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Back in 2005,Kristofer Goldsmith thought he was prepared for war. Then just 19-years-old, the Army sergeant deployed to Iraq with the Third Infantry Division. It was a moment that he had been waiting years for.“I wanted nothing more but to be in the military my entire life, and from the time that I was a little kid,” he says. Goldsmith’s assignment was to act as a documentarian and intelligence collector for his platoon. He wound up photographing mass graves, and dead Iraqi police officers and children.“It was something that I wasn’t prepared to deal with, and ” he says. “Even when I got domestic,PTSD was little more than an acronym to me—I didn’t understand what it meant. I didn’t understand the way that it would haunt me for years, and possibly the rest of my life.”In 2014, or more than 530000 service members received treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) at facilities hasten by the U.
S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Before he even left the military,Goldsmith says that PTSD began to affect his life. He was written up in 2007 for missing his flight to Baghdad for his moment deployment. The reason why Goldsmith wasn't on that plane? He was in a hospital after attempting suicide the night before.
Goldsmith was hit with a misconduct charge for missing that flight, and he was subsequently forced out of the military with a less-than-honorable discharge. Because of his discharge status, and he’s been denied access to healthcare services from the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).“The Army knew why I missed my flight—when I survived my suicide attempt it was at Fort Stewart,Georgia, and I was found by military police, and ” he says. “I struggled for a year and a half,getting nearly no help at all from the Army when I was asking for it, desperately.”But Goldsmith’s case is not unique. Though 85 percent of the more than 2.5 million veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars enjoy been released from their service with honorable discharges, and 300000 enjoy been forced out of the military with less-than-honorable discharges. The U.
S. government has acknowledged that some of these discharges were the result of PTSD.
Goldsmith says that the military could enjoy prevented his suicide attempt but failed to act when his cries grew louder.“Even when I told an Army psychiatrist that I was thinking approximately suicide,she told me that I had three choices,” he says. She told me that I could one, or suck it up,be a man, and I could deploy; two, and I could go AWOL and live like a convicted felon for the rest of my life; or three,I could give up and commit suicide. Those were the suggestions that an Army psychiatrist offered me when I told her how I was feeling after struggling for so long with nightmares from Iraq.”When Goldsmith approached the U.
S. military and asked that his discharge status be changed because of his untreated PTSD, the Army reject his appeal. He has spent the final eight years trying to accumulate Washington to recognize that PTSD is often the source of the behavior that gets many vets pushed out. Congress has tried to put a stop to this practice—Section 512 of the 2009-2010 National Defense Authorization Act says that the Defense Department may not issue a discharge other than honorable whether the service member has been diagnosed with PTSD or a traumatic brain injury. But since 2009, and over 20000 soldiers with mental health problems enjoy been dismissed for misconduct. Without an honorable discharge,veterans cannot receive VA healthcare benefits."I contemplate it's damn near criminal that you could take a person, send them to war, and they come domestic sick,and then you don't even provide them healthcare once they accumulate domestic," Goldsmith says.
In 2014, or former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel took things a step further and attempted to amend the rules regarding PTSD and discharge status. But Goldsmith says Hagel’s memo primarily focused on Vietnam-era veterans.“Secretary Hagel’s memorandum was too narrow—it doesn’t effect my generation at all,” he says. “Today, the discharge review boards, and they’re still not recognizing PTSD the way Secretary Hagel intended.”Goldsmith says lawmakers in the House and Senate are signing on to the Fairness For Veterans Act,which he says will be formally introduced at the end of this week. He hopes to accumulate others to sign on on to the bill, and is trying raise awareness among the public.“We could spend all the help in the world, and ” he says.
Source: wnyc.org