Shell Shock: How Do You Identify A Soldier With PTSD?

by Brett Potter
February 16, 2005

Bobby Cook, a retired chaplain for the National Guard, is a veteran of three mobilizations—Vietnam, Bosnia and Afghanistan. However, he was federally mobilized in Vietnam, so he did not perform the duties of a chaplain then.

Cook, who has counseled soldiers from all over the U.S., says that he is very familiar with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in soldiers. "They started to take notice of PTSD in World War II, and it was called Battlefield Stress or Shell Shock. It was really something well known after Vietnam," he told the Jackson Free Press.

"PTSD is something that some guys start suffering from relatively quickly and some much later—maybe even years. It is a disorder that affects their ability to relate to other people and to function and communicate in the normal context in a relationship. A lot of time they become introverts, or they refuse to talk about a particular thing or a group of things that is related to something traumatic that happened to them. If they do talk about it, it usually comes out in the form of anger or a fit, especially in response to a loved one. Any radical change in behavior should make your antennas go up."

Most of the time, Cook said, he has been able to counsel people and work them through their emotional situations. However, if he couldn't help them, he referred them to a combat stress specialist. He says that some guys are even taken off the battlefield and back to mental treatment at the Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, D.C.

Cook says that, most of the time, problems from home are part of the soldier's mental health problems, especially National Guardsmen and Reservists who never really expected to have to go overseas and fight and leave their families for a long period of time. He gives an example from when he was a chaplain in Bosnia.

"It was brought to my attention that a particular officer had appeared to be ignoring his standard duties and responsibilities. Then, we noticed there were inappropriate communications going on between he and other troops. Normally, this guy was cool, calm and collected and was very decent and didn't get excited. But they start noticing he was getting irate, losing control, using profanity and yelling at guys that he worked with and served under him."

"Then," Cook continued, "they called me as a chaplain to talk to this individual and find out what was going on. Through the process, you find out there's all this baggage from back home—he and his wife had been struggling before he left to fight. To add to that, he was responsible for many others' lives because of his rank. He got overloaded and overreacted to something as simple as an automobile backfiring, so I assessed that he was suffering from PTSD and referred him to the health care professionals that help with mental disorders."

Cook asserts that if PTSD goes untreated it can definitely lead to suicide and harming loved ones around the affected person.

To get treatment, a soldier can go to the Veterans' Affairs Hospital here in Jackson. According to Bob Goza, the Calhoun County Veterans' Service Officer, "The VA will treat anything that happened to them while they were in the service for two years after they get back for no cost."

"The problem," he says, "is that the Jackson and Memphis VAs are both crowded. It usually takes three months to get an appointment to see someone, unless they go for urgent care, and some soldiers won't even go for mental health problems much less go for urgent care."

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