Sad days for poets, writers, and historians in Washington, D.C.

A. Friend (not a real name) told me that she and her husband are traveling to Washington, D.C., this week to see the National Museum of African-American History. They want to visit it before the Trump people purge the exhibits and dismantle the building. A. Friend is not a Trump voter, not even a person undergoing what MAGA calls Trump Derangement Syndrome or TDS. She and her husband are just regular folks who visit museums and art galleries and historic sites during their travels. Over the years, she has sent me postcards from sites I never knew existed and I am the richer for it. 

Trump's Nitwits have already purged some of the exhibits from this museum. They have never met a museum they didn't suspect of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion or DIE which is an ironic acronym on its face. MAGA terms it DEI because, well IED was taken (Boom!) and IDE was too close to "Beware the Ides of March" which sounds too Shakespearean which might remind Idiocrats of a college English class they were forced to take in 1997. 

I wish A. Friend and her husband Godspeed and good luck. Make sure to take your REAL ID with you just in case there is an ICE sweep on the National Mall.

More bad news from D.C.: Trump's goons have eliminated the National Endowment for the Arts Literary Program and canned its staff including Director Amy Stolls whom I have worked with. The administration had already rescinded grants to literary magazines and presses whose only crime was admitting to DIE. 

I am going to list them here because I have read some of their books and they might not have existed with the writer's non-profit publisher, often hanging on by a shoestring. Here are the names:   Alice James Books, Aunt Lute Books, BOA Editions, the Center for the Art of Translation, Deep Vellum, Four Way Books, Hub City Writers Project, Open Letter Books, Milkweed Editions, Nightboat Books, Red Hen Press, and Transit Books as well as such literary magazines Electric Literature, McSweeney’s, n+1, the Paris Review, and Zyzzyva.

I have read books from many of these presses. I will mention one. Brian Turner's first book of poetry was published by Alice James Books. Poet, essayist, and professor Turner won the 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award for his debut collection, Here, Bullet, the first of many awards and honors received for this collection of poems about his experience as a soldier in the Iraq War. His honors since include a Lannan Literary Fellowship and NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry, and the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship. His second collection, shortlisted for the 2010 T.S. Eliot Prize, is Phantom Noise, also published by Alice James Books on New Gloucester, Maine, a teeming metropolis filled with radical outfits such as the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Community, Pineland Farms, and the New Gloucester Fair. And one publisher. 

Brian's bio a pretty standard description of a contemporary American poet. But what's that part about the Iraq War? Oh yeah, Turner is a U.S. Army veteran, and was an infantry team leader for a year in the Iraq War beginning November 2003, with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. In 1999 and 2000 he was with the historic 10th Mountain Division, deployed in Bosnia and Herzegovina. 

"Here, Bullet" knocked me out. The title poem will tell you more about war's realities than any non-fiction book. Go to the Alice James web site and buy the book. Better yet, buy all of his books and e-books which include individual poems. 

During my time as literature program specialist at the Wyoming Arts Council, I brought Brian to our fall 2012 writing conference in Casper to read from his work and congratulate the writers he had chosen for the WAC's literary fellowships. Later, he joined two other veteran writers on a panel to discuss the role of soldier/poet in "Active Duty, Active Voices," featured Iraq War veterans and writers Brian Turner and Luis Carlos Montalván. The panel was moderated by Casper College professor and military veteran Patrick Amelotte. Montalvan suffered from severe PTSD and wrote the wonderful memoir "Until Tuesday: A Wounded Warrior and the Golden Retriever Who Saved Him." He brought Tuesday with him to Casper that October weekend. I worked with the state's military coordinator to bring other service dogs and their handlers to the conference to demonstrate what they do. 

I wish I could just end this blog with another Liberal's complaint about our current situation. But I have a sad story to tell. In December 2016, the 43-year-old Montalvan was found dead in an El Paso hotel room. He had left his dog Tuesday with a friend. He killed himself and was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery. Delivering the eulogy was Democratic Sen. Al Franken. Montalvan had persuaded Franken to sponsor legislation expanding the military dog program which passed a different Congress during different times. 

During his time in Casper, Montalvan said his favorite poem growing up conservative Cuban in South Florida was "Invictus." You know the one. It celebrates bravery. William Ernest Hanley wrote it and it's always been a favorite to memorize because it rhymes and is in iambic tetrameter. Montalvan memorized it. It ends this way: "I am the master of my fate/I am the captain of my soul."

Rest in peace, Captain.

It's a perfect day for Bananafish, until it isn't

Just one more thing about Jerome Charyn and J.D. Salinger...

