Looking After the Soldier
Back Home and Damaged
Local veteran's suicide reflects
troubling trend
Orrin Gorman McClellan grew up among the
alder and cedar that cover his family's 11-acre homestead on Whidbey Island. He
relished painting, music and acting, playing the star role of Toad in a local
production of "The Wind in the Willows."
McClellan seemed an unlikely Army recruit.
But in the post-9/11 world, he responded to talk of honor, service and
camaraderie. After graduating from high school, without informing his parents,
McClellan signed up for three years of active duty.
He served in Afghanistan, where he lost
friends to enemy bullets, picked up the body parts of blown-up soldiers and
wrestled with the emotions unleashed by combat missions.
"Have you ever felt that each word you
say brings you further away from explaining yourself," he wrote in an
April 30, 2005, poem in a computer journal. "Everything you create puts a
sour taste in your mouth and every action you take burns you with shame."
In the fall of 2006, McClellan left the Army
and came back to his Western Washington island and a strong support network
eager to help him rebuild his life. But family and friends were not enough to
save him.
This year, on May 18, McClellan took his life
with a handgun.
McClellan is among the war casualties that
the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has just begun to track — young men and
women who served in the post-9/11 military, and killed themselves after
struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder and other war wounds.
In 2007, the last year figures were available
from the VA, the suicide rate for veterans ages 18 to 29 was 37.1 per 100,000.
That's more than 80 percent higher than the rate for the civilian population
and the active-duty military.
"He never really came all the way
home," said his mother, Judith Gorman, a social worker skilled in
counseling traumatized people. "If some good can come out of this, I would
like communities to be able to recognize that we all have to be able to bear
some of the burden. We can't just expect veterans to heal ...
"We have to listen to their stories.
Deep listening."
High
suicide rate
During nine years of war, suicide rates among
active-duty soldiers, once far below the civilian population, have been on the
rise. From January through June 10 of this year, 115 soldiers had taken their
lives. The even higher rate of veterans taking their own lives after leaving
the military also has raised major concerns.
More than 35,800 Washington state veterans
have served in the Iraq and Afghanistan war era. If the national veteran
suicide rates also are representative of the state level, then more than a
dozen young Washington veterans kill themselves each year.
These veterans can turn to a network of
hospitals, clinics and counseling centers that have benefited from increased
federal funding. Washington state has developed a network of 37 counselors who
offer free services to veterans, while King County voters approved a 2005 levy
that expanded services to veterans.
These efforts have aided plenty of people.
But the failures are wrenching.
In the summer of 2008, for example, two
25-year-old Iraq veterans in Washington state killed themselves: Timothy
Juneman, who was attending school in Spokane, hung himself in his apartment.
Tim Nelson, who was working at a Bellingham veterans center, shot himself at his
home.
"As I've often asked, mostly of myself,
but also of others from time to time, why do we know so much about suicides but
so little about how to prevent them?" said Eric Shinseki, a retired Army
general who now heads the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Photos
and poems
Orrin McClellan served with the 173rd
Airborne Brigade Combat Team in a unit that called itself the Chosen Company,
working in mountainous eastern Afghanistan. His photos and poems reflect the
physical and emotional grind of serving in what was then a war largely
forgotten back home.
But he took great pride in being a good
soldier, and in the bonds forged with combat buddies.
His parents say McClellan was stung by the
loss of an older soldier he particularly respected, and a young one he had
befriended. He also had trouble reconciling the warrior creed of protecting the
innocent and fighting a war rife with civilian casualties.
In July of 2005, near the end of his time in
Afghanistan, McClellan wrote a bitter ode to military recruiters:
"take
your pleasantries
your
generalizations, good intentions,
sweet
words, and half truths,
put
them in a box.
drape
a flag over it.
and
bury it with the rest of the dead."
When McClellan left Afghanistan to return to
his post in Italy, he was already struggling with PTSD and other ailments,
according to Gorman.
McClellan was sent to Germany for a
tonsillectomy, and his mother, without checking with the Army, flew there to
watchdog his care.
