Mr_Sandman's Blog

 I am really at the end of my rope. After returning from Iraq a diffrent man and battling the Veterans Administration for service connected didability that they have denied twice now. I am closer to the edge than I have ever been. I am so angry I can't stand myself, everything makes me so upset anymore. From listening to pure stupidity pour from peoples mouth about the war and what should be done to the media's inability to show an ounce of compassion for the fallen soldiers, instead they simply state an number of the dead for the day and move on. The nightmares still come at night, and when my baby daughter screams it still is a trigger from Iraq. I have been going to the local shrink at the VA and it has gotten me no where quickly. Case and point the diagnosis they gave me was cyrcadian rythem disorder........yep thats what's causing my problems....my sleep scedule. It's like I am standing in a room full of people screaming at the top of my lungs and nobody hears me. I am reaching the end of my ability to deal, to cope with this any longer.

As a recently returned soldier from the war in Iraq. I am constantly confronted when I turn on the news each day and hear that more of us soldiers have died in Iraq. What really bothers me about mainstream news and media is the way they report these deaths. Typically it is a very short segment simply stating the body count of the US soldiers dead, and if it was a local soldier that was killed, then they simply move right into weather or whatever else that seems to be more important.

I am more concerned that nobody in this civilan world really cares........I am surrounded by people who are self absorbed, and shoot off about what should be done about the war in Iraq. But when it comes right down to it most simply look the other way as we soldiers lay down our lives.

Am I bitter......yes

I am truly starting to see the issues my father returned from during the vietman war. It is enough to send most over the edge.....Especially when you are dealing with PTSD, and the loss of men you knew......husbands, fathers, someones son. Yet it seems everyone just looks away

Somewhere between reality and dreams...I drift away
Days I have lived... from the past...come back to me
Haunting...that will never let me be

In my soul...guilt...for the things I could not change
A lump in my throat...as I sleep...as all the sadness begins to heap
Unable to stop these chains of events...I cannot breath

Understanding...comprehending...feeling...what any war truly is
My innocence...gone from me...all I trust...all that I was...just a memory...A monster for all to hate
Man...not meant for war...tries to rationalize...excuses the horrible...
...the cries...the screams...the anger...and tries to live his life..............in the end you can only run so far....but in the night ....like a sick parade that passed before my eyes...those days are played a thousand times over.

Many Many times when I was in Iraq, I would stay awake at night thinking of things back in the states, like it was world far away. I would think of the people in my life friends, family, even people that I did not know. Would they ever really know what an average day over here was like for me and thousands of other troops. Descriptive words will never come close,but at the very least they can give you the sensation of what it was like for me to be there.


Awake......2:47AM
A mission......suspected weapons......a civilians house
20 minutes.... briefing.....my stomach turns


I check my gear.......lock and load
200 rounds......tracer rounds and all
Slow motion.....my mind wonders
"We are winning the hearts and minds of the Iraq people".....My commander and chief says

Screams ring out as we bust in the door
Women and children cry.......they think will kill them
No weapons to be found

Winning hearts and minds.......I just don't know

Reservist Due for Iraq Is Killed in Standoff With Police

By Megan Greenwell
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 27, 2006; Page B02

Army Reservist James E. Dean had already served 18 months in Afghanistan when he was notified three weeks ago that he would be deployed to Iraq later this month. The prospect of returning to war sent the St. Mary's County resident into a spiral of depression, a neighbor said.

Despondent about his orders, Dean barricaded himself inside his father's home with several weapons on Christmas, threatening to kill himself. After a 14-hour standoff with authorities, Dean was killed yesterday by a police officer after he aimed a gun at another officer, police said.

Wanda Matthews, who lives next door to Dean's father and said she thought of the younger man as a son, described him as a "very good boy."

"His dad told me that he didn't want to go to war," Matthews said. "He had already been out there and didn't want to go again."

Dean, 29, was shot once after a confrontation with officers that began when a member of Dean's family asked police to check on him about 10 p.m. Monday, police said. Dean stated his intention to kill himself several times late that night and yesterday morning and had fired at officers multiple times, St. Mary's County Sheriff Tim Cameron said. A handful of bullets hit police cars, but no officers were injured.

