VetWOW News and Event Notices

Harvey was a sergeant in the Oregon National Guard with about 16 years of military experience (the first eight were with the Marines), serving double duty as fuel specialist and military police officer.

Nothing, he emphasized, could have prepared him for the intense experiences of combat. Having nearly died multiple times, the final straw that sent him out came when a rocket-propelled grenade destroyed the front end of his convoy truck.

After undergoing surgery in Germany, Harvey returned stateside to Fort Lewis, Wash., where for months he waited to be demobilized.

“It’s like you’re on the bullet train doing several hundred miles an hour, and then all of a sudden you’re thrown off that train, and you come to a dead stop,” Harvey said, sitting next to his wife Laurie in their Milton-Freewater home.

There was no fanfare to mark Harvey’s return, no celebration to honor the sacrifices he had made. And while safely removed from the combat zone, Harvey immediately joined the thousands of other veterans in the cliched, but often overlooked, “war at home.”

Unfortunately, according to Harvey, doctors still do not know exactly what is wrong with him. Harvey clearly sustained physical injuries to his neck and shoulders and now suffers chronic pain. He also lost 30 percent lung capacity.

But there also are the insidious symptoms - commonly associated with post-traumatic stress disorder - sudden flashbacks set off by something as startling as a car backfiring

or as mundane as an unfamiliar door opening.

Perhaps most troubling are the mental and motor-skills deficiencies that only began cropping up about six months ago. Harvey has more trouble communicating than when he came home, and sometimes stutters. He has trouble keeping balance and often walks with a cane.

On Nov. 1, after months of waiting, a psychiatrist determined Harvey suffers from traumatic brain injury. He will undergo more extensive testing Nov. 28.

“We have some good doctors behind us now,” said Laurie, who has done most of her husband’s communicating with the Department of Veterans Affairs. “We’re seeing more progress than we have in quite some time.”

That’s probably because the VA is beginning to take TBI extremely seriously. As of now, all returning combat veterans are being pre-screened for TBI, PTSD and military sexual trauma, according to Kerry Childress, public affairs representative at the Palo Alto Polytrauma Rehabilitation Center in California.

CUTTING EDGE

The Palo Alto center is now the cutting-edge location for TBI treatment. While the center commonly deals with soldiers who physically have lost limbs or parts of their brain, doctors are only beginning to understand the effects of “closed head” injuries.

Sometimes exposure to three or four improvised explosive devices or RPG explosions can trigger internal damage. IEDs are the primary weapon of destruction in Iraq.

“Three or four (encounters) is not that unusual,” Childress said. “This is the area where it gets a little bit tricky in evaluating.”

“If you can get knocked down and get back up - and just kind of stagger a moment or two and start tracking again - they don’t see an injury,” Harvey said. “It’s an injury from the concussion of an explosion, or being slammed against something.”

While treatment for lost limbs is better-than-ever with the capabilities of modern prosthetics, as Childress said, “There is no prosthetic for the brain. And it can be a very long and very arduous rehabilitation.”

The trick, she said, is to identify the particular defects. For people suffering memory loss, a personal digital assistant (PDA) is like a prosthetic.

While Harvey and his wife may hope for the best outcome, the official TBI designation has been a long time coming.

GETTING BY

Unfortunately, there is much more to Harvey’s personal story than can easily be written, much less understood.

Harvey has a list of 29 different medications he is supposed to take each day. But to take them all, he said, would result in him lying sedated in bed for most of the day.

Because of his medical discharge, Harvey said the Army bought the remainder of his contract as a severance package, which he is now paying back out of his VA disability pay. Although rated at 40 percent disability, Harvey said he is receiving $225 a month, the equivalent of a 20 percent disability rating.

VA representatives could not verify those numbers, but according to Childress, the severance package repayment is something many veterans do not initially understand.

If the new diagnoses determine Harvey to be unemployable, he may be able to file new claims for 100 percent disability. Even if that happens, the Harveys have no idea how long it will take.

To support himself, Harvey is self-employed as a window washer and carpet cleaner. That is in spite of an orthopedic specialist telling him the work is aggravating his shoulder injuries.