She believes her intervention helped save his
life as she fought for additional treatment of post-surgical bleeding and other
complications.
But McClellan was disciplined by a superior
for his mother's unauthorized appearance, according to Gorman. Later, he would
tell his family that his morale hit rock bottom after he was punished by being
forced to hold concrete blocks while treading water, a practice that he said
felt like drowning.
"I will be forever angry at how they
treated him," Gorman said. "They made him sign something saying that
he had no control of his mother and tried to cut off family ties."
Unsettled
at home
Back on Whidbey Island in the fall of 2006,
McClellan moved into a small cottage on his family's property. On this familiar
terrain, he tried to heal.
He suffered from constant headaches and back
pain. His hearing was damaged from mortar blasts. He feared sleep for the
nightmares that left him screaming in the dark.
In his daytime hours, he appeared to lose track
of time and place, packing his truck with gear as if he was about to head off
on a combat mission, or constantly taking apart and cleaning the family hunting
rifle.
His mother took a counseling job at Whidbey
Island Naval Air Station and helped her son navigate through the VA system. He
eventually received a 100 percent disability rating due to post-traumatic
stress disorder.
He cycled through therapy sessions, as well
as inpatient treatment for alcohol abuse and PTSD. Just the commute from Whidbey
Island to the Seattle VA hospital created stress. He would walk around the
driveway again and again, trying to muster up the fortitude to get into the
car.
In the summer of 2007, McClellan left Whidbey
Island to get a fresh start at Montana State University in Bozeman. But he
struggled with alcohol and drugs. By February 2008, McClellan was back home.
That summer, a police reprimand for kicking
over a barricade at a Whidbey Island music festival turned into an ugly
incident. McClellan repeatedly urged police to shoot him, and he was arrested
after a struggle.
Losing
the fight
By the spring of this year, McClellan
appeared to be starting to put his life together. He and his fiancée, childhood
friend Michelle McGowan, had moved into their own cottage by a lake and
McClellan quit drinking hard liquor.
He was also helping to promote the Whidbey
Island Veterans Resource Center, which his parents had established in 2009 to
offer referrals, networking and other assistance.
But one night, McClellan relapsed. He was
anxious about yet another drive to the Seattle VA scheduled for the next
morning. He was uneasy about what seemed like an invasion of privacy: a noisy
construction crew working on the house next door had asked to use the
electrical plugs in his cottage.
That night, in addition to his Ambien sleep
medication, he drank Wild Turkey whiskey. A stranger, apparently a new neighbor
seeking to introduce himself, approached the house with a barking dog.
McClellan appeared to launch into a
flashback. He retrieved his semi-automatic from a lockbox. Then, he went
outside and fired several warning shots into the ground.
McGowan looked at McClellan. He seemed
startled by what he had just done. But she eventually was able to calm him
down.
Somewhere outside, there was a bang, perhaps
a firecracker lit by a neighbor.
McClellan was set off once again. He fired
more shots, then walked into a bedroom and shot himself.
In the following weeks, the family thought of
the suicide as a kind of accident — that McClellan, his mind fogged by alcohol
and prescription drugs, had not realized what he was doing as he pulled the
trigger.
More recently, his mother has come to believe
McClellan sensed, in his final moments of life, that he had been out of
control. That he had the potential to hurt innocent people. To keep that from
happening, she thinks, he took his own life.
"Warriors are supposed to protect
people, and that's what he did."
After War, From Wife to Caregiver: April Marcum
has joined a community of spouses, parents and partners who drop most
everything in their lives to care for injured loved ones returning from war.
By CATRIN EINHORN
Published: September 27, 2011
"The biggest loss is the loss of
the man I married," April Marcum said, describing her husband now as
disconnected on the best days, violent on the worst ones.
He usually ignores them, and she ends
up having to make him do it. Since Mr. Marcum came back in 2008 from two tours
in Iraq with a traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder, his
wife has quit her job as a teacher to care for him. She has watched their life
savings drain away. And she has had to adjust to an entirely new relationship
with her husband, who faces a range of debilitating problems including
short-term memory loss and difficulties with impulse control and anger.