In "Sergeant Salinger," the author stresses Salinger's "battle fatigue" (PTSD) which is a major part of the story. But not all. Charyn writes that some of the signs were there as a youth. An unusual boy with loads of imagination and talent. He struggled in school. First he was in a NYC public school that he liked and then went to a private academy when his father started being successful and moved to Park Avenue. He struggled here. His parents pulled him out, enrolled him in a military school in Pennsylvania where he thrived. The discipline and routine was good for him. It appears he had the makings of a soldier at an early age. And he was a good soldier in the war although a bit unorthodox. His teen years also gave signs of genius and mental health challenges. 

I bring this up because some experts have traced many cases to PTSD to a soldier's early life. Maybe they had trouble learning or maybe they were just a bit off-kilter. What would he have been like without his war experiences? Who knows? But he did and he was a recluse and very careful with his privacy and reputation. Not everything he wrote later in life was as good as "Nine Stories" and "Catcher in the Rye." He joins a long line of writers who hit it big early on and then not so much. Jerome Charyn, on the other hand, just keeps getting better at 86. 

I have no first-hand knowledge of military service and combat. But good books and movies can impart some of that experience. Charyn does it in this novel. Vietnam vet writers such as Tim O'Brien and Larry Heinemann and Bill Ehrhart and Yusef Komunyakaa do it in print. It took flyer Joseph Heller 17 years to write and then publish "Catch-22." It took Kurt Vonnegut even longer to serve up the Dresden firebombing in "Slaughterhouse Five." Silent movie film director W.S. Murnau took his years as a World War I German combat pilot and created a monstrous creature in "Nosferatu." J.R.R. Tolkien transferred the horror of the trenches into a blighted netherworld called Mordor with its pitched battles and fiery pits and humans adrift in murky holes -- you know, The Somme, July 1916. 

"No soldier ever really survives a war" -- Audie Murphy

Make that two more things...

In a chapter near the end of "Sargeant Salinger," Sonny Salinger and his sister Doris vacation at the Plaza Hotel in Daytona Beach, Fla. The Plaza was a post-war vacation destination for Northerners. It was best known for the tunnel motorists blasted through to get to "The World's Most Famous Beach," back when you could drive freely on it. That was my introduction to the Atlantic Ocean when our father drove us through it on our first day in Daytona. 

In the novel, Sonny breaks away from his sister's watchful eye and joins some kids making sandcastles on the beach. The kids eye him suspiciously as he joins in, shows them some techniques he perfected during family trips to Daytona. A concerned mother fetches her kids and eventually Doris fetches her brother. Nothing is mentioned about bananafish but you can see the beginnings of the short story. 

This became my beach in the late 60s, from the Plaza down to Hartford approach where we surfed. The only thing I knew about Salinger then is that I had to read "Catcher in the Rye" for English class. We chatted up girls, played frisbee and made sandcastles when the surf was flat, as we used to say. We eventually headed home and off to our night jobs at restaurants and hotels. My mind was mostly on surf and girls, getting enough pay for gas so we could find surf when none was to be found in Daytona.

Next time I visit Daytona to see family and friends, I'm going to the beach in front of the Plaza and try to see what Salinger saw. I know now that writers see things others don't. I may spot a bananafish struggling to get out of a hole in the ocean because it got too fat eating underwater bananas.

"Sergeant Salinger" by Jerome Charyn will rip your heart out

I was gobsmacked by an historical novel written about a famous author’s experiences in World War II.

“Sergeant Salinger” by Jerome Charyn is about J.D. Salinger, the most reclusive of American authors. His war experiences and the PTSD that followed helps explain why he kept his distance from his fellow humans for most of his adult life.

But that’s not the whole story. We first meet Salinger as a young single on the make in New York City. He dates Oona O’Neil, the vampish daughter of playwright Eugene O’Neill, and hangs out at the Stork Club with the likes of Walter Winchell and famous people we recognize by their last names or nicknames. Papa “Hem” Hemingway is one of them. Salinger writes radio scripts and short stories and readers like them but they are nothing to write home about. The letters home come later when he has something to say.

Salinger gets drafted even though he’d been previously diagnosed with a heart murmur. It’s the spring of ’42 and Uncle Sam needs everybody, even “half-Jewish writers with heart murmurs.” You’d think that Salinger (he goes by the nickname Sonny) would land in a cushy stateside job writing press releases or speeches for generals. What happens is something horrific and unexpected, even for someone like me who knows Salinger’s stories of PTSD veterans (“For Esme with Love and Squalor” and “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”). Salinger told these stories from the inside out. The author’s “Nine Stories” broke my heart when I first read them all in my 20s. Another heartbreaking story about returning vets is “Hemingway’s “A Soldier’s Story.” In “Sergeant Salinger,” there’s a scene when a jaded Hem visits Salinger in a Nuremberg psych ward and calls his own story “amateurish.” Hem groused that everything was behind him. He published “The Old Man and the Sea” in 1952 and it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and Nobel Prize in 1954.

