COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Military Service: Casualties
Told to Wait, a Marine Dies
Charles M. Sennott, Boston Globe
February 11, 2007
VA care in spotlight after Iraq war veteran's suicide.Stewart, Minnesota - It took two years of hell to convince him, but
finally Jonathan Schulze was ready.
On the morning of Jan. 11, Jonathan, an Iraq war veteran with two
Purple Hearts, neatly packed his US Marine Corps duffel bag with his
sharply creased clothes, a framed photo of his new baby girl, and a
leather-bound Bible and headed out from the family farm for a 75-mile drive
to the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in St. Cloud, Minn.
Family and friends had convinced him at last that the devastating
mental wounds he brought home from war, wounds that triggered severe
depression, violent outbursts, and eventually an uncontrollable desire to
kill himself, could not be drowned in alcohol or treated with the array of
antianxiety drugs he'd been prescribed.
And so, with his father and stepmother at his side, he confessed to an
intake counselor that he was suicidal. He wanted to be admitted to a
psychiatric ward.
But, instead, he was told that the clinician who prescreened cases
like his was unavailable. Go home and wait for a phone call tomorrow, the
counselor said, as Marianne Schulze, his stepmother, describes it.
When a clinical social worker called the next day, Jonathan, 25, told
again of his suicidal thoughts and other symptoms. And then, with his
stepmother listening in, he learned that he was 26th on the waiting list
for one of the 12 beds in the center's ward for post-traumatic stress
disorder sufferers.
Four days later, on Jan. 16, he wrapped a household extension cord
around his neck, tied it to a beam in the basement, and hanged himself.
In life, Jonathan Schulze didn't get nearly what he needed. But in
death, this tough and troubled Marine may help get something critical done.
The apparent failure of the Department of Veterans Affairs to offer
him timely and necessary care has electrified the debate on the blogs and
websites that connect an increasingly networked and angry veterans
community. It has triggered an internal investigation by the VA into how a
serviceman with such obvious symptoms faced a wait for hospital care.
And it is being cited by veterans' advocates and their allies in
Congress as a searing symbol of a system that they say is vastly unprepared
and under funded to handle the onslaught of 1.5 million veterans of the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who are returning home, an estimated one in
five of them with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. One in three
Iraq war veterans is seeking mental health services, according to a report
by an Army panel of experts last year.
The death of Jonathan also raises questions, among veterans and in
Washington, about how far the military culture still has to go in dealing
with the stigma often attached to cases of mental illness. Marines,
especially, just aren't supposed to cry out for help.
"My feeling is no veteran should be turned away, and definitely not a
veteran who is openly saying he needs help and that he feels like taking
his life," said Jonathan 's father, James, who is a Vietnam War veteran and
comes from a family with a long tradition of military service.
"My son did his duty, he risked his life for his country, and he came
home a broken person. And then the VA failed in its duty to care for him,"
he said, sitting in the family home in front of a coffee table transformed
into a shrine for his son, with framed photos and, folded in a neat
triangle, the flag that draped his coffin.
Across the country, there are stories of veterans suffering with
combat stress and PTSD, who are struggling to find help at VA facilities to
deal with the problems they face, according to Steve Robinson, director of
veterans affairs for the Washington-based Veterans for America, an advocacy
group.
"Sadly, there are a lot of Jonathan Schulzes out there," said
Robinson, a veteran of the Gulf War who investigates cases all over the
country of service members suffering from mental illness and other injuries
who are struggling to get the care they deserve.
A Plea for Help
Jonathan's case has prompted the US Department of Veterans Affairs,
with 235,000 employees at a network of medical centers for servicemen and
women, to launch an ongoing internal investigation into the details
surrounding Jonathan's death, according to Phil Budahn, a VA spokesman in
Washington.
But beyond that, Budahn could say little. All patient files are
confidential, he said, declining comment on any of the specifics of
Jonathan's case.
But VA officials have released 400 pages of documents on the case to
the Schulze family. One document from that file showed that the VA clinical
social worker, Daniel Ludderman, with whom Jonathan spoke by phone on Jan.
