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AFTER IRAQ: NEBRASKA GUARDSMAN FINDS IT HARD TO

PUT HORRORS BEHIND HIM -- They fight post-traumatic

stress and lingering brain injuries. Some abuse alcohol.

Others seek out danger to revive the excitement of combat.

 

 

For more on PTSD, use the VA Watchdog search engine...click here...
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Story below:

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After Iraq: Guardsman finds it hard to put horrors behind him

BY C. DAVID KOTOK
WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER

Snipers, mortar attacks, roadside bombings. The soldiers from the Nebraska Army National Guard's Troop A, 1st Squadron, 167th Cavalry survived it all during a year in the insurgent stronghold of Ramadi, Iraq. Last summer, the soldiers came home. After a quick round of medical exams and paperwork, they were back with families, back to regular jobs. But scars remain as some soldiers struggle with problems afflicting thousands of Iraq vets. They fight post-traumatic stress and lingering brain injuries. Some abuse alcohol. Others seek out danger to revive the excitement of combat. For the past year, The World-Herald has chronicled seven soldiers' return to civilian life. This week, we're sharing their stories.

GRAND ISLAND, Neb. - When Joel Hestermann returned after a year in Iraq, counselors at the Army's Camp Shelby, Miss., warned him to get help.

They told Hestermann that he had gone through too much combat to step straight back into civilian life.

They also wanted Hestermann, 33, to stay at the base to undergo a more thorough medical examination of a recent shrapnel wound.

But after a year in Ramadi, the National Guard staff sergeant and Grand Island police officer had had enough.

"All of us said no," Hestermann recalls. "Everybody was ready to go home."

"Hesty" figured he was too tough to succumb to any mental strain.

He'd been tough enough and sharp enough to be one of four soldiers from Troop A, 1st Squadron, 167th Cavalry chosen for sniper training. It's a job where the patience to wait out the enemy is as important as the marksmanship to kill in a single shot.

He was tough enough and sharp enough to be selected for the Grand Island Police SWAT team and anti-gang unit.

Tough enough - and crazy enough - that his wife, Jennifer, had a new Harley-Davidson motorcycle waiting in the driveway back home.

The 5-foot-6 fireplug of a man, who can bench press 365 pounds, is tough.

But he realizes today that his toughness wasn't enough to fight off the war's effects. The counselors' warnings he scoffed at ring true.

First, Hestermann was diagnosed last winter with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, an anxiety disorder. That helped explain the nightmares, depression and sleeplessness.

Then, a brain scan found black spots left from internal bleeding, which explained the headaches. Doctors call it traumatic brain injury. It's caused by shock waves from a nearby explosion.

His marriage to Jennifer is on the rocks. He moved out months ago. The new motorcycle was sold to help pay the bills and keep his two children in their house.

Department of Veterans Affairs doctors rate his military-related disability at 80 percent.

But the tough guy reports for work every day with the police department. He shows up for monthly Guard drills.

Does he wish he had followed the early warnings from the counselors at Camp Shelby?

"I still wouldn't do it," he says.

In Iraq, when a dangerous assignment required agility and mental toughness, Hestermann often got the call.

During an October 2005 mission, he was standing on the brigade commander's shoulders, clutching the top of a mud-and-rock wall, scanning for insurgents in a Ramadi neighborhood.

The wall crumbled. The colonel's hold on Hestermann's legs gave way. Tumbling to the ground, Hestermann broke his wrist.

Recuperation took nine weeks. Hestermann considered it hell because he was confined to the base. When he returned to combat duty, he commanded the lead Humvee for Troop A's 1st Platoon, code-named Wolverine.

When suicide bombers attacked the Ramadi Glass Factory, killing dozens of Iraqi police recruits, Hestermann was one of four soldiers assigned to investigate the carnage.

Blood and body parts were strewn around the building. The dead included Lt. Col. Michael E. McLaughlin, the brigade's well-liked "Colonel Mac."

Hesty's lieutenant and the men in his platoon all thought he was tough enough and mature enough to assess the grisly scene.

He stayed tough until the end.

Less than a week before heading home, Hestermann accompanied a Marine bomb squad sent to disarm an improvised explosive device - something he had done more than a hundred times before.

It exploded.

"I was too close," Hestermann says.

A piece of shrapnel lodged in his muscular shoulder. This explosion also probably sent the invisible shock waves that caused some brain injury.

Wounded again and with only days left in Iraq, Hestermann said to himself: "I'm not going out anymore."

At the Hastings Guard Armory 11 months later, Hestermann received the Purple Heart for that shrapnel wound. He could be eligible for two more - if he chooses to push the paperwork.

Back in Grand Island, Hestermann still looks for action.

On a recent patrol, he scanned the streets, parks and alleys, looking for gang members. Six distinct gangs, including Hispanic, white and Somali, have been identified in the city.