Lest you think Charyn has employed his magnificent storytelling skills to make it all up, think again. I did too. Until Part One: Slapton Sands, the section that follows Prelude: Oona. Salinger is a Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) NCO, who accompanies invading troops to interview prisoners and others who might spill the beans on Nazi war plans. He speaks German. He’s been drilled in all the tricks of the interrogator’s trade. While preparing for the D-Day landings, he’s witness to one of the army’s biggest tragedies. In a practice run for Normandy on Lyme Bay on the Channel side of England, a live-fire exercise goes astray and German’s Kriegsmarine speedboats sneak in an torpedo LSTs, spilling overloaded troops into the ocean. There are 749 casualties, some interred in mass graves, and Charyn documents it.

I told myself this couldn’t possibly happen. I looked it up. It happened. That’s when I knew we were off on a wild ride. We go to Utah Beach on June 6, 1944. Salinger is in the thick of it with the Fourth Division. They get into hedgerow battles with dug-in German troops and 82^nd Airborne “sky soldiers” (paratroopers) who are keen to even the score with Nazis who shot their comrades out of the sky when they dropped into the wrong spot. I looked that up too and it was much more gruesome than featured in “The Longest Day,” book or movie. Anywhere, for that matter.

Kudos to Charyn for doing his homework. He is a brilliant writer, one I’ve liked since getting hooked on his Inspector Isaac Sidel novels. We are in the shit with Salinger all the way through occupation duty in Germany. And he comes home which we all know. Salinger humped his “Catcher in the Rye” manuscript through Europe and wrote until he couldn’t write any more. The novel ends with the manuscript in his tiny retreat on Sleepy Hollow Lane, a street that Salinger invents because of its locale near the setting of the famous Washington Irving story. Nobody but family can find him there. Until he finishes his war-battered manuscript and it becomes a best seller. "Catcher in the Rye" still makes waves. 

Publisher is Bellevue Literary Press of New York, a small press with origins at Bellevue Hospital, noted for its Psychiatric Unit (the Ghostbusters were interned there, briefly) and the medical offices where Dr. Lewis Thomas wrote the best-selling “Lives of a Cell.” I haven’t read most of its authors who write, Bellevue notes, “at the intersection of the arts and sciences.” They’ve also published other books by Charyn, including his latest “Ravage & Son,” a “vintage noir” set in Manhattan’s Lower East Side during the turn of the last century. I have pre-ordered it. Charyn has other historicals. Look them up at his web site at jeromecharyn.com

It ain't spring yet, but I can see it on the horizon

In normal years, spring is opening up time in Wyoming. Bright morning sun streaks through the windows. We open the windows to let in the fresh breeze. Then we close the windows when the 60 mph gusts blow in. We wave to our neighbors the first time we see them outside since October. I check on the bulbs planted last fall t see if anything is blooming. That often happens with the spring snow, lilies making a show of it by bursting colorful heads through the white blanket.  

Spring 2020 brought a radical change. We closed down just as the weather turned nice. Houses became fortresses against the gathering plague. Schools closed. Jobs disappeared. Events cancelled. As the fatalities rose, we hunkered down. Stores delivered our groceries. Beer could only be bought by stealthy visits to drive-up windows where you almost wanted to whisper your order through your new mask that didn't fit. Our downtown craft distillery stopped bottling vodka and churned out plastic bottles of hand sanitizer. Overnight, Zoom became a thing.

This spring feels different. It won't officially be spring for another 25 days. But we yearn for it. Chris and I got our two Covid shots of vaccines that didn't exist this time last year. I've ordered seeds for sprouting -- I'm already a little late doing that. We are already a week into the Lenten season and it seems like a miracle that the plague is receding. I am blessed to be alive and among the vaccinated and I can pay my bills and buy groceries. I have a roof over my head. I'm retired so my 8-to-5 working days are behind me. 

I thought about all of this last night as I watched "Nomadland" on Hulu. Thousands of my fellow Americans live in vans and small RVs. They crisscross the country looking for a place to land and a place to work. They exist on disability checks and small pensions. Work service jobs when they can get them. Their humanity comes through in a film that features real people and real places. Credit goes to director Chloe Zhou and lead actor Frances McDormand who transforms from Fran to Fern in the film.

Some people opt as a life as a nomad. Others are forced into it due to substance abuse, mental illness, or circumstances beyond their control. It raises big questions about the state of our country. But it merely asks you for empathy which is in short supply after four years of the hate and greed of Trumpism. Not too much to ask. I came away from it with the same feeling I had after watching "The Florida Project." In it, a different kind of nomad moves from cheap motel to cheap motel in Orlando's Disney neighborhood.  The film shows a lot of heart notably in the form of the six-year-old main character.

