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UNSEEN SCARS -- Debbie Camicia really doesn't talk about her

time in Iraq. Debbie has PTSD, and now her family and

fellow veterans are trying to help her find structure.

Debbie Camicia shows hints of her old self, smiling and laid-back, in this photo she had e-mailed to her parents. (photo courtesy of the Camicia family)

For more about veterans and PTSD, use the VA Watchdog search engine... click here...
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earch.php?q=ptsd&op=and

Story here... http://www.roano
ke.com/news/roanoke/wb/180133

Story below:

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Unseen scars

Debbie Camicia really doesn't talk about her time in Iraq. When the Army reservist, stationed at Abu Ghraib, returned home, she still felt confined -- an emotional prison brought on by post-traumatic stress disorder. Her family and fellow veterans have tried to help her find structure.

By Beth Macy

Her parents had no inkling of her suffering. Debbie Camicia had called home regularly during her yearlong assignment as a guard at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

But it was usually the middle of the night, and their conversations were rushed: How were her brother and sister doing? How was her beloved mutt, Peanut?

In a picture she e-mailed, Debbie beamed in front of a Saddam Hussein mural -- his front tooth blackened, the words "THIS PLACE SOXS" scribbled near the Iraqi dictator's sleeve.

In the picture, they could still see the old laid-back Debbie, the chattiest of their three kids, the only girl on her Little League team.

Bob and Margaret Camicia of Franklin County were stunned when their daughter finally arrived home on leave in the fall of 2004. Debbie's eyes darted back and forth, her entire body shook. Riding in the car, Debbie screamed that her mom was driving too fast.

When they asked about Abu Ghraib, where her Army Reserve military police unit was dispatched to restore post-scandal order, Debbie made it clear. In a saying that would become her mantra, she told friends and family alike: "Don't even go there."

Months later, her parents stood by the windows of Roanoke Regional Airport. Debbie was coming home from Iraq for good, and they worried about the civilian life she would be stepping into that gray homecoming day.

With a seriousness that took her parents' breath away, Debbie marched down the steps of the plane, dropped to her knees and kissed the cold, dirty ground.

Few understand

It's been more than three years since Debbie stepped off that plane, and her parents still aren't permitted to go there -- to ask about Iraq. They know the prison where she worked was shelled on a regular basis; that anyone who spent time there lived in perpetual fear.

This is the worst thing they know: The day after a deadly mortar attack on the prison in 2004, Debbie was ordered to pick up body parts of killed detainees. Some of them had known her by name.

That's as far as she'll go with the details -- with her parents, with a newspaper reporter, with people who want to know. As she's fond of telling her mother: "You can't possibly understand."

Her friends at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Salem -- they understand. They range from a 90-year-old who led a D-Day platoon to guys who served in Korea, Vietnam and the first Gulf War. Their average age is 63. Debbie is 36.

Across the country, VA centers are ramping up services for post-traumatic stress disorder in anticipation of the younger generation of vets returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Many, including Debbie, were citizen soldiers, part-timers with the National Guard or Reserve who report an even higher incidence of mental-health problems than their active-duty comrades.

"We are just scratching the surface of the numbers we'll be seeing -- there are folks over there now on their second, third, fourth, fifth deployments," says Lynn McGhee, a counselor for the Veterans Outreach Center in Roanoke's Old Southwest.

According to a recent Rand Corp. study, roughly one in five soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan displays symptoms of PTSD, putting them at a higher risk for suicide. Even more chilling: Ira Katz, the mental health director for the VA, said in widely reported e-mails earlier this year that 18 veterans commit suicide each day, five of whom are under VA care.

Fight or flight

When nurseryman James Lugumira met Debbie at the VA's greenhouse, she was already in counseling for PTSD. She was also being treated for multiple sclerosis, which erupted near the end of her yearlong tour. (While her parents aren't sure if Debbie's MS is related to her service -- "I've asked myself that many times," Bob Camicia says -- they know that stress and heat are common triggers, and a disproportionate number of veterans of the first Gulf War have developed the disease.)