Cameron said special law enforcement units spent the night trying to negotiate with Dean to come out of the house.

"He was asked to come out and refused repeatedly," Cameron said. "We threw a phone in the window and he threw it back out."

About noon, tactical teams from the Maryland State Police and St. Mary's, Calvert and Charles county sheriffs' offices began pumping tear gas into the home to force Dean out, Cameron said.

Police said Dean stepped outside his front door and pointed a firearm at an officer. Another officer on the scene, believing his colleague was in danger, shot Dean in the chest, they said.

Cameron did not reveal the department affiliation of the officer who shot Dean. The St. Mary's County Bureau of Criminal Investigations, which comprises officers from the sheriff's office and state police, will investigate the shooting, he said.

Dean's father, Joseph L. Dean Jr., was not home during the standoff, authorities said, and his phone number had been disconnected yesterday afternoon. Neighbors were evacuated from the surrounding homes when police responded to the scene.

Matthews said Dean enjoyed hunting and fishing but had lost much of his enthusiasm for life when he found out that he was being deployed to Iraq. She said that she had not spoken to him since he was notified but that his father was extremely worried about Dean. "He was a good country boy," she said.

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF AN IRAQI VETERAN WHO COULD TAKE NO MORE
By Andrew Buncombe and Oliver Duff


May 14, 2006
The following true stories. hits it right on the head for me, the following things in this story that I put in bold Italic capture the way I feel sometimes, and the experinces in Iraq, as I was too a driver for the 101st in Iraq. I hope all who come take the time to read all of this.


By his own admission Douglas Barber, a former army reservist, was struggling.
For two years since returning from the chaos and violence of Iraq, the
35-year-old had battled with his memories and his demons, the things he had
seen and the fear he had experienced. Recently, it seemed he had turned a
corner, securing medical help and counselling.

But last week, at his home in south-eastern Alabama, the National Guardsman
e-mailed some friends and then changed the message on his answering machine.=A0
His new message told callers: "If you're looking for Doug, I'm checking out
of this world. I'll see you on the other side." Mr. Barber dialled the
police, stepped on to the porch with his shotgun and -- after a brief
stand-off with officers -- shot himself in the head. He was pronounced dead
at the scene.

The death of Mr. Barber is one of numerous instances of Iraqi veterans who
have taken their own lives since the U.S.-led invasion to oust Saddam Hussein
in spring 2003. Concern is such that the Pentagon has recently instigated new
procedures for monitoring the mental health of returning troops. But his
story would not have been told but for a group of determined activists and a
British journalism student who was among the handful of people the reservist
e-mailed just minutes before he killed himself.

Craig Evans, 19, a student at Bournemouth University, was working on a project
about post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and had been in regular contact
with Mr. Barber. But the e-mail message he received on Monday 16 January told
him something was terribly wrong. It read: "I have nothing to live for any
more -- I am going to be checking out of this world." Mr. Evans said he tried
to contact the U.S. embassy and some of Mr. Barber's friends in the U.S. to
alert them to what he suspected might happen. "I e-mailed him back and wrote,
'I am going to ring you, don't do anything stupid.' It was an effort in vain:
within an hour Mr. Barber had used his shotgun to end to his torment.

Mr. Evans said: "Doug said he wasn't the same person when he got back [from
Iraq] -- he was paranoid, had lost his social skills, his marriage was over,
the street without worrying something was going to blow he couldn't walk down
up. I made a promise to him that I would do everything I could to get his
story out there."

Mr. Barber was a member of the 1485th Transportation Company of the Ohio
National Guard and was called up for active duty in February 2003. He arrived
in Iraq in summer 2003, when the initial invasion had been completed and just
as the insurgency was gathering strength.

He spent seven months in Iraq, driving trucks and trying to avoid the deadly
perils that confronted him. He was haunted by the deaths of his colleagues
and by the fear and desperation he saw in the faces of Iraqis. Like many
reservists pushed into the front line, Mr. Barber said he was not properly
trained.