12 did not indicate in his notes that Jonathan had expressed suicidal thoughts.
A VA spokesman told local news organizations that there were emergency
beds available in a psychiatric hold unit throughout January. But the VA
has not responded to questions about why, if that was the case, Jonathan
was not placed in one. Another looming question in the VA investigation is
why there are only 12 beds for in-patient PTSD treatment in Minnesota. That
number has remained unchanged for a decade, former state VA officials say,
even as the nation has engaged in two wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq, in the
past five years.
James and Marianne insist they both heard Jonathan clearly state that
he was suicidal on Jan. 11. Marianne says she heard it again when Jonathan
was speaking with the VA's Ludderman on the phone the next day.
James believes the VA response thus far indicates that officials are
worried more about protecting the VA's image than in meeting the
overwhelming need for more and better PTSD counseling for veterans
returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.
"I heard what Jon said. They can doctor the records all they want; it
is not going to change what I heard," he said.
Major Cynthia Rasmussen, who worked for 18 years as a psychiatric
nurse at the VA and who now runs the Army Reserve Combat Operational Stress
Control Program at Minnesota's Fort Snelling, said, "Jonathan's case is
classic and classically tragic."
Rasmussen said that there are many excellent programs and treatment
centers within the VA, but that effective delivery of service is spotty and
inconsistent and that problems of poor communication between the military
and the VA are thwarting attempts by service providers to treat those
veterans who need help.
"That is what happened to Jonathan, and there are just hundreds of
cases like this across the country. We are seeing them every day," she added.
Descent into Mental Illness
Behind the stark details of the case is a more complex and nuanced
picture of Jonathan's descent into mental illness.
He arrived home last fall after a hellish tour of duty with Second
Battalion, Fourth Marines in the Ramadi/Fallujah area of Iraq, where
fighting was particularly intense in the spring of 2004. In letters home,
Jonathan had described the combat deaths of 16 men he called friends. He
himself was wounded by shrapnel twice.
In his neat grammar-school cursive, Jonathan described the death and
danger that confronted his unit daily. He made it very clear: He was terrified.
"My heart is filled with sadness. And I ask God why," he wrote on May
13, 2004, the day after two close friends were killed. "I pray so much and
ask God to keep me out of harm's way and get me back in one piece."
One of his fellow Marines in the Fallujah area was 25-year-old Eric
Satersmoen, who knew Jonathan from local bars in the Minneapolis area where
Jonathan had worked as a bouncer. They traded news about mutual friends and
the Vikings and the Minnesota Wild hockey team, and they vowed to stay in
touch when they got back home.
When they did return, in the winter of 2005, they found they shared
some other things: persistent nightmares, sleeplessness, anxiety, anger,
and a tendency to use alcohol to numb themselves to all that.
But their experiences diverged in a critical way that underscores how
the VA system sometimes succeeds and why it so often falls devastatingly
short - right from the moment demobilized troops get ready to go home.
Returning Marines and soldiers are routinely asked to fill out a form
in which they are told to self-evaluate their own mental health on a
questionnaire about nightmares, anxiety, aggression, and suicidal thoughts.
The military says the forms are a way to highlight problems early. But
veterans advocates say that all too often servicemen, eager to reunite with
family and friends, give the forms short shrift. They simply check "no" to
every question because they do not want to be delayed at the base with
mental health appointments.
That's what Jonathan told friends and family he did. And that's also
what his close friend Eric had done after his first tour, but was
determined not to repeat this second time around.
This time he knew he had a problem. He checked "yes" to the boxes that
asked about nightmares, anxiety, and violent outbursts. He was given a
schedule of appointments and began to enter a long process of counseling
that has allowed him to slowly heal and eventually to have in-patient
treatment at the Minneapolis VA where he was given a bed in the PTSD ward.
Jonathan, meanwhile, returned home for 30 days' leave. His family
immediately saw that he was depressed and anxious. They heard him thrashing
and yelling in his sleep. He was not the big, fun-loving young man he was
before he went off to war, they said.
The family doctor, William Phillips, saw him and wrote a report that
Jonathan appeared to be suffering classic symptoms of PTS D. He prescribed
Valium and encouraged Jonathan to seek help when he returned to Camp Pendleton.