Lugumira, a Ugandan-born immigrant and a U.S. Army veteran, is known by customers for his lilting accent and impeccable manners -- a trademark of his Bantu culture, as he tells visitors, most of whom are quite charmed.

Not so Debbie. When she was sent to him for plant therapy, Debbie refused to speak.

It had been that way since the family wedding reception in West Virginia, shortly after her return from Iraq in 2005. Children popped balloons. People shouted and danced.

Her fight-or-flight instincts on full alert, Debbie sobbed hysterically: "Dad, you have to get me out of here!" Back at their hotel, Bob Camicia had to tranquilize his daughter.

From that moment on, it was clear: Debbie needed order. Debbie needed purpose -- beyond potting and watering plants. She longed for her old job on the Staunton police force, something that would make use of her criminal justice degree.

But brain lesions caused by the MS affected her short-term memory. And driving through town one day, Debbie spotted a man fixing a roof -- and immediately dived onto the floorboard of her car.

Another veteran filled her in on Lugumira: He's one of us. He had served with the Army in Jordan and Somalia, and later as a volunteer, with tribal forces in Rwanda. When he was a teenager, his parents were killed by former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin's thugs.

Lugumira didn't talk much about what he'd seen or done, either. But he was as calm as Debbie was edgy.

"Before, I was like Debbie," Lugumira says. "In college, I didn't laugh. I was serious, very suspicious. But I've gone through too much to let little things bother me."

Like that neighbor's souped-up car, the one with the loud, backfiring muffler. Sometimes that drives Debbie so crazy that she has to call Lugumira on his cellphone to help her calm down.

"I'm trying to be more like him," she says. She bought a book of Ugandan proverbs. She has started reading the Bible from beginning to end.

She lets slip another detail from Iraq: At dusk, the prison guards played the Muslim call to prayers over loudspeakers for the inmates. A detainee she was friendly with asked her a question about the Bible -- something to do with Abraham -- and Debbie was stumped.

"I felt like an idiot," she says. "I found myself up in the tower with my gun and my Gideon Bible, and I said I'm going to do something for my Christian faith."

Not long after she returned from Iraq, Debbie had someone burn the shape of a cross into her upper arm. The brand is the size of a lemon, and the first time Margaret Camicia spotted it she freaked.

"I can't even go there with her about that," Margaret Camicia says.

Home away from home

This is Debbie's routine: At 9 a.m., she arrives at the VA's main clinic, where she does an hour or so of KT -- kinesiotherapy. The drill includes stretches, aerobic machines and weights, under the tutelage of rehab specialist Harlen Gudger.

When she first started KT, Debbie depended on crutches -- her first post-deployment attack of MS had left her partly paralyzed. But as soon as Gudger saw she could walk without the crutches, he made her throw them out.

KT helped retrain her muscles, but it was the fellow vets in the KT room who did the most for Debbie's mental state.

There was Willard Norfleet, 90, a D-Day hero who'd become a grandfather figure. Debbie talked to him as he rode the stationary bike and made sure the greeters in the lobby kept an eye on him when his son dropped him off before work. Norfleet, who wore colorful ties on his visits to the VA, died Thursday.

There's Keith Sears, an Air Force veteran who wears a prosthetic leg. He and Debbie like to hike parts of the Appalachian Trail together -- Sears, with the help of crutches and Debbie, whose balance is still at times wobbly, with the help of Sears.

There's Chuck Blackwell, one of her best buddies, a career Marine who served during the Vietnam War. Legally blind from a stroke, Blackwell has just recently come to terms with what he calls "my anger management issues."

He's trying to persuade his Marine-reservist son, who served a year in Iraq, to face his issues, too.

"But I don't have PTSD," the son tells him.

"How do you know?"

"Because I'm a Marine!"

It's that supermacho thing; Blackwell knows the syndrome well. "When you're a Marine, you think you can walk across water and through a wall," he says during lunch at the VA canteen, where he and Debbie eat together most days.