"It was really bad -- death was all around you, all the time. You couldn't
escape it," he said in an interview after he returned to Alabama with the
campaign group Coalition for Free Thought in Media. "Everybody in Iraq was
going through suicide counselling because the stress was so high. It was at
such a magnitude, such a high level, that it was unthinkable for anyone to
imagine. You cannot even imagine it." He was opposed to the war but felt
obliged to go because he believed that without the experience his opinion
would be invalid.

Friends said that when Mr. Barber returned things started to fall apart and he
split from his wife of 11 years. He had been prescribed clonazepam, an
anti-anxiety drug that can cause depression. One friend of more than 13
years, Rick Hays, a minister from Indiana, said: "He was a really good guy,
pretty level-headed . . . He liked to have fun. But when he came back from
Iraq the difference in him was so sad."

Charlie Anderson, of Iraq Veterans Against the War, said the federal Veterans
Administration relied too heavily on the use of drugs for dealing with
returning soldiers suffering from stress.

Mr. Barber's sister, Connie Bingham, said a funeral was due to take place on
Saturday.

'WE LIVE WITH PERMANENT SCARS FROM HORRIFIC EVENTS'

--Doug Barber wrote this internet article on 12 January, just before he died

My thought today is to help you the reader understand what happens to a
soldier when they come home and the sacrifice we continue to make. This war
on terror has become a personal war for so many, yet the Bush administration
do not want to reveal to America that this is a personal war. They want to
run it like a business, and thus they refuse to show the personal sacrifices
the soldiers and their families have made for this country.

All is not OK or right for those of us who return home alive and supposedly
well. What looks like normalcy and readjustment is only an illusion to be
revealed by time and torment. Some soldiers come home missing limbs and other
parts of their bodies. Still others will live with permanent scars from
horrific events that no one other than those who served will ever understand.
We come home from war trying to put our lives back together but some cannot
stand the memories and decide that death is better. We kill ourselves because
we are so haunted by seeing children killed and whole families wiped out.

Others come home to nothing, families have abandoned them: husbands and wives
have left these soldiers, and so have parents. Post-traumatic stress disorder
has become the norm amongst these soldiers because they don't know how to cope
with returning to a society that will never understand what they have endured.

PTSD comes in many forms not understood by many: but yet if a soldier has it,
America thinks the soldiers are crazy. PTSD comes in the form of depression,
anger, regret, being confrontational, anxiety, chronic pain, compulsion,
delusions, grief, guilt, dependence, loneliness, sleep disorders,
suspiciousness/paranoia, low self-esteem, and so many other things.

We are easily startled with a loud bang or noise and can be found ducking for
cover when we get panicked. This is a result of artillery rounds going off in
a combat zone, or an improvised explosive device blowing up.

I myself have trouble coping with an everyday routine that often causes me to
have a short fuse. A lot of soldiers lose jobs just because they are trained
to be killers and they have lived in an environment that is conducive to that.
We are always on guard for our safety and that of our comrades. When you go
to bed at night you wonder will you be sent home in a flag-draped coffin
because a mortar round went off on your sleeping area.

Soldiers live in deplorable conditions where burning your own faeces is the
order of the day, where going days on end with no shower and the uniform you
wear gets so crusty it sticks to your body becomes a common occurrence. We
also deal with rationing water or even food. So when a soldier comes home
they are unsure of what to do.

This is what PTSD comes in the shape of -- soldiers can not often handle
coming back to the same world they left behind. It is something that drives
soldiers over the edge and causes them to withdraw from society. As Americans
we turn our nose down at them wondering why they act the way they do. Who
cares about them, why should we help them?


RETURNING HOME ALIVE
By Stan Goff

Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW)


--All is not okay or right for those of us who return home alive and
supposedly well. What looks like normalcy and readjustment is only an
illusion to be revealed by time and torment. Some soldiers come home missing
limbs and other parts of their bodies. Still others will live with permanent
scars from horrific events that no one other than those who served will ever
understand. --Douglas Barber, 2005.