“The biggest loss is the loss of the man
I married,” Ms. Marcum said, describing her husband now as disconnected on the
best days, violent on the worst ones. “His body’s here, but his mind is not
here anymore. I see glimpses of him, but he’s not who he was.”
Ms. Marcum has joined a growing
community of spouses, parents and partners who, confronted with damaged loved
ones returning from war who can no longer do for themselves, drop most everything
in their own lives to care for them. Jobs, hobbies, friends, even parental
obligations to young children fall by the wayside. Families go through savings
and older parents dip into retirement funds.
Even as they grieve over a family member’s
injuries, they struggle to adjust to new routines and reconfigured
relationships.
The new lives take a searing toll. Many
of the caregivers report feeling anxious, depressed or exhausted. They gain
weight and experience health problems. On their now-frequent trips to the
pharmacy, they increasingly have to pick up prescriptions for themselves as
well.
While taking comfort that their loved
ones came home at all, they question whether they can endure the potential
strain of years, or even decades, of care.
“I’ve packed my bags, I’ve called my
parents and said I’m coming home,” said Andrea Sawyer, whose husband has been
suicidal since returning from Iraq with post-traumatic stress disorder. “But I
don’t. I haven’t ever physically walked out of the house.”
Those attending to the most severely
wounded must help their spouses or adult children with the most basic daily
functions. Others, like Ms. Marcum, act as safety monitors, keeping loved ones
from putting themselves in danger. They drive them to endless medical
appointments and administer complicated medication regimens.
One of the most frustrating aspects of
life now, they say, is the bureaucracy they face at the Department of Defense
and the Department of Veterans Affairs, from problems with the scheduling of
medical appointments to being bounced around among different branches of the system,
forcing them to become navigators and advocates for their loved ones.
A variety of care services are offered
to the severely injured. But many family members do not want their loved ones
in nursing homes and find home health services often unsatisfactory or
unavailable.
Despite Ms. Marcum’s cheerful manner and
easy laugh, she has started taking antidepressants and an anti-anxiety medication
when needed. She has developed hypertension, takes steroids for a bronchial
ailment that may be stress related and wears braces to relieve a jaw problem.
“I just saw all of my dreams kind of
vanishing,” she said.
Over the past few years, advocacy
organizations like the Wounded Warrior Project lobbied Congress to enact a law
providing direct financial compensation and other benefits to family caregivers
of service members.
In 2010 they succeeded, and by mid-September,
the veterans agency had approved 1,222 applications, with average monthly
stipends of $1,600 to $1,800. Caregivers can also receive health insurance and
counseling.
“We know it doesn’t replace full lost income,”
said Deborah Amdur, who oversees caregiver support for the agency. “It’s really
a recognition of the kinds of sacrifices that are being made.”
While families express deep gratitude
for the help, questions remain about who will qualify and how compensation is
determined, advocates for veterans say. Furthermore, the law applies only to
caregivers of service members injured in the line of duty on or after Sept. 11,
2001, eliminating help for thousands who served in earlier conflicts.
And the emotional strain is still
palpable as families struggle to adjust to what many call their “new normal.”
In a reversal of the classic situation in
which adult children help out ailing parents, a substantial number of the
caregivers of post- Sept. 11 service members are parents caring for their adult
children.
Rosie Babin, 51, was managing an accounting
office when a bullet tore through her son Alan’s abdomen in 2003. She and her husband
rushed to Walter Reed Army Medical Center and stayed at his side when Alan,
then 22, arrived from Iraq. He lost 90 percent of his stomach and part of his pancreas.
His kidneys shut down and he had a stroke, leaving him with brain damage. He
eventually underwent more than 70 operations and spent two years in hospitals,
his mother said.
Ms. Babin fought efforts by the
military to put her son in a nursing home, insisting that he go into a
rehabilitation facility instead, and then managed to care for him at home.
But since her son’s injuries, her doctor
has put her on blood pressure medication and sleeping pills. Now, while deeply
grateful for her son’s remarkable recovery — he gets around in a wheelchair and
has regained some speech — she sadly remembers the days when she looked forward
to travel and dance lessons with her husband. Instead, she helps Alan get in
and out of bed, use the bathroom and shower.