We haven't yet processed the Time of Trump. If you carried a bleeding heart into the 2016 election, it has been bleeding since. We may be suffering from a type of PTSD, a reaction to four years' worth of daily outrages. Reading good books and watching good movies may help us heal. It may also help us to greet our human comrades with good will when spring opens our doors.

As the election nears, remember America's broken mental health care system

The mental health of veterans is tied to the mental health of civilians.

I am not a veteran.  I am a civilian with mental health issues. Depression is in my DNA. I can't help it. I can, however, do something about it. A conscious choice that can only be made when I am not in the grip of a depressive episode. That's how tricky it is.

I'm always on the lookout for Catch-22 analogies.

"There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.  

"That's some catch, that Catch-22," he observed. 

"It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka agreed.”  

With depression, it works like this. When you are depressed, you need help. You have to ask for it as nobody else knows you are depressed because you look normal although you may not act normal, whatever that is. If you ask for help, that is a sign that you are coming out of depression. Have some pills, the doc says and sends you on your way to recovery.

It gets worse before it gets better. It takes time for the medications to kick in. With the pills comes talk therapy with a psychiatrist or a therapist or both. This also takes time to bear results. Meanwhile, you have to get on with your life. There's work to do, soldiering to get done, families to raise, bills to pay. None of this waits on your mental health. If your job and family permits it, as mine did a few years ago, you can take a month off of work to allay your latest depressive episode. Some people would rather work through it, take their mind off the problem. But what happens if you can't?

There's a TV ad for Trintellix, a new depression medication. It shows a man trying to get involved in gardening with his wife. A thought balloon perches over his head. Inside is a jumble of colorful spaghetti strands that seem to represent the tangled web depression causes. If you take Trintellix, the word "me" magically emerges from the spaghetti. It's not magic, really, but pharmacological. Antidepressants now can be targeted to the brain's synapses a lot better than when I took my first dose of Prozac 25 years ago. I'm not sure of the science but I'm going to look it up. I'm always looking it up.

My Catch-22 analogy isn't perfect. But it does illustrate the quandary of a person with clinical depression, or with any kind of mental illness. You find yourself in an illogical, Catch-22 universe. It makes no sense. It makes perfect sense.

On my growing stack of books to read is Bruce Springsteen's biography, Born to Run. One of the best-known performers in the world has struggled with depression. Interesting, isn't it, that the man who known for rousing anthems and hour-long encores, can also be battered into submission by the blues. The real blues. The kind that's as physical as a heart attack or leukemia.

Chris and I saw Springsteen in concert during his "Born in the U.S.A." tour in Denver in the mid-1980s. It was September and it snowed at Mile High Stadium. We didn't mind. Springsteen and the band didn't seem to mind. Maybe they minded but it didn't stop them. That's kind of how depression feels. You mind that it's there but you play on. The show must go on, as theatre people say.

Springsteen might have been depressed that day. I was, until I went to the concert. I then was uplifted.

The song, "Born in the U.S.A.," focuses on the Vietnam War and the problems veterans had when they returned home. Not a whitewashed Lee Greenwood or Charlie Daniels vision of wartime trauma. War can transform you, just as childhood traumas can. Some psychiatrists say that childhood trauma can exacerbate PTSD sparked by combat. We also know that people who have been no closer to combat than Donald Trump or Dick Cheney can struggle with PTSD. It's all in your head, man! Last time I checked, my head was attached to rest of me.

It's real. That's why it's so difficult to hear someone like Trump belittle the problems of veterans. After Oct. 9's "debate," Jon Soltz sent out an e-mail call for donations. Here's his pitch:

I am filled with profound sadness after watching Donald Trump's behavior before tonight's debate.  

I started VoteVets after returning from Iraq because veterans, military family members, and those who support them need elected representation that recognizes the cost of war continues long after the last service member returns home.  

This is a presidential election. We deserve a debate on these issues. Every veteran who has ever served deserves better than what Donald Trump has done to the process of deciding our next Commander in Chief.

Contribute to VoteVets here: https://secure.actblue.com/contribute/page/defeat-trump?refcode=em161009

I am not a veteran. I state this as a matter of fact. I approach this issue not from personal experience as a warrior but as a civilian. It's academic and personal. My kids both struggle with mental health issues. So do I.

My weapons are words.

Donald Trump has no mental health plan in his platform. Hillary Clinton does.

As Jon Soltz says, we deserve a debate on these issues. We still haven't had one. All of us struggling with mental illness deserve better.

Reading "In Country" in the aftermath of another set of wars

It only took me 31 years to get around to reading "In Country" by Bobbie Ann Mason.