On January 16th, after having talked quite normally on the phone with at least
two other people that same day, Douglas Barber, a member of Iraq Veterans
Against the War (IVAW) living in Lee County, Alabama, changed the
answer-message on his telephone. "If you're looking for Doug," it said in his
Alabama drawl, "I'm checking out of this world. I'll see you on the other
side." He then called the police, collected his shotgun, and went out onto
his porch to meet them.

From the sketchy reports we have now, it seems the police wouldn't oblige him
with a "suicide by cop" and tried to talk him down. When it became apparent
he wasn't able to commit cop-suicide, 27-year-old Douglas Barber did an
about-face, rotated the shotgun, and killed himself. There is a hell of a lot
that we just don't know about how this happened. I talked to Doug on the
phone earlier this month, and he described how excited he was to have joined
IVAW, how he looked forward to taking up the pen and speaking out. Others had
spoken with him only days and hours before he permanently quieted the chaos in
his head. None of the "classic" signs of suicidal thinking were manifest.=A0 He
was gregarious and upbeat, playful.

We know he had been prescribed medication. When he came back from Iraq,
having served with the 1485th Transportation Company, a National Guard unit
federalized to compensate for the extreme combat overstretch in Iraq, he was
diagnosed with severe post-traumatic stress (PTSD), and the Veterans
Administration medical system leans toward drugs. In fact, they frequently
shazam PTSD into something called "personality disorder," which can be treated
with drugs. One veteran I know was prescribed Paxil, which made him feel
suicidal, and when the VA insisted that it worked, this kid switched to his
own anti-depressant -- marijuana, which he says works better than the Paxil
and doesn't make him feel like killing himself.

If one has a personality disorder, you see, then the "pathology" has no
relation to one's job, like participating in the occupation of Iraq. The
etiology exists somewhere within the individual, like a genetic disorder . . .
that was missed during induction, missed by one's units, and missed during
medical pre-screening for deployment into Mesopotamia. We don't know if Doug
was taking medication, or had stopped taking medication, or even what
medication he had been prescribed. We do know that he was a truck driver, and
that his job in Iraq was driving supply convoys along the shooting gallery
between Baghdad Airport and LSA Anaconda in Balad -- a giant military base, a
veritable city -- that is subject to so many mortar and rocket attacks that
the troops have renamed it Mortaritaville.

We do know, from Doug's interviews, that the stress of those convoys -- each
confronting its participants with the possibility that this could be one's
last road trip -- were hard on Doug. In July 2003, his convoy was hit with an
improvised explosive device, and the mortar attacks at Anaconda were so
regular that they were almost a weather pattern. But Doug said there was
something else that was even harder on him.

When the grunts came in, they would describe how many civilians they'd killed.
When Doug was in a traffic jam one day, feeling very vulnerable, and the U.S.
units dismounted to clear the traffic jam -- angry and afraid and waving
weapons at the civilians -- a woman in a bus held up her baby for them to see
. . . like that window-sign we see in cars on American highways, "Baby on
Board." Only she wasn't cautioning other drivers to be careful. She was
trying to prevent an armed attack that could kill her child. Doug may have
decomped from medication, I don't know. That could have contributed to his
suicide. It's possible.

He fought with the defunded, Bush-administration VA for two years, trying to
get counseling, and trying to get authorization for his disability. It's very
difficult to be a "productive member of society" when one fears sleep, and
when one has lost meaning. I read a book on post-traumatic stress once.=A0 Rape
is the most common cause, then combat. It said that trauma disrupts one's
sense that the word is a safe place, that trauma destabilizes our sense of
meaning. Let me explain something, as a veteran myself of eight conflict
areas, and something that Doug discovered in Balad. The sense that the world
is not a safe place is not a "disorder." It is an accurate perception.=A0 And
the sense of meaning many of us enjoy is an illusion, a cruel construction
that normalizes the orderly activity of the suburb and nurses our children on
simple-minded, Disney-fied optimism pumped through television sets in a
relentless data stream.

Post-traumatic stress is not a disorder. Calling it that earns it a place in
the DSM IV, professionalizes and medicalizes this very accurate perception
that the world is not safe, and that life is not a comforting film convention.
Calling it an individual "disorder" cloaks the social systems responsible for
experiences like Vietnam and Iraq. And it renders invisible the fact that
Douglas Barber was not merely a suicide. Douglas Barber was nurtured on the
illusions that secure our obedience, but when the real system needed to
demonstrate to the rest of the world just how unsafe our nation could make
them as the price of disobedience, the vile carnival barkers of the Bush
administration, like administrations before them, did not recruit the children
of Martha's Vineyard or Georgetown.