In so many ways, the burden falls on Laurie. Not only must she communicate with her husband’s clients, she also must pick up the slack in some of the work he physically cannot finish, adding loads to her own full-time career.

LIFE-SUSTAINING LOVE

Rick and Laurie, both in their second marriage, did not meet until he came back from Iraq. They met through correspondence with Laurie’s daughter. In all likelihood, the encounter may have saved his life, as Harvey admitted to having contemplated suicide.

When they got around to their first date (Harvey was on leave from Fort Lewis), it turned out to be an unanticipated nine-and-a-half hour adventure, driving up into a blizzard in the Blue Mountains and down to a beautiful, clear hike along the Walla Walla River.

During that hike, Laurie witnessed first-hand one of Harvey’s flashbacks, triggered when a bird flew up behind him.

“I just quietly said, ‘You’re here with me. Come back.’ And I touched his arm,” Laurie said. “And he came right back and he looked at me and asked, ‘How did you do that? It takes the doctors 15 to 20 minutes to pull him me of one, and they’d better be careful cause I come out swinging.’ ”

“She gained my trust, and instead of shying away … she just jumped in with both feet,” Harvey said.

A DIFFERENT LIFESTYLE

Harvey can no longer enjoy the same hobbies and activities he once did. Once an avid outdoorsman, his worsening physical condition makes hiking much more strenuous, and his unpredictable PTSD symptoms prevent him from hunting.

He avoids the city’s rowdy celebrations during Independence Day and New Years. Whereas he used to be in charge of the National Guard’s rock-wall exhibit at the Pendleton Round-Up, promoting the military and helping families have a fun time, he all but avoids high-volume traffic.

But to fill some of the void, Harvey has turned to a new hobby of scroll-saw art, which he makes from his shop. He has even started selling some of his wood pieces at craft shows. For him, the work is a kind of therapy.

“I’m safe because I’ve got the doors locked,” Harvey said. “I can lose myself and put all of the garbage from the war behind me.”

COMPLICATED FEELINGS

For veterans like Harvey, the struggles at home cannot easily be summed up. Sometimes, the bureaucratic process for receiving treatment is painful enough. Laurie described a common problem of having specific medical appointments being canceled multiple times and being forced to do follow-up work.

But for Harvey, the pain also comes in the sometimes insensitive treatment from the military he faithfully served. While stationed at Fort Lewis, Harvey said he fell into conflict with a higher-ranking lieutenant colonel who was ordering him to clean up trash. Harvey tried to tell the man why he couldn’t comply.

“In Iraq, you don’t pick up anything that you did not physically drop,” Harvey said. “I have physically seen someone kick something that was put on the ground and had been booby-trapped. The individual now has to live his life in a wheelchair.”

Now, Harvey said, he goes out of his way to personally thank a recognizable veteran.

The remaining members of Harvey’s unit eventually came back home, and he was able to briefly reunite with them. They have since redeployed.

“When I showed up there, it wasn’t just shake my hand,” he recalled. “They all came up, individually gave me a hug, thanked me for getting the job done.”

In Iraq, Harvey was referred to as the modern Radar from the TV series M*A*S*H. He used his know-how to deliver creature comforts to his comrades, trading excess supplies for things like ice, Gatorade and fresh fruit.

He helped construct a makeshift swimming pool for his men out of an unused bladder bag, complete with sand filter. Those amenities stopped when Harvey left, without word to the troops of his condition.

When Army Spc. Ashley Miller found out that the man who allegedly raped her would not be prosecuted in a military court, she said she couldn’t help but relive the May night when, after some drinks at the RAF Menwith Hill club, she was attacked in her on-base dorm.

“I felt like I was being raped all over again,” the 24-year old recently wrote in an e-mail to Stars and Stripes.

A staff judge advocate officer at Menwith Hill, an intelligence-gathering airbase in Yorkshire, England, said Miller’s rape accusation was investigated and later dismissed due to insufficient evidence.

The exact circumstances of the case remain unclear, as authorities would not discuss investigation specifics.

“The case was closed Aug. 24 after the extensive investigation did not turn up enough evidence to prosecute a case,” Capt. Ryan Oakley, 421st Air Base Group’s deputy staff judge advocate, wrote in an e-mail to Stars and Stripes. “We take every case seriously, thoroughly investigating all angles of a case.”

