LOCAL VETERANS WRESTLE WITH THE AFTERMATH OF WAR

COVER STORY
Iraq War veteran Kevin
Plemmons regularly visits the
local VA for counseling. Like
many veterans, it took him
years to get help.
LOCAL
VETERANS
WRESTLE
WITH THE
AFTERMATH
OF WAR
STORY BY
CAITLIN BYRD
PHOTOS BY
MAX COOPER
10
AUGUST 21 - AUGUST 27, 2013
“When the happy gods bring on the hard times, bear them he
must, against his will, and steel his heart. Our lives, our mood
and mind as we pass across the earth, turn as the days turn.”
— HOMER, THE ODYSSEY
THE FRAMED PHOTOS stand at attention on a shelf in the
living room. A drill sergeant in his broad-brimmed hat, and
Marines and soldiers in their dress uniforms, stare straight
ahead with fixed, unflinching gazes. Their eyes reveal no more
about the unintended consequences of war and military life
than what a collection of painted toy soldiers can teach a child
about combat and casualties.
So when young Kevin Plemmons looked up at the gallery
of his family's military men, all he saw were heroes in big hats.
Kevin’s Uncle Robert served in the Army for 20 years; cousins Craig and Chris proudly called themselves Marines. Two
other cousins, Greg and Heath, enlisted in the Army.
To the young man growing up in Waynesville, N.C., these
relatives represented an elite association of men who stood for
valor, selfless service and an undying allegiance to God and
country.
“I want to do that,” Plemmons remembers thinking. “They
always talked about how good it was to serve.”
But they never mentioned things like night terrors or
chronic pain. Guilt, depression, isolation and fear. And they
absolutely never spoke about mental health.
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On the plane back to the States, Ron Lapointe took a few
sips of the booze being passed from soldier to soldier. Some
men sat quietly, declining to take a swig. Others guzzled gladly
at the end of their stint in Vietnam.
Lapointe had landed in the country’s central highlands a
little more than a year before. On the first day of his deployment in August 1967, the former UCLA international relations
student found himself wrapped in a poncho, knee-deep in
mud, awaiting orders.
“Do you need any 11 Charlies?” (military speak for an
infantry mortarman, Lapointe's occupational specialty), one
unknown man barked to another. “Do you need any 11
Charlies out there?” he repeated.
But at that moment, louder than even the yelling man and
biting rain, Lapointe's intuition told him, “You're going to be
OK.” Somehow, he remembers, he knew he would survive.
And now here he was, heading home.
David Paul O'Brien had famously burned his draft card
on the steps of the South Boston Courthouse a year before
Lapointe landed in the Vietnamese
jungle. But by the time Lapointe’s
boots once again touched American
soil two years later, the anti-war movement had grown. When he got off the
plane, protesters were waving signs
with the words “baby killer” smeared
across them.
“In World War II, you got a parade
and community support,” says
Lapointe. “But for Vietnam vets, you
got community rejection.”
His family, however, embraced him.
And after throwing himself into completing his undergraduate studies and
attempting to return to his former life,
Lapointe flew from Los Angeles to New
York to visit his sister, who’d recently
moved there.
As he ran through Times Square
to catch the next train leaving Grand
Central Station for Long Island, a
bus backfired. Instinctively, Lapointe
dropped, his knees hitting the pavement
as his arms came up to cover his head.
“That's when I realized there were
issues,” he says with a sigh.
Because on that plane ride back to
America, he remembers, “The guys
who had not been in combat were getting stupid drunk � drinking and hollering and having a good old time. The
guys who had been in combat were
very quiet.”
Forty-four years later, Lapointe
would finally be ready to break his
silence.
Despite having no military base
nearby, nearly 20,000 veterans call
Buncombe County home — giving it�
the sixth-largest veteran population
among the state’s 100 counties. In the
five years that psychologist elizabeth
huddleston has worked at Asheville's
Charles George VA Medical Center,
the number of local veterans accessing
mental health services has continued
to rise, and she doesn’t expect that to
change any time soon.
She reads aloud from a document on
her desk: “From Oct. 1, 2006, to Oct. 1,
2011, the number of veterans accessing mental health service at Charles
George VA Medical Center increased
by more than 50 percent.” During
that same period, the total number
of people receiving specialized mental
health care from the U.S. Department
of Veterans Affairs increased annually,
from 927,052 to more than 1.3 million in
the last fiscal year.
And for this year, she continues, the
local office is “already on track to show
an increase in veterans seen for mental
health services.”
But another trend, notes Huddleston,
also persists among the veteran population.
