Soldiers in Colorado slayings tell of Iraq horrors

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. – Soldiers from an Army unit that had 10 infantrymen accused of murder, attempted murder or manslaughter after returning to civilian life described a breakdown in discipline during their Iraq deployment in which troops murdered civilians, a newspaper reported Sunday.

Some Fort Carson, Colo.-based soldiers have had trouble adjusting to life back in the United States, saying they refused to seek help, or were belittled or punished for seeking help. Others say they were ignored by their commanders, or coped through drug and alcohol abuse before they allegedly committed crimes, The Gazette of Colorado Springs said.

The Gazette based its report on months of interviews with soldiers and their families, medical and military records, court documents and photographs.

Several soldiers said unit discipline deteriorated while in Iraq.

"Toward the end, we were so mad and tired and frustrated," said Daniel Freeman. "You came too close, we lit you up. You didn't stop, we ran your car over with the Bradley," an armored fighting vehicle.

With each roadside bombing, soldiers would fire in all directions "and just light the whole area up," said Anthony Marquez, a friend of Freeman in the 1st Battalion, 9th Infantry Regiment. "If anyone was around, that was their fault. We smoked 'em."

Taxi drivers got shot for no reason, and others were dropped off bridges after interrogations, said Marcus Mifflin, who was eventually discharged with post traumatic stress syndrome.

"You didn't get blamed unless someone could be absolutely sure you did something wrong," he said

Soldiers interviewed by The Gazette cited lengthy deployments, being sent back into battle after surviving war injuries that would have been fatal in previous conflicts, and engaging in some of the bloodiest combat in Iraq. The soldiers describing those experiences were part of the 3,500-soldier unit now called the 4th Infantry Division's 4th Brigade Combat Team.

Since 2005, some brigade soldiers also have been involved in brawls, beatings, rapes, DUIs, drug deals, domestic violence, shootings, stabbings, kidnapping and suicides.

The unit was deployed for a year to Iraq's Sunni Triangle in September 2004. Sixty-four unit soldiers were killed and more than 400 wounded — about double the average for Army brigades in Iraq, according to Fort Carson. In 2007, the unit served a bloody 15-month mission in Baghdad. It's currently deployed to the Khyber Pass region in Afghanistan.

Marquez was the first in his brigade to kill someone after an Iraq tour. In 2006, he used a stun gun to shock a drug dealer in Widefield, Colo., in a dispute over a marijuana sale, then shot and killed him.

Marquez's mother, Teresa Hernandez, warned Marquez's sergeant at Fort Carson her son was showing signs of violent behavior, abusing alcohol and pain pills and carrying a gun. "I told them he was a walking time bomb," she said.

Hernandez said the sergeant later taunted Marquez about her phone call.

"If I was just a guy off the street, I might have hesitated to shoot," Marquez told The Gazette in the Bent County Correctional Facility, where he is serving a 30-year prison term. "But after Iraq, it was just natural."

The Army trains soldiers to be that way, said Kenneth Eastridge, an infantry specialist serving 10 years for accessory to murder.

"The Army pounds it into your head until it is instinct: Kill everybody, kill everybody," he said. "And you do. Then they just think you can just come home and turn it off."

Both soldiers were wounded, sent back into action and saw friends and officers killed in their first deployment. On numerous occasions, explosions shredded the bodies of civilians, others were slain in sectarian violence — and the unit had to bag the bodies.

"Guys with drill bits in their eyes," Eastridge said. "Guys with nails in their heads."

Last week, the Army released a study of soldiers at Fort Carson that found that the trauma of fierce combat and soldier refusals or obstacles to seeking mental health care may have helped drive some to violence at home. It said more study is needed.

While most unit soldiers coped post-deployment, a handful went on to kill back home in Colorado.

Many returning soldiers did seek counseling.

"We're used to seeing people who are depressed and want to hurt themselves. We're trained to deal with that," said Davida Hoffman, director of the privately operated First Choice Counseling Center in Colorado Springs. "But these soldiers were depressed and saying, 'I've got this anger, I want to hurt somebody.' We weren't accustomed to that."

At Fort Carson, Eastridge and other soldiers said they lied during an army screening about their deployment that was designed to detect potential behavioral problems.

Sergeants sometimes refused to let soldiers get PTSD help or taunted them, said Andrew Pogany, a former Fort Carson special forces sergeant who investigates complaints for the advocacy group Veterans for America.

Soldier John Needham described a number of alleged crimes in a December 2007 letter to the Inspector General's Office of Fort Carson. In the letter, obtained by The Gazette, Needham said that a sergeant shot a boy riding a bicycle down the street for no reason.