Published in 1985, the book explores post-Vietnam War America, specifically the South of rural Kentucky. The struggles of local veterans are seen through the eyes of 18-year-old  Sam (Samantha) Hughes, whose father Dwayne was killed in the war before she was born. Sam lives with her Viet vet uncle, Emmett, and might go to school at the University of Kentucky or she might get a job and marry her boyfriend, Lonnie. She's rooted in a specific place but rootless, too, as are most 18-year-olds. She keeps asking questions about the war but nobody, especially the vets who meet with Emmett every morning for coffee, want to give her any answers.

In one passage, Sam ponders a photo of her "soldier boy" daddy who was about her age when he died:

She stared at the picture, squinting her eyes, as if she expected it to come to life. But Dwayne had died with his secrets. Emmett was walking around with his. Anyone who survived Vietnam seemed to regard it as something personal and embarrassing. Granddad had said they were embarrassed that they were still alive. "I guess  you're not embarrassed," she said to the picture.

In the mid-1980s, the war years were fresh memories. Mason's epigraph is from Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A.," possibly one of the most misunderstood rock songs in American history.

I'm ten years burning down the road
Nowhere to run ain't got nowhere to run

Springsteen's lyrics are sprinkled throughout the book, as are songs by the Beatles, Stones, Creedence -- all the oldies from the era. The soundtrack of the Vietnam War, as one author recently called those tunes. Pop culture references abound, as do mentions of Americana: Wal-Mart, strip malls, muscle cars, Budweiser, and so on. Writing teachers sometimes tell their charges to be sparing with contemporary references, as it might date their work. Bobbie Ann Mason uses these references in order to date her work from the mid-80s, when veterans and non-veterans alike were trying to make sense of a lost crusade that nearly ripped this country apart.   This style was sometimes referred to as K-Mart Realism. This style was at its zenith when I attended grad school 1988-1991. It was shorthand for all of those white folks who once populated rural Kentucky and wide-open-spaces Wyoming. Whether draftees or volunteers, these men went to "a foreign land to kill the yellow man." They returned hoping to marry their high school sweethearts and get a job in the mines or in the factories that powered the 1970s economy. Many disappointments awaited them. Their girlfriends and high school pals had moved on. They didn't want to hear about Vietnam. Neither did older vets, the Greatest Generation, fathers of the whiners and complainers who came back from Vietnam. "Get over it," So they only talked about it with other veterans oif they just dropped out, as did Emmett, who doesn't work and spends his time watching M*A*S*H and recycling cast-off goods, much as the VC used to re-purpose all of the material the GIs threw away.

By 1985, this economy had begun to disappear,  Mines and textile mills and factories were shuttered or moved overseas for cheaper labor. To Mexico, Indonesia and, ironically, a newly energized Vietnam. Reaganomics worked to destroy unions, the foundation of blue-collar America. Vietnam veterans tended to blame liberal elites for this reversal of fortune. They were the spoiled hippie college kids who caused us to lose the war. Their love for the spotted owl and pristine wilderness killed the logging and mining industries. Their political correctness have us everything from women's lib to gay rights to Barack Obama in 2008 to -- yes -- The Donald in 2016.

Mason's characters are wonderful. The book begins with Sam, Mamaw and Emmett driving from Kentucky to Washington, D.C., in a beat-up VW bug Sam just bought from Vietnam vet Tom. We then are transported back to Hopewell in the months leading up to the trip. The book ends at The Wall, no surprise since its presence looms large throughout the book, even though it's off-stage most of the time. This a a fitting remembrance to the Vietnam War. Remember that the memorial was referred to by one opponent as a "black gash of shame." It now is almost a sacred site for Vietnam vets, home to motorcycle rallies for wounded vets and pilgrimages by vets and their families, such as the Hughes clan of Kentucky.

I'm not spoiling "In Country" to tell my readers than it ends at The Wall. The reflective surface of The Wall often leads to eerie juxtapositions, as when Sam looks at her father's name and realizes that it's her name too and she can see his face in hers. Or in veteran writer Yusef Komunyakaa's 1988 poem "Facing It:"

I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.
I touch the name Andrew Johnson;
I see the booby trap’s white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman’s blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.

The real quandary for the depressed: you often are too depressed to take action

Marjorie Morrison is the author of the recently published "The Inside Battle: Our Military Mental Health Crisis" (Military Psychology Press, $8.99 ebook). Yesterday, she wrote a great column for the Huffington Post. Here are some excerpts:

From 2005 to 2010, service members took their own lives at a rate of about one every 36 hours. There are currently more deaths in the military by suicide then killed in combat. Suicides in the US Army increased 80% in 2004 to 2008. 