“I felt like I went from this
high-energy, force-to-be-reckoned-with businesswoman,” she said, “to a casualty
of war. And I was working furiously at not feeling like a victim of war.”
Research on the caregivers of service
members from the post-Sept. 11 era is just beginning, said Joan M. Griffin, a
research investigator with the Minneapolis V.A. Health Care System who is
leading one such study. (The V.A. estimates that 3,000 families will benefit
from the new caregiver program; 92 percent of the caregivers approved so far
are women.)
What makes the population of patients
receiving care different, Ms. Griffin said, is their relative youth. “The V.A.
has not had a significant influx of patients of this age group since Vietnam,”
she said, with a result that caregivers are looking at a “long horizon of
providing care.”
And one in five returning service
members, a previous study found, report symptoms of post-traumatic stress
disorder or major depression.
Ms. Griffin’s research shows that many
family members spend more than 40 hours a week providing care. Half feel that
they do not have a choice.
“They feel stuck,” Ms. Griffin said.
Some walk away.
For Ms. Marcum, 37 — who has an 18-year marriage
and two sons, ages 14 and 11, with Tom, 36 — there was never a question of
leaving. “I’m his wife and it’s my job, whether he’s hurt or not, to make sure
he’s O.K.,” she said.
When she first asked for a leave of
absence from work to care for him, she expected it would be for just a few
weeks, while doctors got to the bottom of the migraines keeping him in bed for days
on end. When he was up, he often seemed confused and sometimes slurred his
speech. After 12 years in the Air Force, where he worked as a weapons
specialist, he was suddenly having trouble taking a phone message or driving
home from the base. Mr. Marcum, who endured several mortar attacks in Iraq, one
of which knocked him unconscious, eventually was given diagnoses of traumatic
brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder.
“My wife, I would imagine, probably
felt as if she was a single parent for a while,” said Mr. Marcum, who is now
medically retired from the Air Force. “She had to raise two boys. And now at
times she probably thinks that she’s raising three boys,” he added with a
laugh.
Ms. Marcum has found relief at a
weekend retreat for military wives in her situation, and on a private Facebook
page where caregivers vent, offer emotional support and swap practical advice.
Participants say online communities like these are often more supportive than
their extended families, who sometimes retreat in the face of such overwhelming
change. Financially, at least, things are looking up for the Marcum family. Ms.
Marcum was awarded the highest tier of coverage through the veterans agency’s
new caregiver program, giving her a monthly stipend of $1,837. Physical,
occupational and speech therapy have all helped Mr. Marcum improve, but she
worries that his progress has plateaued.
“We kind of have been in the same spot
for a while,” Ms. Marcum said. As proud as she is of her husband’s service, Ms.
Marcum feels guilty that neither of them now works, and hopes that one day she
will again hold down a job, while continuing to care for him. She pictures
herself working somewhere relaxed, like a Hallmark store, where she could chat
with people and help them with cards and gifts. It would be an escape, she
said, from the stress at home.
It was Sept 10th 2007. I had been at
work all day. A few strange phone calls with strange questions had came
in, but still I never imagined what was to come. Until the last phone call
to work that said, "Go home straight after work'. I crumbled inside.
I could not even drive. A friend drove me home. All I kept
saying is... he's okay. He was just on my voice mail the morning before.
Then it hit me. My birthday was in 5 days and I had told him that
all I wanted for my birthday was for him to come home. Maybe he was playing
a trick on me. Maybe it was him who had called my job telling me to
come home. I walked back and forth in my apartment looking at pictures of
him... pictures of us... pictures of our 3 children ages 4, 2 and 7 months.
The door opened and in walked 2 soldiers in class As. One soldier
was a chaplain. I fell on my couch.
Then the SFC read while shaking the paper in his hand. My husband had been
killed in Iraq in a vehicle rollover. What? I just kept saying they
had the wrong man. My husband could not leave. Not now. He
only had a month left. We still had 3 children to raise and a life to
live together.