A couple of guys on a corner flashed gang signs after Hesty's police cruiser passed, unaware that the trained combat scout had picked them up in his passenger side mirror.

Hestermann and Officer Jeff McConnell, a fellow Guard soldier who was shot through the calf by a Ramadi sniper, are highly regarded within the police department, says Chief Steve Lankin.

Both are SWAT team members. McConnell, who retired from the National Guard this year after 20 years, mentors fresh police recruits.

Hestermann is involved in the community, as well. He sat on a billboard at Christmastime to raise $10,000 for the Special Olympics. He's working to develop a three-on-three basketball league to help keep young people from gang life.

And on the job, Hestermann remains the cool professional. The night of July 9, three police officers shot a 61-year-old man to death in an exchange of gunfire. Hestermann was there, weapon ready.

But as the man came off his porch with a gun, Hestermann showed the discipline and level-headedness that won him respect in Ramadi and Grand Island.

Although he had a shot, Hestermann followed police procedure and did not take it, because other officers might have moved into his line of fire.

Both Hestermann and McConnell "are back in the flow," the police chief says. "We are glad to have them on the streets of Grand Island. . . . They are both doing well."

Hestermann and McConnell aren't always sure.

Not once after joining the police force in November 2000 was Hestermann the target of a citizen complaint. Since returning to work in July 2006, six complaints have accused him of being overly aggressive or abrasive.

Cautions from supervisors came because he was at bars late when fights broke out among other patrons.

In retrospect, Hestermann says, he probably returned to work too soon after coming home.

Yet after only a three-week layoff, "I was going nuts. I needed to get back on the street quickly - but it was probably way too quick."

Home life proved a struggle. Hestermann had been away from Jennifer and their two children for 2½ of the previous five years because of Guard deployments to Bosnia and then Iraq.

All the thoughts, flashbacks and nightmares about his experience were kept bottled up. He didn't confide in Jennifer, his sweetheart since high school. War stories weren't shared with other police officers.

Even when he was with McConnell, they didn't talk about Ramadi. Other people were always around.

His police schedule didn't help in rekindling romance or making enough time for his kids. His swing shift is 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. Saturday through Tuesday, and Wednesday from 2 p.m. to 10 p.m.

"I've been gone from home way too much with the military and the police department," Hestermann said. "It doesn't help a marriage."

The one time he talked with Jennifer about his war experiences came late one night after a lot of drinking. He telephoned from South Carolina, where he was attending a military leadership school, working toward promotion to sergeant first class.

Jennifer Hestermann was active in Troop A's family support group during the soldiers' six months of training and year of combat. Family members had been warned about PTSD, and she thought she knew what to expect.

"I had a lot of support" from family, friends and co-workers in the Hall County Sheriff's Office during the long separation, Jennifer wrote in an e-mail. "But they could only imagine what it was like.

"The family support group helped keep some of us going," she wrote. "The issues that we all were dealing with, only people in our shoes could fully understand."

Eventually, Joel Hestermann turned to the Department of Veterans Affairs for help. He spent five days at the VA Medical Center in Omaha in February for treatment of PTSD.

But he felt he spent too much time sitting around waiting for his sessions with the VA's psychiatrists and therapists. He prefers his current regimen of going to counseling in Grand Island twice a week, finding it more helpful than inpatient VA sessions.

Antidepressant medication was prescribed to help him handle the mood swings common with PTSD. Hestermann decided to stop taking it.

The cop in him worries that a defense lawyer could use the fact that he's on medication to help free a gang member. Hestermann doesn't consider a shift a success without bringing in at least one gang member with an outstanding warrant.

As is common with many who suffer from PTSD, Hestermann self-medicates: Captain Morgan rum and Coke are his sleeping potion.

The adjustment from soldier to civilian has been hard, Hestermann says, but he pushes on.

"One minute you are in a firefight and then - BAM! - you are right back in civilian life. . . . You are expected to go back to normal life way before you are acclimated."

Hestermann is making one more try at normal, with the annual Sturgis, S.D., Motorcycle Rally as inspiration.

During a lost week in Sturgis, Hestermann decided he wanted to give his marriage one more shot. This weekend, with the kids at the grandparents', he came home.

"Hopefully it will go good," Hestermann said on his way to dinner with Jennifer. "I'm not sure yet."

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Troop A's honors

Combat awards for the soldiers of the Nebraska Army National Guard's Troop A, 1st Squadron, 167th Cavalry:

2 Bronze Stars with Valor for heroic achievement with valor in a single engagement.

6 Bronze Stars for heroic or meritorious achievement or service.

13 Purple Hearts for being wounded in action.

12 Army Commendation Medals with Valor for acts of heroism involving conflict with an armed enemy.

59 Army Commendation Medals for heroism, meritorious achievement or meritorious service.

2 Combat Infantryman Badges for active combat with enemy.

44 Combat Action Badges for engaging the enemy in combat.

Source: Troop A records

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Larry Scott  --