"I told him that when I came home from Vietnam, I just closed up and
hardened my shell. It hurt me in life. I was a pole cat to live with, and I
wanted to be sure he didn't make the same mistake," said his father.
After his 30 days' home leave, Jonathan returned to Pendleton for 90
days before his final discharge notice would be given. That was when he
really went off the rails. He was drinking heavily and getting in violent
confrontations at local bars off the base and even with his own Marines. He
had nightmares of firefights in which comrades died and civilians were
caught in the crossfire. He refused to admit he suffered mental problems
"Marines don't do weakness," said his older brother Travis, 27, a
Marine who also joined up straight out of high school. Travis served in
Afghanistan in the fall of 2001 during the US-led military response to the
attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. "That's the attitude, and Jon was caught up in
that world," said Travis.
Jonathan was completely out of control. In the fall of 2004, he
brutally beat a fellow Marine. He also threw a 200-pound potted tree
through a plate glass window during a bar fight. He ended up spending one
month in the brig. Military Police searched his locker and found steroids -
he was an obsessive body builder. He was busted in rank from lance corporal
to private and given a "general" rather than an "honorable" discharge.
Drinking and Self-Loathing
These kinds of discharges are on the rise among returning veterans,
particularly among those suffering from mental trauma who veer into
violence and substance abuse, according to Lieutenant Colonel Colby Vokey,
who supervises the legal defense of Marines at Camp Pendleton.
For Jonathan, the "general" discharge status meant that he was
ineligible for GI Bill benefits, including assistance for college tuition,
and it was technically up to the discretion of the VA whether he would
receive medical treatment.
The VA did accept Jonathan for treatment of his shrapnel wounds and
back pain. Eric, his Marine buddy, tried to help him get assistance for his
mental health issues as well. They sometimes waited the entire day for
appointments and group counseling.
Through it all, Jonathan never stopped drinking. Friends and family
say that every night he drank his trusted Wild Turkey by the shot glass and
one beer after another to chase it down. When he was tired, he drank
"Jager-bombs, " a mix of the potent German liqueur Jagermeister mixed with
the energy drink Red Bull.
His friend Eric drank with him. It was not easy for either one of them
when they talked about the war. Eric lost control sometimes, but nothing
compared with the bouts of anger and depression and violence that he
watched Jonathan go through. "Crazy Jonny," as he called him, was on a
different path.
Jonathan was wracked with feelings of self-loathing about his demotion
in rank, his tainted discharge, and what he felt was a failure on his part
to save his friends, several of whom were killed right by his side in Iraq.
The obsession with lifting and steroids, Eric believes, were an expression
of low self-esteem.
"He just never could be big enough and bad enough ... It was like he
was going to drink and lift his way through the mess," Eric said.
Then at 8:35 p.m. on Jan. 16, Eric, who was in Florida on business,
received a phone call from Jonathan, who was staying in an apartment in New
Prague, Minn., that Eric owned and where he gave Jonathan a room.
Jonathan told Eric he was in the basement standing on a stool and
tying a noose around his neck with an extension cord. A bottle of Captain
Morgan rum, three-quarters' full, was at his side, and he was slurring.
"I tried to stall him by being nice, and then I tried getting mad at
him, telling him he was taking the easy way out. I told him, 'What about
your faith?' I was doing everything I could," said Eric.
"He said: 'The hell with it all, the Marines, the VA, the hell with
religion. The hell with it all. I am doing it,'" said Eric.
Then, Eric said, he heard the phone fall to the floor.
A Family Mourns
Last week, it was 10 below zero with the windchill factor in the
farming town of Stewart. Before his shift at a nearby dairy plant,
Jonathan's father crunched through dry, drifting snow toward the St. Paul's
Lutheran Church cemetery to visit his son's grave.
Dead flowers from the funeral and a small American flag that marked
the grave were disappearing beneath the drifting snow.
"This never should have happened," said James, tears welling behind a
pair of sunglasses.
"This country should have taken better care of one of its sons. They
owed that to Jon."
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