Another sergeant shot a man in the head while questioning him, lashed the man's body to his Humvee and drove around the neighborhood. Needham also claimed sergeants removed victims' brains.

The Army's criminal investigation division interviewed unit soldiers and said it couldn't substantiate the allegations.

The Army has declared soldiers' mental health a top priority.

"When we see a problem, we try to identify it and really learn what we can do about it. That is what we are trying to do here," said Maj. Gen. Mark Graham, Fort Carson's commander. "There is a culture and a stigma that needs to change."

Fort Carson officers are trained to help troops showing stress signs, and the base has doubled its number of behavioral-health counselors. Soldiers seeing an Army doctor for any reason undergo a mental health evaluation.

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On the Net:

Colorado Springs Gazette: http://www.gazette.com

Wide-Ranging PTSD Intervention Not Beneficial

By Rick Nauert PhD Senior News Editor
Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on July 22, 2009

Imagine a deadly campus shooting occurs. It might seem sensible to offer everyone on campus psychological support to prevent psychological repercussions, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

However, a new review from Wales and Australia suggests the opposite: Researchers found no evidence to support offering interventions to everyone involved in a traumatic event. In fact, they found that some forms of blanket intervention might foster worse outcomes than no intervention whatsoever.

“Some experts argue everyone should be offered help. Others argue that only those considered at particular risk of developing a psychological disorder should be treated. This study attempted to examine whether any psychological intervention offered over more than one session was effective in preventing PTSD,” said lead author Dr. Neil Roberts, a psychologist with the University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff.

“The results found no evidence to support the use of an intervention offered to everyone,” he said.

“There was some evidence that multiple session interventions may result in worse outcomes than no intervention for some individuals, although I don’t want to overplay the risk of harm. The effects for most interventions we studied were neutral; that is, treatment and control participants did equally well.”

The stakes are high. In some people, severe PTSD precipitates family breakdown, job loss and substance abuse.

Roberts’ team evaluated findings from 11 studies that tested diverse psychological interventions aimed at preventing PTSD after one-time traumatic events. Together the studies comprised 941 adult participants.

Participants included mothers who had experienced traumatic births, people in serious traffic accidents, persons involved in armed robberies involving violence and parents of children newly diagnosed with cancer.

Interventions fell into six categories including cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), individual counseling, group therapy and adapted debriefing. The authors noted that counseling was the most often used intervention and that the evidence provided no support for its use to prevent PTSD. They said that no individual study showed a significant difference in favor of any treatment intervention in comparison to the control.

The new review appears in the latest issue of The Cochrane Library, a publication of The Cochrane Collaboration, an international organization that evaluates medical research. Systematic reviews like this one draw evidence based conclusions about medical practice after considering both the content and quality of existing trials on a topic.

Only one study reported adverse effects due to treatment. In that case, researchers found that individuals with a psychiatric history did worse at six-month follow up if they had received a counseling intervention than similar individuals who received none.

“Our study builds on the findings of previous research showing that a popular intervention –psychological debriefing — delivered in the first few days after trauma was not effective in preventing PTSD. Although many mental health professionals have stopped using debriefing as a result of this research, uncertainty has remained about best practices,” Roberts said.

His team found no evidence to support offering any type of intervention to everybody present at a traumatic incident. However, the review did show that interventions aimed at people showing early signs of PTSD was effective at preventing chronic PTSD. Roger Pitman, M.D., a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, considered the findings noteworthy.

“The results of this Cochrane review appear to establish limits for outreach efforts to trauma victims,” Pitman said.

“Whereas it makes sense to inform them of the availability of therapy should they desire it, encouraging them to make use of it may be imprudent, unless there’s clear evidence of psychiatric symptoms.”

Meaghan O’Donnell, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist and senior research fellow with the Australian Centre for Posttraumatic Mental Health at the University of Melbourne, also deemed the review’s findings important.

“After a traumatic event, most people will experience high levels of distress. This review shows us that despite this distress, most people will not need intervention from a mental health professional,” O’Donnell said.

“It also tells us that by identifying those people facing high risk for developing later PTSD, early cognitive behavioral therapy is very useful in preventing chronic PTSD.”

The review called for further research to evaluate the best ways to provide psychological help soon after a traumatic event. Both O’Donnell and Pitman concur: “Early intervention is dependent on effective screening instruments to help target treatments, and we need more research to establish screening instruments that will identify high-risk trauma survivors,” O’Donnell said.

“Furthermore, we need to find out whether other psychiatric or psychological interventions are as useful as cognitive behavioral therapy in preventing chronic PTSD.”

These findings might reassure trauma survivors. This research clearly showed mental health professionals what not to do — offer counseling to everyone, and provides guidelines about best practices to prevent chronic PTSD — provide CBT for those with serious early PTSD symptoms. This information could help trauma survivors on their road to recovery.

