Debbie Wilson's Family Brain Injury Blog: Survivor of war, victim of ...

When police found James Veth, the 25-year-old Marine was slumped over a desk in his room at a homeless shelter. White foam was puddled around his mouth. A DVD was still playing. A cell phone lay just beyond his reach.

The body was taken to the Essex County medical examiner, who concluded what everyone already knew. Lance Cpl. James Veth died in December of a heroin overdose.

His is an old story and a new story. Veterans have come home from war in similar condition for thousands of years, but in 2012, in a country spending billions to help soldiers, they still slip through everyone?s fingertips, leaving behind regret and recrimination.

There are statistics for suicides, suicide attempts, violent crimes committed by veterans and those diagnosed with mental illness. They are all staggering and well-reported. This is a story of a man who won?t be counted in any study.

At the Community Hope homeless shelter, run out of the YMCA on Broad Street in Newark, some say not enough was done to keep watch. For the family, Veth?s decline was a horror story. A beloved son who became a phantom in their midst for most of the five years since he returned home from Iraq, traumatized from a shrapnel wound to the head.

Veth, an only child, grew up in view of Atlantic Highlands Harbor amid lots of uncles, aunts and cousins. He was one of the older cousins and always made time for the younger ones, horsing around, listening to their stories, his family said.

He talked about becoming a police officer and wanted to be involved with others, said Deborah Dailey, Veth?s mother. He wanted to do something where he could help people.

Galvanized by the Sept. 11 attacks, he enlisted in the military two months after graduating from Middletown High School North in 2003. In Iraq, Veth was a motor vehicle specialist stationed at Al Asad Air Base, a convoy hub, in Anbar province, about 100 miles west of Baghdad.

Veth never discussed much of what he saw or did. His family, struggling to make sense of their loss, has had to guess or invent a narrative that helps justify his transformation.

His Aunt Mary Millan once told him that his cousins would be so excited when he returned home. They looked up to him, she said.

"Did you tell them I am a murderer?" he asked.

Veth, in fact, never told his aunt if he was a murderer, and it would be years before he confided to his mother he had killed in Iraq.

There was a skeleton tattooed on his upper right arm with initials beneath it. They stood for the names of friends he had lost, he told his mother. He had seen them die, had stood in their blood, he told her. But these anecdotes were incomplete.

It seemed as if he were trying to recount a dream he only partly remembered. He wouldn?t talk about what happened. He couldn?t fully describe what he had seen, couldn?t discuss what he felt.

He would say, "If I tell you, you?ll think I?m a monster," Dailey said.

FEELING UNWORTHY

Ray Scurfield, a Vietnam veteran and professor emeritus at the University of Southern Mississippi who is co-editing two books about returning veterans, said he has seen soldiers return and feel unworthy because of what they have done.

"They feel like they don?t deserve help," he said. "They want to be punished."

Veth, to many of those closest to him, appeared to fit that model. He also was terrified of being judged, his mother said.

Veth returned to the States in 2006 after suffering a traumatic brain injury when a piece of shrapnel from an improvised explosive device cut into his head.

For the first year he was fine, Dailey said. Then he changed.

He became introverted, dark, quick-tempered, frustrated and lonely.

"The whole look of my child was different," Dailey said. "He was afraid of his own temper."

Jack McFadden, a veterans counselor for Family Service of Morris County, said it is typical for symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder to begin a year to 18 months after a veteran returns home.

At night, Veth lurked around the house. He always wanted the blinds closed and would tell his mother not to drive so close to cars in traffic.

"He was always on high alert," Dailey said. "That?s the best way I can describe it."

Veth turned to alcohol and marijuana as a way to cope, another familiar story, McFadden said.

"It?s the emotional shock of combat," he said. "They?ll deaden it with the alcohol. You can?t be in combat and not get shocked down to your cells. That?s the truth."

Through all this, Veth refused to talk and no one could reach him. One relative later said it was like "he slipped through our fingers."

Veth?s behavior became more erratic. The fights with his mother increased in frequency and intensity.

In June 2010, Dailey found a bullet on the dashboard of her car.

"What?s this?" she asked her son.

"That?s all it takes, Mom," he said. "That?s all it takes for me to kill you."

Dailey called his Department of Veterans Affairs advocate, who called the authorities. Police arrived and took Veth to the crisis center at Monmouth Medical Center in Long Branch.

He saw a series of counselors through the VA, but, according to the family, found them lacking. There was no consistency, he told his mother. He had to see a different doctor each time and the waits could be long. The doctors didn?t understand him. They were too old, or they were women, or they had never been in combat.