Miller said she was so distressed about her alleged rape on May 17 that she couldn’t even acknowledge it to herself. She now regrets waiting two days to report the attack to a military doctor.

“I felt ashamed,” she said about the incident.

Now, she wants to tell her story publicly in hopes of convincing other women to learn from her mistake and report sexual assaults promptly.

“I’m turning my bad experience into something that will help other women,” she said over the phone in early October. “I want women to come forward and not to be afraid. The more you wait, the more you blame yourself.”

A night to forget

Miller recalls that night in May in fine detail, which she described in a long e-mail.

She remembers drinking screwdrivers at the base club, and leaving one of the drinks out of her sight for a moment as she hugged some friends. Into her second screwdriver, she began to feel “funny,” she said.

“The room was kind of getting fuzzy and my legs felt like they were made of Jell-O. I decided it was probably best to go home and lay down,” she said.

Her memory goes hazy after that. She remembers putting on her pajamas before heading to bed and going to sleep. She awoke find to an airman she knew on top of her, holding her down, she said.

“I remember trying to scream or at least fight back, but I couldn’t move,” she said, adding that she felt pain in her left hand, legs and genitals. “I couldn’t do anything.”

She said she thought that she must have passed out, because the next memory she had was being in the shower, scrubbing herself vigorously.

“I broke down and curled up in a ball in the shower,” she said. “I was sobbing so hard and my body felt so ill that I vomited in the shower.”

Two days later, she made a medical appointment and told her story to a doctor who conducted a rape kit. The Air Force Office of Special Investigations was then called in to collect Miller’s unwashed clothing and bedding as part of the investigation into the alleged rape, she said.

Was it too late  to report a rape?

Air Force authorities would not say what bearing prompt reporting of a sexual assault has on an investigation eventually becoming a prosecution.

“We have no statistics on trial efficiency versus date of reporting,” Lt. Col. Terry Bullard, commander of RAF Lakenheath’s Office of Special Investigations, wrote in an e-mail. “It’s important for victims to report as soon as possible, however this is too important of an issue to speculate on.”

Oakley, the Menwith Hill deputy SJA, also wouldn’t go into detail regarding Miller’s case since it didn’t result in charges against the accused.

Guidelines from the Mildenhall Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office urge victims to report sexual assault immediately and take other precautions to protect evidence, such as not bathing, changing clothes or brushing teeth.

A spokesman from the New York State Coalition Against Sexual Assault said that an immediate report of sexual assault is always ideal but a time lapse shouldn’t stop victims from coming forward.

“In all cases, whether it be a sexual assault or any other crime, the more physical evidence that is collected, the greater the opportunity for conviction,” Joseph T. Farrell, director of training at coalition, wrote in an e-mail.

“However, a lack of or reduced amount of collected physical evidence in no way means that a conviction cannot be sought or obtained in a court of law,” Farrell added.

Unfinished business  for alleged victim

Miller claims to have suffered post-traumatic stress following the rape, and she has since been transferred to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany for care, she said.

She has not given up on her case, and said she has recently retained British attorney Christopher Harrison to pursue the case in civil courts.

When Stars and Stripes contacted Harrison, he said British law prohibited him from confirming or denying any involvement with Miller’s case.

Because of Miller’s tenacity in her rape claim, three other victims at Menwith Hill — whose alleged rape cases also were thrown out — spoke to her about their ordeal, she said.

“Other women came forward to me because I was so vocal about it,” Miller said, adding that the legal office could have fought harder for her alleged rape to be tried at a court-martial.

She also said her Menwith Hill unit denied her convalescent leave after the alleged rape.

“I was told to suck it up and drive on,” she said.

Air Force public affairs officials would not say whether Miller’s request for leave was denied but said that there is no standard procedure for giving time off to a person who alleges rape, according to 501st Combat Support Wing spokeswoman Tech. Sgt. Kristina Barrett.

Even though it’s too late for her, Miller said she’d like to see changes to the Air Force structures that she said have failed her and perhaps other victims.

“This is not just about me, it is about helping other women as well and trying to change the system that has failed so many of us for a supposed no-tolerance system,” she said.