“Part of what we deal with everywhere
is the stigma of mental health. But maybe,
with this population, it's a little strongerinstilled: It's seen as a weakness,” she
explains, noting that mental-health-related issues the local office frequently sees
include post-traumatic stress disorder,
depression, substance abuse, homelessness
and unemployment.
Certain triggers can instantly make
Plemmons find himself back in Iraq — or
find parts of Iraq back in him.
He doesn't like to go to the mall. “No way.
Too many people.”
He always takes the seat closest to the
wall. “If your back's against the wall, nobody
can be behind you.”
And he always thinks up an escape plan.
“If something does happen, I'm going to go
out that window.”
During his year as a military police
officer at Camp Bucca, once the largest
detainment center in Iraq, Plemmons
adapted to his new environment. Now,
however, the 27-year-old says he's still
in the process of adapting to post-Army
life. “It's a culture shock when you get
over there; then it's a culture shock
when you come back.”
He continues, “I've been shot at. I've
been attacked. I've lost a friend. I've
been bombed. You lose all emotion
over there � except for a couple that will
save your life.”
An outgoing manner wouldn’t have
helped Plemmons when a roadside
bomb blew up the bus that he and
more than 40 detainees were riding
in as it pushed toward northern Iraq.
And by the time he returned home in
the fall of 2005, Plemmons had become
more distant, less talkative. Insomnia
kept him awake nearly every night,
and when it didn't, his dreams made
him long for a pill that could shut them
down the way you turn off a TV.
Friends and family began to tell
Plemmons he'd changed. But what
hurt the most was when his best friend
“I’ve been shot at. I’ve been attacked. I’ve lost a
friend. I’ve been bombed. You lose all emotion over
there — except for a couple that will save your life.”
— iraQ War Veteran Kevin pleMMons
After returning home from Vietnam, Ron Lapointe begged his brother to send
him his drum kit. Those drums, Lapointe says, “really saved my sanity.”
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auGuSt 21 - auGuSt 27, 2013
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said Plemmons was no longer the
“smoker and joker” he used to know.
At that point, the young veteran began
to understand how much he’d been
weathered by war and morphed by
mortar fire.
“There's not one person in this
world that wants to believe that they've
changed. No matter how severe something could be, you don't want to think
of being the person who's changed, especially if it's in a bad way,” he maintains.
“I knew the dude was telling the truth. And then
he kills himself before the VA ever gets all the
paperwork together to process his claim.”
— Kevin Turner, BuncomBe county
Veterans assistance office
No one believed the 25-year-old soldier when she said her staff sergeant
had sexually harassed her. He denied
it, and when other soldiers accused her
of lying, she dropped the matter. So
when four of her fellow soldiers raped
her in the barracks, she said nothing.
“I felt like I couldn't go to anybody,”
the veteran says now, speaking on condition of anonymity. “There shouldn't
be, but there's a lot of shame.”
It would be more than 20 years
before the Army veteran could begin to
talk about what happened to her while
serving as an administrative clerk at
a base in Heidelberg, Germany, from
1980-83.
Being a victim of military sexual
trauma, she says, “affects every relationship that you have.” It’s been 12
years since she was last romantically
involved with anyone.
During the last fiscal year, she was one
of the 884 victims of military sexual trauma treated at the Asheville VA hospital.
Shortly after Lapointe moved back
to his family’s potato farm in Maine, his
mother brought him what she thought
was great news. “They're having a celebration for veterans,” she told him excitedly. “You should put on your uniform.”
Silence.
“Where's your uniform?”
“I can't tell you,” Lapointe answered.
She kept pushing him, and he kept
lamenting, “I can't tell you.”
“I'll press it for you,” she offered.
An anguished Lapointe struggled to
find a gentle way to tell his mother that
she couldn't press a uniform he no longer had.
“Well, where is it?”
Sometime before, Lapointe had
walked straight to the barn, taken off his
uniform, and burned it in the iron barrel
his father used to incinerate the trash.
“After the country's response and
the effects of war,” he says, taking two
deep breaths, “I felt ashamed.”
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auGuSt 21 - auGuSt 27, 2013
Kevin Turner, director of Buncombe County’s veterans assistance office, says the
complexity of the claims process can sometimes result in “unintended consequences.”
It took Plemmons three years to
begin seeking help — and nearly two
more before the Iraq War veteran actually got any. Still, he fared better than
most local veterans who submit disability claims, particularly if they’re mental-health-related, says Kevin turner,
who heads up Buncombe County’s
Veterans Assistance Office.
