keli Frasier, the mother in Colorado who had been struggling with depression, finally managed to schedule an appointment with a V.A. psychiatrist to obtain new antidepressants. Across the state in Denver, Keri Christensen said she was still haunted by nightmares and unnerved by driving.

And finally, there was Suzanne Swift, who in early December was given a summary court-martial at Fort Lewis, a hearing normally used for minor offenses. As part of a plea bargain, she pled guilty to "missing movement" and being absent without leave. Her rank was reduced to private, and she spent the next 21 days, including Christmas, in a military prison in Washington State. The Army ruled that in order to receive an honorable discharge, Swift was dutybound to complete her five-year enlistment, which ends in early 2009. After finishing her stint in prison in January, Swift says she checked herself into the inpatient psych ward at Fort Lewis's hospital for a few days but ultimately was released back to duty. She told me she was trying generally to ignore the PTSD but had taken to drinking a lot in order to get by. "I kind of liked the Army before all that stuff happened," she said in early February, on the phone from her barracks at Fort Lewis. "I was good at my job. I did what I was supposed to do. And then in Iraq, I got disillusioned. All of a sudden this Army you care so much about is like, well, all you're good for is to have sex with and that's it." She added, "I really, really, really, don't want to be here."

The Army had issued an order for Swift to be transferred to a base in California later this spring. Swift was unhappy about the change, because it would take her farther from her family in Oregon, but she was also considering other plans. "Did you know," she said, "that there's some program near San Francisco that's just for women who have PTSD?" She paused for a moment, surrounded by the silence in the barracks at Fort Lewis, then said, "I'm thinking about trying to get in there."

http://www.truthout.org/

Part 1 here:
http://hiddenmysteries.net/geeklog/article.php?story=20070318221828586

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Bush and his Khristian War on Women (part 2)

Sunday, March 18 2007 @ 09:17 PM CDT