This is the excerpt that rang true for me:

A service member who seeks help has significant barriers to overcome. Almost all of us can look back at a time when we felt depressed. Typically, it isn't until after you get through it that you realize how distressed you were. It's difficult enough to ask for help, but considerably harder when one feels hopeless.

This is the problem, isn't it? People who suffer from clinical depression often cannot reach out of that big black hole to get help. In other words, we are too depressed to know we are depressed and too depressed to get the help we need. It often takes someone close to us to urge us on. Unfortunately, we may be too depressed to act. We may pretend that we know better. We may pretend that we are fine.

I am not a veteran. I do come from a long line of veterans who suffered from depression and PTSD. I know what depression feels like. I know how hard it is to reach out to get help.

I was first diagnosed with depression in 1990, when I was 40. I have been on and off antidepressants ever since. More than one psychiatrist has told me this: "Stay on antidepressants. You have clinical depression."

Did I listen? Of course not.

Here is the danger. Antidepressants may seek to work effectively over time. If we are seeing clinicians on a regular basis, they may discover this and switch our meds. If we are not seeing clinicians on a regular basis, who's to know? We may just decide to quit taking Prozac or Zoloft or Mertazapine or Effexor or Wellbutrin or any of the other drugs that help to ward off the hopgoblins.

Big mistake.    

We should pause here to entertain objections from those who think that antidepressants are the work of the devil, or a means to mind control. Any Scientologists in the room? I can see why objections may arise. Many of those who commit suicide are taking antidepressants. It's easy to assume that antidepressants lead to suicide.

When I was embarking on my latest antidepressant regimen, I came across an article about a young Iraq veteran who had committed suicide. Tip for the depressed: never read about suicide when in the throes of depression. The photo in the story showed the vet's bedroom. Near his bed were myriad bottles of pills. One read "Mirtazapine." Thing is, I'd been taking the very same drug at the very same dosage for two weeks. Nothing was happening. I was feeling a bit desperate. Was I ready to kill myself? No. But I was depressed as hell. It would be months and months before that med and several others finally combined to give me some relief.

Now that I am no longer depressed, I realize how depressed I really was. And I am amazed that I am front of you right now, that I am typing on this keyboard and entering fairly sensible words on the screen. Amazed.

I was lucky. I had an understanding wife. I had understanding colleagues at work. I have friends. I have health insurance. I am en ex-jock who knew that exercise can be a way to the other side. I am a writer who believes in journaling. I have an extra dose of Irish cussedness in me -- it keeps me going when things look blackest. I have some wisdom endowed by six decades on the planet. I know how to pray.

What if I was 21, just back from a terrible war? Would I know what to do? I've never had to face that. But thousands of others have to face that every day.

Be kind. That's what combat veteran and ex-POW Kurt Vonnegut used to say. Be kind. He knew that little acts of kindness can go a long way. If nothing else, that's something we can all give to one another.

Be kind.

And take your freakin' meds, ya dimwit!

That's me talking to myself. When I'm feeling right. When I'm not, well, I say nothing.

Roger Ludwig speaks about innovative PTSD treatment Sept. 30 in Cheyenne

Cheyenne psychotherapist Roger Ludwig will talk about an innovative treatment for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) on Sunday, Sept. 30, 6 p.m., at St. Peter's Church, 252 Dell Range Blvd., Cheyenne.

Ludwig recently returned from Africa as a member of an elite team teaching the Thought Field Therapy (TFT) approach to PTSD among people who have suffered through the seemingly endless wars raging on the continent.

St. Peter's Church is located across from the Wyoming Air National Guard. The presentation is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.

Then out spake brave Horatius: Get thee some therapy, soldier!

Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the Gate:
"To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his gods?"

From Horatius, by Thomas Babington McCauley

Luis Carlos Montalvan first came across these lines while reading a biography of Winston Churchill. Montalvan was 13, a voracious reader, memorizing McCauley and Poe and Neruda and any other verse that struck his fancy.

"It really fueled my passion for life," Montalvan said. "It also led to a love affair with those teachers who taught me in school."

Luis Montalvan and Tuesday

His parents were well-educated. His father fled Castro's Cuba. His mother emigrated from Puerto Rico. They were well-read and liked to argue about politics.

"My father was a Republican and my mother, a Democrat," he said. "We had lots of discussions. I tended to wear my opinions on my sleeve. At school, kids looked at me, said, 'here's a spirited guy' and beat me up. But I became a warrior and they didn't beat me up any more."

Montalvan's dream was to be a soldier. He grew up in the Reagan era when "the Evil Empire was a true-blue threat." He joined the Army at 17, receiving his parent's consent because he was under-age. He started boot camp in June 1990 just as Operation Desert Shield got started in Kuwait. Desert Storm followed. By the time Montalvan was a trained soldier the following April, the war was over and he wasn't deployed.