The county agency helps local veterans connect with the proper services
within the federal VA system. “The
claims process itself is very complicated. They don't mean for it to be, but
it is,” says Turner, a veteran who left
active duty in August 2011.
Papers practically spill out of the
thick, green folder Turner slaps on his
desk. Wanting to really understand the
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timeline for the claims his office sends
off to the VA for processing, Turner filed
one himself, intentionally omitting information that might cause it to get special
treatment (such as the fact that he's a
general officer and head of an office that
serves vets).
“We submitted my claim as if I was Joe
Blow,” he explains, opening the folder.
“I submitted that in July of last year, and
I have yet to be sent a request to have a
physical.”
After the first 125 days (the federal agency's stated goal for processing
claims), Turner's test case became part
of the VA system's massive backlog. As
of Aug. 3, nearly two-thirds of the claims
in the system — 500,062 out of 780,026 —
were backlogged, the Veterans Benefits
Administration reports.
Turner, however, worries more
about what he calls “the unintended
consequences.”
When Turner asked a veteran with
severe PTSD to describe the event
that had so terrified him, the soldier
struggled to articulate it. But Turner
knew from the man’s records that the
traumatic event was a prison break in
Afghanistan, which Turner knew about
from his own time on active duty.
“I knew the dude was telling the
truth,” he says. “We were going to
push this thing. And then the gentleman kills himself before the VA ever
gets all the paperwork together to process his claim.”
Pulling out his BlackBerry, Turner
reads part of the daily list of military suicides that commanding officers
receive. “Death of a soldier in Texas.
Potential suicide; number 153 for the
calendar year. On the same day, death
of a soldier in Qatar. Asphyxiation,” he
says, putting down his smartphone.
“That is the drumbeat that goes
on,” he continues, pounding his fist
on the table. “Not all of these people
had PTSD. Some of them were dealing with depression; Some of them
were dealing with just poor choices.
You can't put people in boxes, because
there's not boxes to describe it. It's
cross-symptomatic.”
Once her eyes adjusted to the light,
none of the surroundings looked familiar. She wasn't in the room she’d been
renting from friends — and why was
she lying in a hospital bed?
For eight days, the 56-year-old had
been in a coma, the nurse explained;
two doctors called her survival “a miracle.” But that alcoholic blackout successfully annihilated the memory the
Army veteran would need in order to
connect all the pieces: To this day, she
doesn't know how she tried to kill herself, or even why.
For her, it remains one of the lowest moments in a life she describes as
“tragic, yet blessed.”
“I guess I just hit rock bottom,” she
says.
Soon after her attempted suicide,
the veteran enrolled in a substanceabuse program and mental health services in Salisbury, N.C., where there’s
a VA facility. She was diagnosed
with bipolar disorder, anxiety disorder and PTSD (the latter stemming
from her military sexual trauma in
Germany). But when she returned to
Asheville, she was homeless. Having
nowhere else to go, she wound up at
Steadfast House, Asheville Buncombe
need help?
Community Christian Ministry's
facility for homeless women, children and families. The roughly
33-bed shelter reserves 10 beds specifically for female veterans.
Sadly, this veteran's story of PTSD
and military sexual trauma is not
uncommon among the clients who
seek shelter at Steadfast House,
Director Donna Wilson reveals.
“A lot of times, women experience
being raped or molested before they
go into the military. Sometimes they
go into the military to escape that
and then, unfortunately, something
happens in the military also,” she
explains. “Our society is just now
kind of accepting that that's happening, but our women still are very
private and scared to talk about it.”
Talking about Vietnam, Lapointe
maintains, isn’t going to help. “I
don't want to sit in a room of vets,
particularly combat vets, and share
war stories,” he says. “Why relive
something you don't want to relive?”
That makes sense to psychologist George Lindenfeld, a veteran
himself. Rather than relying on
strictly talk-based psychotherapy,
Lindenfeld combines biofeedback
Veterans, he emphasizes, need more
therapeutic options. Otherwise,“There
are too many guys that just aren't going
to get what they need.”
Weeks after returning from Iraq,
Plemmons and about 80 other soldiers
piled into a big classroom. Taking his
seat in the back row alongside other
guys his age, Plemmons watched an
officer wheel a projector into the room.
“These are the things you need
to look out for,” the officer told
the group, as the warning signs for
PTSD, traumatic brain injury and
suicide flashed on the screen. But
while other soldiers joked around
in between the slides, Plemmons
thought, “I feel like that.”