As it has frequently since it happened, the subject of Micah Brentford Sword's death arises. He's the 24-year-old killed by police in March. A two-tour veteran of Iraq, Sword had opened fire on two police officers and a sheriff's deputy after a high-speed chase on U.S. 220 in Roanoke County. Debbie's parents and friends both discuss the tragedy with a kind of there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I.

"PTSD, it had to be," Debbie says, shaking her head. While the cause of Sword's meltdown has not been publicly confirmed, Blackwell agrees. Here's why: He was walking across the VA grounds not long ago with a friend from group therapy, a recent Iraq war returnee. When a nearby lawn tractor backfired, the young man dived into the nearest bush.

"I thought I was right back in Iraq," he told Blackwell when he emerged, still shaking. "If I could've gotten my hands on the guy driving that mower, I would have killed him, I swear."

Bulldogged benefits

Margaret Camicia doesn't understand Debbie's attachment to the VA. She wants her to get some friends her own age. And whatever happened to girlfriends? Every woman needs those.

Her parents worry about her, especially since the VA doctor took a deep breath and in the nicest language possible told Debbie that she was "unemployable."

But the Camicias read the soldier obits. They know the stories about lost limbs and traumatic brain injuries -- vets who are damaged beyond repair. "Compared to that, what Debbie's dealing with is a blip on the screen," Margaret Camicia says.

Debbie lives independently now, thanks largely to her parents, who bought her a home in Roanoke's Virginia Heights and still check on her most days. It was her father, a Smith Mountain Lake civic leader and retired Alcatel executive, who helped Debbie navigate the VA medical system and repeatedly went to bat to win her a full disability claim.

More than a year after doctors declared her unemployable, Debbie's check was still just 30 percent of the standard full disability benefit. With the help of advocates from the Disabled American Veterans, Bob Camicia appealed and got it upped, incrementally over the course of another year, to 90 percent.

"I told them at the VA, 'We are supporting her. We don't mind, and we can do it. But it's not fair, and we're not going to be around forever.' "

He worries more about the modest-income vets who don't have a business-savvy advocate to bulldog the system: "If you come back and you're sick ... you'll go bankrupt long before you're able to get the government's help," he says.

Dr. Dana Holohan, who directs the VA's Center for Traumatic Stress, nods her head when she hears of Camicia's complaint. "I wish everyone had someone like that," she says. "I think that process is often slow and quite difficult."

Complaints about bureaucratic delays at the VA are nothing new, Lynn McGhee says, but "the military has gotten a lot better than it used to be" about educating soldiers on re-entry issues.

McGhee is most concerned about the recent returnees with PTSD who have not yet requested help -- only half of eligible returning vets have even enrolled with the VA so far, he estimates. And it can take years for PTSD to hit.

"A lot of the information they get on PTSD is when they're being out-processed, and they don't retain it; they're just focused on going home," McGhee says. "You've just had the most traumatic experience of your life, and to come back and just act like it didn't happen, that's the insanity of it."

Setting an example

It's midday at the VA, a crisp late-summer day. Debbie brings Lugumira a Danish pastry from the canteen and, sitting next to the greenhouse, she watches him water plants.

"You'll never guess what happened to me yesterday," he tells her. "See that plant right there?"

It's a hibiscus, a tall spiky plant, one of the perennial varieties; Lugumira has one just like it in his back yard.

Apparently, someone in the neighborhood spotted it not long ago -- and called police. An officer paid him a house call to see if the rumor was true: That African immigrant, the one with all the plants, was he growing marijuana?

Lugumira chuckled and cut the female officer a stalk to take back to headquarters.

Debbie is horrified. "Ten bucks, she was right out of the academy," she snaps. "I mean, weren't you ticked off?!"

Lugumira laughs. In Uganda, when people disappeared, everyone knew immediately their fate. In Rwanda, dead bodies floated past him on the River Kagera; he found slaughtered women and children in every third house.

"Mad at this?" he says to Debbie. "Mad at what?

"This, you see, I have already forgotten about."

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