But over the course of the next 17 years, he worked his way from the enlisted to the officer ranks and was deployed many times, eventually earning the rank of captain. An explosion knocked him out of action in Iraq. He walks with a cane now, and is aided by a helper dog, a Golden Retriever named Tuesday. But Tuesday helps his master as much with his Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) as he does with the physical wounds.

Montalvan joined Iraq War veteran Brian Turner and Desert Shield/Desert Storm veteran Patrick Amelotte at a panel discussion entitled "Active Duty, Active Voices" at the Equality State Book Festival Sept. 14-15 in Casper. Montalvan's book (co-written with Bret Witter) is Until Tuesday: The Story of a Wounded Warrior and the Golden Retriever Who Saved Him. In it, he relates the long journey toward healing his physical and emotional wounds.

As he spoke about his experiences, Montalvan began to recite the McCauley quote above. He stumbled after a few lines. This is caused by an aphasia that stems from his TBI. As Turner and Amelotte took turns speaking, Montalvan brought out a sheet of paper and wrote out the lines of Horatius that he had memorized as a 13-year-old. When it was his turn to speak, he read McCauley's lines.

"I sometimes forget words," said Montalvan. "It's disturbing."

Montalvan has received years of physical and psychological counseling for his wounds.

"I believe in the importance of facing trauma head-on," Montalvan said. "Trauma causes the five stages of grief. It causes physical and psychological suffering. It's impossible to get past trauma by internalizing it."

He encourages every veteran he meets to get counseling. He encouraged everyone in the book festival audience to get counseling.

"When I talk about the value of therapy, that's not learned until one does it," he said. "Here you are in a safe place. What you say is confidential. If your therapist is good, he is there to facilitate you talking about your issues.

"It causes stress to express your journey through pain. It is a release of negative energy. It doesn't really solve anything, but it gets it off of your chest. You sometimes stutter and stammer through these things. But there is a value in what you're forced to do."

Montalvan acknowledged that there is a difference between individual therapy and group therapy. "In group therapy, there's a different dynamic," he said. "Camaraderie builds. There were times when I was in the throes of PTSD and I imagined a whole platoon of friends were behind me. That would give me strength."

The retired Army Captain, who also holds a master's degree in journalism,  notes that writing and speaking have aided in his recovery. He also extols the benefits of journaling, of getting thoughts down on paper. "There's a healing to that."

During a long weekend, veteran suicides wipe out an entire platoon

This is not right.

From an AP wire service story:

So far this year the number of suicides in the military has surged beyond expectations, given that the pace of combat deployments has begun to slow. The Defense Department closely tracks suicides throughout the military but releases its figures only once a year. The Associated Press in June obtained an internal Defense Department document that revealed that there had been 154 suicides in the first 155 days of the year, though June 3. That marked the fastest pace of active-duty military suicides in the nation's decade of war.

This is not right.

This past weekend at the Equality State Book Festival in Casper, Wyo., we heard from a panel of veterans who also are writers. Brian Turner served seven years in the U.S. Army, with deployments in Bosnia-Herzegovinia (1999-2000) and Iraq (2003-2004). Luis Carlos Montalvan served 17 years in the U.S. Army, with a deployment in Iraq that earned him a Purple Heart and a lifelong limp and a case of TBI -- Traumatic Brain Injury. Patrick Amelotte was a U.S. Marine Corps Reservist who was deployed during Desert Shield/Desert Storm in 1991. They all spoke during a panel entitled "Active Duty, Active Voices."

One of the most haunting quotes came from Brian Turner. He noted that 18 veterans or active duty troops commit suicide daily. That includes veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as all of the other conflicts the U.S. has been engaged in during my lifetime: Korea, Vietnam, Cold War, Vietnam (including Cambodia and Laos), Grenada, Central America, Desert Shield/Desert Storm (Iraq and Kuwait), Bosnia, Somalia, and other hotspots too numerous to mention. It seems odd to include The Good War in these stats but, yes, there are aging WWII vets who sometimes choose the gun or rope over the long march into the darkness caused by cancer, heart disease, diabetes, etc.

Eighteen per day. At least one of those suicides is by a member if our active duty forces. You know, some 19-year-old kid who used to live next door to you and joined the Army to pay for college or a trade school or to gain citizenship.

Here's how Brian put it:

"There are 18 suicides today, 18 tomorrow and 18 on Sunday when I fly back out. By the time I get back to Orlando, my platoon is gone."

Every three days, we lose a platoon to suicide.

This is not right.

So what are you going to do about it?