It is now 2 weeks later and I still
expect a phone call or an email to say he's alright. The funeral was beautiful
and the Army honored him well, but I still feel like it's all a dream. I
remember the last email he wrote to me. It said that he had tried to
imagine a life without me but that it was too painful to imagine. I now
am living this life. While he was deployed I felt like my life has been
on pause. Everyday making myself get out of bed to take care of the kids
and go to work. Saying to myself soon he'll be home to help. Saying
he'll be back to help with everything. But now he won't. How do I unpause
my life when he's not coming home to unpause it? Everything is just so confusing.
**************************
On
the one-year anniversary of her husband's
suicide, Barb Dill breaks down at her husband's tombstone. Wade Dill, a
Marine Corps veteran, took a contractor job in Iraq. Three weeks after
he returned home for good, he committed suicide (Francine Orr / Los
Angeles Times / Redding, CA / July
16, 2007).
REDDING, Calif. — Wade Dill does not
figure into the toll of war dead. An exterminator, Dill took a job in
Iraq for a company contracted to do pest control on military bases.
There, he found himself killing disease-carrying flies and rabid dogs,
dodging mortars and huddling in bomb shelters.
Dill, a Marine Corps veteran, was a
different man when he came back for visits here, his family said:
moody, isolated, morose. He screamed at his wife and daughter. His
weight dropped. Dark circles haunted his dark brown eyes.
Wade Dill
Three weeks after he returned home for
good, Dill booked a room in an anonymous three-story motel alongside
Interstate 5. There, on July 16, 2006, he shot himself in the head with
a 9 mm handgun. He left a suicide note for his wife and a picture for
his daughter, then 16. The caption read: "I did exist and I loved you.''
More than three years later, Dill's
loved ones are still reeling, their pain compounded by a drawn-out
battle with an insurance company over death benefits from the suicide.
Barb Dill, 47, nearly lost the family’s home to foreclosure.
"We’re circling the drain," she said.
While suicide among soldiers has been a
focus of Congress and the public, relatively little attention has been
paid to the mental health of tens of thousands of civilian contractors
returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. When they make the news at all,
contractors are usually in the middle of scandal, depicted as cowboys,
wastrels or worse.
No agency tracks how many civilian
workers have killed themselves after returning from the war zones. A
small study in 2007 found that 24 percent of contract employees from
DynCorp, a defense contractor, showed signs of depression or
post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, after returning home. The
figure is roughly equivalent to those found in studies of returning
soldiers.
If the pattern holds true on a broad
scale, thousands of such workers may be suffering from mental trauma,
said Paul Brand, the CEO of Mission Critical Psychological Services, a
firm that provides counseling to war zone civilians. More than 200,000
civilians work in Afghanistan and Iraq, according to the most recent
figures.
"There are many people falling
through the cracks, and there are few mechanisms in place to support
these individuals,'' said Brand, who conducted the study while working
at DynCorp."There's a moral obligation that's being overlooked. Can the
government really send people to a war zone and neglect their
responsibility to attend to their emotional needs after the fact?"
The survivors of civilians who have
committed suicide have found
themselves confused, frustrated and alone in their grief.
"If I was in the military, I'd at
least have someone to talk to," said Melissa Finkenbinder, 42, whose
husband, Kert, a mechanic, killed himself after returning from Iraq.
"Contractors don't have anything. Their families don't have anything."
Some families of civilian contractors
who have committed suicide have tried to battle for help through an
outdated government system designed to provide health insurance and
death benefits to civilian contractors injured or killed on the job.
Under the system, required by a law
known as the Defense Base Act defense firms must purchase
workers’ compensation insurance for their employees in war zones.
It is highly specialized and expensive insurance, dominated by the
troubled giant AIG and a handful of other companies. The cost of it is
paid by taxpayers as part of the contract price. But the law, which is
designed to provide coverage for accidental death and injury, blocks
payment of death benefits in the case of almost all suicides. Cases
linked to mental incapacity are the lone exception, judges have ruled.