"That?s very common," Scurfield said. "Most veterans believe that no one can understand, or the only people who can understand are people who have been where they have been, the same war, doing the same thing."

The government has acknowledged the problem and announced a plan last month to ameliorate a critical shortage of mental health specialists.

Veth, meanwhile, continued to go through fits and starts. He tried welding school in Florida but couldn?t make it work. He returned to New Jersey last summer and fell into old habits ? drugs, alcohol. He was losing control and asked to be taken to the crisis center at Monmouth Medical. From there, his family said, he was transferred to the VA hospital in East Orange, where he was kept in the psychiatric ward for three weeks. His shoe laces were taken from him. But the intense care seemed to help. He was sober and upbeat.

"My child was back," Dailey said. "He breathed air for the first time in weeks."

THE MOVE TO NEWARK

On Dec. 8, Veth moved into the YMCA on Broad Street in Newark. The plan was to stay there until a bed opened at the VA?s Lyons campus in Somerset County, which has long-term care programs. Dailey helped her son move into his small, well-lit single room. They hugged, they kissed.

"He told me how much he loved me," Dailey said.

Her son would be dead in four days.

Community Hope?s program for veterans in Newark is a short-term transitional housing service. Its goal is to provide basic needs ? food, shelter, clothing ? and get veterans off the street and into a longer-term care program, said Julia Ahmet, vice president of development at Community Hope. It is a place meant for homeless veterans to take their first step.

"We don?t do personal searches," said Ahmet. "We are accepting individuals whether or not they?ve gone through a rehab program and that?s what makes this program so important and so needed because you have got to help that veteran get off the street and get services."

Veterans who want to get help, get their life back in order, have the opportunity to begin the process.

And veterans who want a safe place to sleep while they continue their drug habit can do that as well.

"Drugs are more readily available than help is," said John Webster, a former resident. "In Newark, you know what spots you can go to score."

Warren Ellis said he befriended Veth when he arrived and said the YMCA was a prime target for dealers.

"If you wanted to get reefer you can get it right on the outside, if you wanted to get heroin you can get it right on the outside," he said. "It?s like open shopping."

The night before Veth died, Ellis says he alerted staff that something wasn?t right with Veth.

Ellis, and a veteran named Milan, who asked that his last name not be used to protect his family, said the staff ignored their pleas for help.

Community Hope, citing privacy concerns, declined to discuss Veth?s death, but J. Michael Armstrong, a veteran and CEO of Community Hope, provided a general statement. "The death of any veteran is truly regrettable, especially the young veterans who have nobly served our country in Iraq and Afghanistan," Armstrong said.

When Veth missed his counseling session at 9 the following morning the staff assumed he had just overslept, said Carla Alexander-Reilley, the program coordinator who was fired soon after Veth?s death.

"When you are the head, they are going to get rid of the head," she said, "but this tragedy could have been prevented."

That?s what everyone wants to think ? his family, his friends, those who only knew him for the four days he spent at Community Hope ? because there is something about this story that still feels wrong.

SAYING GOODBYE

Nearly seven months after Veth died, about 60 family and friends gathered for a burial at sea. They boarded the Sea Tiger II, a 70-foot party fishing boat that docks at Atlantic Highlands Harbor, in view of the home where Veth grew up.

The mood was light until the engines were cut and the ceremony began. The boat rocked gently on a calm sea as a poem, a psalm and a prayer were read.

Veth?s ashes were inside a blue papier-m?ch? clamshell. Dailey, who had been composed throughout the evening, began to weep when the shell was brought out and placed on the railing at the back of the boat. She touched her hand to her lips and then placed that hand on the shell. She kissed his dog tags, which hung around her neck.

Beneath the pinkening sky of a summer sunset, Veth?s closest relatives said their last goodbyes. And then it was time to cast him to the sea. Dailey stood, shaking as she picked up the clamshell. She was flanked by her brother and sister.

She held the clamshell at the edge of the boat and looked over the water. She paused.

"That?s my boy," she said softly. "I don?t know if I can do it."

Her family stayed with her, holding her, supporting her.

She tossed her son into Sandy Hook Bay.

Petty Officer 2nd Class Michael Allen approached and presented Dailey with a United States flag.

"On behalf of the president of the United States, the commandant of the Marine Corps, and a grateful nation ?"

Source: http://noahsarkconsulting.blogspot.com/2012/07/survivor-of-war-victim-of-demons-vets.html

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