"After his diagnosis, Sgt. Boyle was sent to North Carolina's Fort Bragg, an assignment he resented because he thought he should be fighting the war. At Fort Bragg, he was given heavy antidepressants and sleeping aids that he said caused him to oversleep and miss formation on several occasions, a major transgression in the military.
He wanted to return to Iraq to fight, but the medications barred him from more deployments and he became miserable and agitated. Sgt. Boyle went on to spar with commanding officers who, he said, were unaware of his combat experience. He drank heavily, couldn't control his rage and ended up in trouble with the law.
He reached the tipping point when he experienced a flashback while supervising a session at the firing range at Fort Bragg.
'I was supposed to be keeping an eye on [the soldiers], keep them safe and doing the right thing,' Sgt. Boyle recalled. 'At one point, I went into a flashback into a firefight, and I was in Iraq. And during that flashback, I zoned out and forgot what I was doing.
'I snapped out of it and realized I missed the whole firing sequence, and it scared the hell out of me. I can't operate as a soldier if I can't concentrate on a firing range like that. That helped me realize I had to get out.'"
When I read this portion of the aforementioned article I could not help but exclaim "Oh my god" to my computer monitor. What is the worst thing that you can do to a proud soldier with buddies fighting? Take him away from them. It was hard enough for this soldier to come forward to a field stress clinic, but then for them to take him away is harmful. I am not saying that the treatment is not some sort of removal from the fight or the theater of operations. I just know that to the soldier this action makes you useless to your fellow soldiers. In our minds it perpetuates the notion of weakness and adds to the guilt suffered. Guilt is a ruminating condition and when we get on a kick of such it only adds to our depression, which makes the PTSD worse. And as some authors have noted, such as Terrence Real in the book "I Don't Want to Talk About It", depression in men is oftentimes very covert and is displayed by other things, such as heightend aggression and violence. This fits very well with the picture we have of combat veterans and the rise of domestic violence in their homes.
Our warrior ethics propel us to pull our own weight, to not shun from the fight when others are there, to be supportive of our comrades in arms. Everything about this treatment violated this. It must have been very hard for this sergeant to feel like he had a place in the military, that he was still a warrior.
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