A joint investigation last year by
ProPublica, ABC News and the Los Angeles Times revealed that contract
workers must frequently battle carriers for basic medical coverage.
While Congress has promised reforms, there has been no discussion of
changing the law when it comes to suicides involving civilian defense
workers.
The military, by contrast, allows
survivors to receive benefits in cases in which a soldier's suicide can be linked to depression caused by battlefield stress.
Hundreds of soldiers have committed
suicide since the war in Afghanistan began in 2001, according to
studies by the Army and the Department of Veterans Affairs. In
response, the Defense Department has become more active in trying to
prevent suicide than its hired contractors, military experts said.
The military is "aggressively
trying to reach people and do intervention beforehand and set up
suicide awareness programs," said Ian de Planque, a benefits expert at
the American Legion, the nation's largest veterans group. "Awareness of
it has increased. I don’t know that it’s transferred over
to the civilian sector at this point."
Birgitt Eysselinck has spent years
trying to prove that her husband's death in Iraq was related to stress
from his job with a company specializing in the removal of land mines
and explosive ordnance. So far, courts have sided with the insurance
firm, Chicago-based CNA, in denying Eysselinck's claim. (CNA declined
to comment, citing privacy reasons.) Eysselinck, 44, said that neither
federal judges nor insurance adjusters understand that civilian
contractors face many of the same risks in Iraq and Afghanistan that
soldiers do. Her husband, Tim Eysselinck, endured
mortar attacks and frequently traveled across Iraq's dangerous highways, she said.
"There is a huge percentage of
contractors who are silently suffering," Eysselinck said. "That
obviously puts them and their families at risk. Communities are bearing
the brunt of this, especially the families."
*******
Wade
Dill was working at a local pest control
company when he decided to take a job with KBR in Iraq in late 2004.
The money was good – almost $11,000 a month for handling
extermination and hazardous material disposal, more than double his
normal salary.
"He said this was our
opportunity," Barb Dill said. "He could start a college fund for our
daughter, pay off the mortgage and have a nice retirement. He told me
at his age, 41, he didn't know if he had enough years left in him to
give us what he wanted."
Wade started that December, working on
bases in central and northern Iraq. Violence was ever present. A base
near Mosul was shelled frequently. He told Barb that a mortar landed
close enough to temporarily deafen him. Once, he called her sobbing.
"My husband never cried,
ever," she said. "Marines don't cry. A young man, a soldier, had put a
pistol to his head and blown his brains out. And Wade had to go in and
clean up after they removed the body – he had to clean up brain
matter and blood. It really upset him."
Barb Dill noticed a change in her
husband when he returned home for a visit in December 2005. The couple
had been high school sweethearts, married for 15 years. They had
troubles, but had always worked them out. Now, he seemed moody and
often angry, lashing out at her and their daughter, Sara.
"He would say hateful things to me
and our daughter – things he had never said before." Dill said. "This was a man that loved his little girl
and his wife. He always called us his girls."
When Wade returned for another visit in
June 2006, he abruptly quit his job and began acting erratically, Dill
said. He ripped the wiring out of appliances, smashed mirrors and
poured lighter fluid on their furniture.
After a few weeks, Wade took a room at
a local motel. On July 15, he asked Barb to come see him. Their
conversation spiraled into a confrontation. Frightened and angry, Barb
sped off in her car. The next day, the Shasta County coroner's office
called to tell her that Wade's body had been found in the room.
"He told me that he was sick and
needed help," Dill said. "I told him to get help and then we would talk. The last time I saw him was in my rearview mirror."
Dill soon found herself in financial
difficulty. Her husband had
always taken care of the bills. He had spent lavishly with his higher
salary, buying two BMWs during trips home. Now, Dill discovered the
couple was $300,000 in debt on their mortgage and car loans.
She plunged into depression, struggling
to cope with her daughter’s grief and the sense that she had
failed her husband in his time of need. She sold the cars and nearly
lost her home after falling behind on mortgage payments.
She suffered mostly by herself. Except
for a handful of Web sites, no support groups exist for widows of
civilian contractors. The federal government offers no counseling for
civilians returning from work in war zones.