Source: Health Behavior News Service

Iraq vets' caregivers seek training, compensation

Play Video ABC News – PTSD Diagnosis on the Rise

• Play Video Iraq Video:First Person: Caring for injured vets AP
• Play Video Iraq Video:Wounded troops' families ask Congress for help AP
• Play Video Iraq Video:Sandstorms strafe Iraq AFP

AP – Bob Briggs works on his computer as he gets help from his wife Michelle in their home, Wednesday, July …

By KIMBERLY HEFLING, Associated Press Writer Kimberly Hefling, Associated Press Writer –

WASHINGTON – On good days, Michelle Briggs has to remind her 40-year-old husband to shower and eat. On bad days, she lifts him out of bed and picks him up when he falls.

Robert W. Briggs, a former Army sergeant, was severely injured in Iraq and needs constant monitoring because of traumatic brain injury, blindness in one eye and paralysis on one side. He walks with the help of a service dog. Briggs gave up her job as a veterinarian technician to care for him and their two kids.

With tissue in hand, Michelle Briggs huddled Monday in a hotel conference room with 15 other caregivers who shared hugs and exchanged stories. They will go to Capitol Hill this week with a message to Congress: We need help.

"Mentally, it takes a very big toll on you," said Briggs, 34, of Hillsboro, Iowa, whose husband was injured in a rocket grenade attack in 2005 while serving with the Iowa National Guard. "You have to be a very strong person to get through a lot of it. It's a choice whether you stay or not. It's very much a choice."

Briggs said she's met other spouses of injured veterans who sought a divorce.

"It doesn't make them a bad person at all, but they just couldn't handle the situation because it's very, very stressful and you have to fight for the things that you're entitled to," Briggs said.

The caregivers say parents, spouses and siblings of the disabled have given up jobs, health insurance and college to care for a loved one. Yet they get no compensation to ease the burden.

"We're providing them with such a better quality of life and we need support in order to provide that," said Tracy Keil, 31, of Parker, Colo., whose husband, Matthew Keil, was paralyzed from the chest down from a sniper's bullet in 2007 and now needs around-the-clock care.

The two married six weeks before he was injured. She said she gave up the job she had as an accountant for 11 years and makes $60,000 less working from home part-time for a nonprofit organization.

The caregivers seek passage of legislation that would require the Veterans Affairs Department to offer more training to primary caregivers of severely injured veterans from the recent wars. Those certified would be eligible for benefits such as health care and a stipend of a few hundred dollars a week.

The alternative, they say, would be life in an institution for some veterans now mostly in their 20s or 30s.

Sen. Daniel Akaka, chairman of the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee, who authored legislation in the Senate to address the issue with Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., said there are more than just an isolated few families asking for help.

"This has been growing, growing to the point now where we can not ignore it," Akaka said.

Akaka, D-Hawaii, said he's waiting for a final analysis about how much the legislation would cost, although he's confident keeping a veteran in the home is cheaper than a nursing home.

The VA has expressed concerns about the cost of the legislation. It has also said it would divert from the agency's mission of providing care to veterans and training clinicians, and said some of the same services are provided in other programs.

Phil Budahn, a VA spokesman, said in a statement the agency would continue to look for ways to "appropriately support these compassionate providers."

Steven Nardizzi, executive director of the Jacksonville, Fla.-based Wounded Warrior Project, which organized the caregivers' effort this week, said what the VA provides simply isn't adequate. He said the VA needs to adapt its primary mission to include helping families of the wounded, and providing health benefits and a stipend would go a long way.

"If the VA thinks they're already providing or the administration thinks they're already providing support, it's because they're simply not paying attention and not listening to the families right now," Nardizzi said.

His group estimates that under legislation it's seeking, about 750 caregivers would be eligible long-term, whereas several thousand would participate for about one to three years.

Briggs said she's thrown out her back at different times lifting her husband. She said she went through a period of depression as she adjusted to their new life but has learned to find comfort talking to other caregivers. She said she's dedicated to making their arrangement work but could use more resources.

"I love him and we've been married — it will be 15 years in November. It's like your marriage vows for better or worse," Briggs said. "This wasn't his fault, and there would be no one else to take care of him properly. He would be in a nursing home."

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On the Net:

Wounded Warrior Project: http://www.woundedwarriorproject.org/

Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee: http://veterans.senate.gov/

Veterans Affairs Department: http://www.va.gov/

Anger Management Techniques?

What are some Anger Management Techniques?

Image by ☆Mi☺Λmor☆ via Flickr

Having trouble controlling anger is a major issue in many individuals lives. Addressing this issue can be difficult if the person is unwilling to admit to their problem and seek help. It is imperative that people be supportive and encouraging to those with anger issues. At times it may seem impossible since these people can be hurtful and even violent. Helping them to realize they need help would be the initial step to controlling their anger.