Following orders, Plemmons got in
a line that led to a row of tables where
psychologists were waiting, armed with
stacks of pamphlets. But when he got
toward the front of the line, he could
hear what the men already seated at
the tables were saying.
“They were all just telling the psychologists what they wanted to hear,”
he recalls.
So he stuck to the script with the
shortest run time: a repetition of noes.
At his 10-year high school reunion last
“A lot of times, women experience being raped or
molested before they go into the military. Sometimes
they go into the military to escape that and then,
unfortunately, something happens in the military also.”
— Donna Wilson, Steadfast House
principles with psychology to help
local veterans with PTSD heal.
“Forget the symptoms. Imagine
that a trauma resets a pathway in
your brain,” says Lindenfeld, who
assesses veterans’ disability ratings
for a company that contracts with the
VA. In other words, whenever something occurs that resembles the traumatic event, it will trigger an emotional reaction over which the person
has no control.
“It's analogous to a light switch,”
Lindenfeld explains.
Instead, he targets the uncomfortable memory in the client’s mind, using
sound to disrupt that toxic response
pattern. The beauty of the treatment,
says Lindenfeld, is that it “allows you
to focus internally. You don't talk to the
therapist about what you're doing.”
month, however, the 27-year-old veteran
learned that his best friend's brother had
recently joined the Air Force and is currently deployed overseas.
And though Plemmons had no pamphlet, no panel of psychologists or
PowerPoint presentation, suddenly, he
opened up.
“When you start seeing him not wanting to talk to you, start getting aggravated over small things, start talking
about things that you don't think would
be right, you need to tell him to get help
now,” Plemmons told his friend.
Stopping his story abruptly,
Plemmons says: “These people aren't
crazy. They're just unheard.”
Caitlin Byrd can be reached at
cbyrd@mountainx.com or 251-1333,
ext. 140.X
Resources for local veterans
Local
ABCCM Veteran’s
Restoration Quarters and
Transitional Housing provides homeless veterans with a
chance to get back on their feet.
Veterans have access to housing,
meals, case management services,
counseling, laundry facilities, a
computer lab, gym, chapel and
transportation to VA Medical
Center appointments.
Cost: Free
Contact: 299-8701, abccm.org/
ministries/veterans
Charles George VA Medical
Center offers 14 different services to veterans, including extended
care rehabilitation and spinal cord
injury care.
Cost: Services included with veteran benefits
Contact: 298-7911, asheville.
va.gov/services/index.asp
FIRST at blue ridge offers
employment assistance and a
12-step plan.
Cost: Call for more info
Contact: 669-0011, firstinc.org/
vetsfirst.html
Happy Body offers free, beginner-level yoga classes for veterans,
current service members and
their families. Classes take place at
Happy Body (1378 Hendersonville
Road) Thursdays from 4-5 p.m.
Cost: Free
Contact: 277-5741
ashevillehappybody.com/gives/
connected-warriors
Helios Warriors is an
Asheville-based volunteer program providing holistic therapy to
veterans, including acupuncture
and emotion-code therapy. They
specialize in post-traumatic stress
disorder, traumatic brain injury
and military sexual trauma.
Cost: Based on income, ranging
from $10-$40
Contact: 299-0776
helioswarriors.org
Western North Carolina
Women Warriors is an advocacy
group composed of female veterans
and local volunteers. Its focus is on
helping female warriors who are
homeless or are at risk of becoming
homeless.
Cost: Free
Contact: wncwomenwarriors.
wordpress.com
State
Citizen Soldier Support
Program works to strengthen community support and increase access
to post-deployment services for those
in rural areas.
Contact: 919-962-4157
citizensoldiersupport.org
North Carolina Focus provides screening, assessment and
treatment for veterans and military
families. They also have resources for
helplines, health care, education
and employment.
Contact: veteransfocus.org
National
Safe Helpline is a Department of
Defense program providing anonymous, worldwide support for victims
of sexual assault. Currently, they have
an online and phone helpline.
Cost: Free
Contact: 877-995-5247
safehelpline.org
Veterans Crisis Line offers confidential support services to vets and
their families. Individuals can call,
text or chat online.
Cost: Free
Contact: 1-800-273-8255 (dial 1) or
text 838255, veteranscrisisline.net
Military Pathways offers free
and anonymous mental health selfassessments. These assessments will
screen for disorders such as posttraumatic stress disorder and depression. The results act as an indicator
— not a diagnosis — and will provide
resources to seek assistance.
Cost: Free
Contact: militarymentalhealth.org
Compiled by Brandy Carl
mountainx.com
AUGUST 21 - AUGUST 27, 2013
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