They went, as they have always done, to places like Lee County, Alabama, where
simple people have formed powerful affective attachments to the myth of our
national moral superiority. When that world view, that architecture of
meaning, collapses in the face of realities like convoy Russian roulette, and
women holding babies up to prevent being shot, and daily stories of slaughter
by the people one sleeps with, the profound betrayal of it is not experienced
as some quiet, somber sadness. It is experienced like bees swarming out of a
hive that has been broken, as a howling chaos. So we quiet it with marijuana,
alcohol, heroin, and even shotguns.

The most fortunate of these survivors find one another. Doug had recently
joined IVAW, where our veterans not only establish mutual support networks of
plain love and care with one another, but where they can engage in the most
"therapeutic" activity of all -- fighting back against the criminality that
sent them there in the first place.

We arrived too late for Doug. We were going to met him in Birmingham later
this month to involve him in the planning for a trip from Mobile, Alabama, to
New Orleans, and serve as the conscience of a nation that will spend trillions
to drop bombs on Iraqis, and use a hurricane in the Black Belt as a pretext to
accelerate gentrification. So when we launch out of Mobile in March on this
135-mile trek, we will carry Douglas Barber with us.

We sit and laugh in the 136 degree Iraq sun
We talk about fast food....beer.... and women
A life we miss from back in the states
With some sense of security we unwind....after all we are in a secure perimeter

I light up a black and mild cigar.....as my buddy Cambel says "give me a drag Pippin"

Pulled back to reality.....we hear gunfire close by
Standing up to get a better look......____!!!...we dont have our gear on
GET YOUR _____ING KEVLARS ON.....our NCO yells!!!

Running to get suted up...........An explosion....as the shockwave sucks the air away
Tripping because I turned around.............. black smoke begins to rise
A volley of bullets..........non stop hit the buildings all around us

Just clearing the door of the bombed out building we were staying in.......A huge explosion knocks what is left of the broken glass out of the frames in the windows, as dust falls from the cracks in the celing

Over the radio......our wepons cashe is on fire.....all we had seized from weapons raids
about 6 tons....50 cal bullets, land mines, mortar rounds, rpgs, it was all going up
Like an earthquake the ground never stopped rumbling
Hot schrapnel.....falls all around us as it catches things on fire

EVACUATE THE BSA!!!.....repeated over the radio.....Weapons, ammo, and flack vests only
So much smoke.......we can hardly see....I dont want to leave behind my letters from home,
I get as many people in my humvee as I can.....I drive through the smoke that I cannot see in

In the middle of Mosul....we sit.....weapons at the ready....as we hear over the radio...calls for med evac

On soldier lost his leg that day......he didn't get out fast enough, and a chunk of shrapnel nearly severed his leg

Here is the link to my PTSD blog on windows live spaces
http://mrsandman782000.spaces.live.com
You will prob have to copy and paste it

Moonlight on canvas


I remember many nights during my deployment to Iraq when the moon was so full and so bright it seemed to sag in the night sky. I would write home to loved ones, and my now wife because it would light up the note book paper. The moon would light up everything. The canvas of the tents, the sand looked white at night even though it wasn't. It was like a whole diffrent world from the day when it was loud hot and unforgiving.


The night... stirred only by my breath... silent
Moonlight washes over eveything......a time to reflect

Holding on to memories of a world far away....but the horrors of my day I try to forget
I send home in letters........ my love to all who will listen

I cannot write how I feel inside.....a shell..... of who I used to be
A monster for all to hate

Knowing my fate.... a Humvee driver......I sit and wait
For the call that will come soon.....I will have to go

Will this be it for me....the one they will talk about....but no longer see
I light a cigarette to calm my nerves......pull myself together

Lights fill the sky..... explosions suck the air away
Yelling and screaming...... more lives.................. gone