Dill said that she felt abandoned by
everyone: her husband's employer, the insurance company and especially
the federal government, which oversees the Defense Base Act system
through the Labor Department.
"Shouldn't our government be
responsible for the companies they hire?" Dill said. "Shouldn't our
government take care of its own people, who are doing jobs our
government, ultimately, wanted them to do?"
Survivors of civilian contractors whose
death is related to their work in Iraq have the right to apply for compensation benefits that pay up to $63,000 a year for life.
Dill applied, asserting that her
husband’s PTSD made him an exception to the rule against payments
in suicide cases. Her claim was denied by AIG, KBR's insurance provider.
She protested, sending her claim into a
dispute resolution system run by the Labor Department. Her case is
still grinding its way through the system, which can take years to
produce a final result. Experts hired by the family and the insurance
company differed on what led to Wade Dill’s suicide.
A psychiatrist hired by her
attorney found that job stress in Iraq was one of the factors that
drove Wade to suicide: "The bottom line is that the combination of
physical separation and work-related stress resulted in increasingly
emotional distance, greater distortion of the relationship, increasing
emotional intensity, and a pattern of increasing erratic behaviors that
culminated in suicide," wrote Charles Seaman, an expert in PTSD.
A Labor Department examiner recommended
that AIG pay the claim, but the company refused. AIG and KBR declined
comment about the case. In court filings, AIG has argued that the
Defense Base Act does not cover suicides. AIG attorneys also have said
that Wade Dill's actions were related to marital and family problems. A
psychiatrist hired by AIG testified at a hearing in San Francisco in
January that he had performed a "psychological autopsy" on Wade Dill
based on interviews with his family and court documents.
The psychiatrist, Andrew D. Whyman,
said his evaluation led him to conclude that Dill suffered from
depression and that his suicide was unrelated to the violence he
witnessed in Iraq.
"Take out the Iraq experience,
(the suicide) would have happened," Whymantestified. "He had a choice.
… He could have chosen not to do that." Barb Dill insists her
husband came back from Iraq a changed man.
"No matter how strained our
relationship could get at times, we always pulled out of it with no problem," Dill said. "Iraq changed all
that." Now, she said, she is trying to hold her life together. A final decision in her case is not expected for months.
"We're just slowly sinking,"
she said. "It's hard to be strong."
***
Watch
a preview of 'Disposable Army,' a documentary currently being produced
by Mark Crupi, which contains interviews with Barb Dill and T.
Christian Miller.
Orrin Gorman McClellan is among the war
casualties that the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has just begun to track
— young men and women who served in the post-9/11 military, and killed
themselves after struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder and other war
wounds.
By
Hal Bernton
Seattle
Times staff reporter
Hal
Bernton: 206-464-2581 or hbernton@seattletimes.com
Seattle
Times researcher David Turim contributed to this story.
For
pictures please go to article on web.
Perry McClellan and Judith Gorman put a
flagpole in front of their home to commemorate their son's life and service. A
talented artist, he helped his parents create a new veterans center on Whidbey
Island before taking his life in May.
Related
Video | A Soldier's
Eye on War
Video | Poetry from
a War Zone
Some
resources for Washington veterans
•
Washington State Department of Veteran Affairs counseling services:
1-800-562-2308, www.dva.wa.gov/ptsd_counseling.html
•
U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Suicide Prevention Hotline: 1-800-273-TALK,
www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org
•
King County Veterans Services: 206-296-7656, www.kingcounty.gov/socialservices/veterans.aspx
•
Snohomish County Veterans' Assistance: 425-388-7255, www1.co.snohomish.wa.us/departments/human_services/divisions/cmtyaction/veteranassistance/
•
Pierce County Veterans Bureau: (253) 798-7449, www.co.pierce.wa.us/pc/abtus/ourorg/veterans/default.htm
•
Whidbey Island Veterans Resources Center: (360) 321-7226, 1796 E. Main Street,
#106, Freeland, WA. 98249; www.vetsresourcecenter.org/index.php
Hal
Bernton