Once an individual is willing to work on their anger problem and turn to anger management, there are anger management techniques which will be taught to help them. There are many techniques which are beneficial regarding anger management. It might be necessary for the individual to try them all in order to find anger management techniques that work best for them.

One technique recommended for anger management is relaxation. Angry feelings and emotions can be calmed by relaxing exercises such as deep breathing, relaxing imagery and slow non strenuous exercise similar to yoga. When a person becomes irritated and headed for a fit of anger, it is suggested they breathe deeply. This technique recommends that the person breathe from their diaphragm in order to relax. Using relaxing imagery may work for some people. Allowing their mind and thoughts to go to a happy place, a relaxing experience may help to calm them down. This imagery may be of a past experience or the individual could use their imagination. The yoga-like exercises used as an anger management technique are meant to relax the muscles which in turn will help the individual feel much calmer.

Problem solving is used as an anger management technique. It is important for an individual to discover the reason for their anger. Anger is a natural response to certain situations and at times it is an acceptable reaction but there are other incidents when the anger is not appropriate. There is a reason for the anger and to every problem there is said to be a solution. When a situation arises, the individual is taught not to focus on the solution but rather the problem. Finding ways to handle the problem and confront it is the main objective in this anger management technique. It may take awhile to conform to this plan. It is important to stick to it, eventually the answers will come.

People with anger issues are taught through anger management techniques to practice better communication skills. Often a fit of anger arises because an individual misunderstood a conversation. Before giving it any thought, they become enraged and filled with anger. Anger management teaches the individual to slow down their thinking, think before they speak or react. The easily angered person needs to listen to the underlying message and try not to jump to conclusions. When feeling on the defensive side, the individual should learn not to fight back. Listening rationally to what the other person has to say might make a huge difference in a reaction.

These are just a few anger management techniques. There are many others which may be helpful to an individual requiring help. There are many books, movies and website on the Internet which can provide information regarding anger management techniques.
Here are just a few:
Anger Management For The Twenty First Century Ebook

Anger Management - Regaining Control Of

Stop The Insanity - Control Your Anger Today

Psychological Self-improvement: Ways to Overcome Fear

Image by Will Lion via Flickr

People are usually afraid of negative things. They are afraid of self-improvement because of this fear. Psychological self-improvement may help you in this situation.

In psychological self-improvement, The best way to remove this fear is to understand that life is always in the cycle of ups and downs. No one is permanently up or permanently down. Remember that no one can avoid these ups and downs even the most envied Hollywood stars.

What we should do about these downs is to learn from it and not to avoid it. We should learn how to handle our problems for our psychological self-improvement.

Problems affect us every day. These problems bring us misery due to the fact that we have feelings. We should never loose hope in figuring out solutions to these problems. All we need is to learn how to overcome it and not to be overcome.

Problems can never be overcome but we can learn from them. This is where Psychology plays an important role.

Psychologists say that we should always be careful in our decisions concerning our problems. We should handle our problems properly and learn how to deal with it. Learning from mistakes helps us in preparing ourselves for psychological self-improvement

There are a lot of myths about every event in our lives. Another belief says that what we encounter in our lives today is our preparation for other things that may come in our lives. To understand what may happen to us in the future, we must learn from the present.

With all that, it is also true that the unexpected can happen anytime. However, you should keep in mind that a psychological self-improvement is not always for the worse and consequently, you must never let go of a chance, because you are afraid to take the risk.

Remember that, from time to time, something has to happen in order to free you from monotony, so you shouldn't be surprised if, at a certain moment in time, instead of being afraid of change, you desire it with all your heart.

If there are some things that hinder you from going on, here are some tips to help you move forward:
Just think of the positive impacts results from the psychological self-improvement. Know important they are and reflect on how to increase them, by adding some other good aspects, which need certain assistance.

Try to picture somebody else in your situation, as picturing ourselves in a less desirable position, always looks more dramatic than it really is. If you realize that the other person can handle the change, you can be sure you’ll be able to handle it as well. This is a good psychological self-improvement.

Think of the worst situation that can result after the self-improvement. Try to find various solutions to it. Reflect on how much you can loose, if the worst happened, and how important those things are to you. If you find more than one reasonable solution, you are safe and the self-improvement can’t be stronger than you are!

Self-improvement is not bad at all. All we need is to learn how to handle some negative changes. We should also reflect from it to learn and use it in the future events that we may encounter. This could be your ultimate psychological self-improvement.

More Resources:

Belief Busters get the free course

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Panic Away Excellent Solutions