I leave you with a Brian Turner poem on the subject (from Here, Bullet). Brian read this poem at the book festival:

Eulogy

It happens on a Monday, at 11:20 A.M.,
as tower guards eat sandwiches
and seagulls drift by on the Tigris River.
Prisoners tilt their heads to the west
though burlap sacks and duct tape blind them.
The sound reverberates down concertina coils
the way piano wire thrums when given slack.
And it happens like this, on a blue day of sun,
when Private Miller pulls the trigger
to take brass and fire into his mouth:
the sound lifts the birds up off the water,
a mongoose pauses under the orange trees,
and nothing can stop it now, no matter what
blur of motion surrounds him, no matter what voices
crackle over the radio in static confusion,
because if only for this moment the earth is stilled,
and Private Miller has found what low hush there is
down in the eucalyptus shade, there by the river.

PFC B. Miller
(1980-March 22, 2004)

Dear Gov. Mead: Make Wyoming a healthier place by embracing Medicaid expansion

When Rodger McDaniel writes about mental health and substance abuse treatment in Wyoming, he knows his subjects. Under Gov. Dave Freudenthal, the Rev. McDaniel was Director of the Mental Health Health and Substance Abuse Division of the Wyoming Health Department. Today in his blog (and on the op-ed pages of the Wyoming Tribune-Eagle), he makes the modest proposal that the Great Conservative State of Wyoming should embrace Medicaid expansion. It's a hard sell because Wyoming and its Governor were parties to the Affordable Care Act lawsuit that recently was spured by the conservative-dominated Supreme Court. Read on:

The enormous investment Wyoming made in mental health and substance abuse treatment in the last decade puts the state in a position to cash in big on the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). Governor Mead and state legislators should weigh the opportunity before rushing to join other Republican governors rejecting federal funding of Medicaid expansion. 

Today Wyoming taxpayers spend more than 95 million dollars each budget period on mental health and substance abuse services. If Wyoming implements the Medicaid expansion under Obamacare, most of that money can be returned to the general fund.

Read the rest here.

Wyoming is not always a trailblazer when it comes to mental health and substance abuse programs. But its Children's Medicaid Waiver has been a godsend to many Wyoming families in crisis. The Medicaid Waiver has helped both uninsured and underinsured families who've sent their children to a treatment program that is usually hours away from home, often out-of-state. When our daughter was diagnosed as bipolar, we had to send her to treatment for four months in Colorado and seven months in Casper. We signed her up for the Medicaid Waiver which kicked in when our insurance company limited her treatment. Before Obamacare, insurance companies either placed caps on mental health treatment or disallowed it as a pre-exisiting condition. The same held true for substance abuse treatment. When our son needed help for substance abuse almost ten years ago, our insurance lapsed after 50 treatment sessions. Since he was in a residential center and had daily sessions, the insurance was up way before the therapy could bear fruit -- nine months before he successfully returned home, clean and sober. We spent my father's inheritance to pay for some of the treatment and our son worked on the center's landscaping crew to pay for the rest. Expensive but worth it.


Many other families share our experience. Others will face problems in the future. The Medicaid Waiver helped pay for our daughter's treatment and for the "wraparound care" that followed her return to the home. A treatment team of parents, siblings, relatives, friends -- led by a certified mental health professional -- guided her back into her community. This beats the old approach of letting our teens sink or swim on their own, which didn't work our too well. Teens with mental illnesses or substance abuse problems have enough problems without having to readjust to school and home and work all by themselves.


Many families never use the Medicaid Waiver or similar programs because they don't know about it. There's a great statewide organization, UPLIFT, that is a resource for these services. I'm on the UPLIFT board and that's how I found out about the waiver. Get more info by calling UPLIFT at 307-778-8686. And be not afraid to go directly to the source at the Wyoming state offices. Yes, I know, it's a big state agency located in a monolithic grey building. But you can talk to real people there -- I did.


This web site is a good place to start: http://www.health.wyo.gov/mhsa/treatment/SystemofCare.html. As you'll see, the waiver program is now focused on keeping the child in the community by providing that wraparound care I talked about earlier.


I do not know how Obamacare, with or without Medicaid expansion, will affect these programs. But in a time of budget cuts in state funds, more Medicaid money from the Feds is a good thing, is it not?


No surprise that health care will be a major topic at this week's National Governors Association conference in Virginia. Also on the agenda is a discussion about the needs of military members returning home from the wars. Gov. Mead co-chairs the NGA committee addressing this issue. Some of the most pressing needs involved mental health care, not only for veterans but their families. The Veteran's Administration Hospital in Cheyenne recently expanded its services by hiring four new psychologists. 

"Good Night, Ryan:" Yet another Iraq veteran dies by his own hand

The film that accompanies Nicholas D. Kristof's New York Times story makes me incredibly sad -- and pisses me off. Why isn't more being done to take care of these young people that we send to war?

THERE’S a window into a tragedy within the American military: For every soldier killed on the battlefield this year, about 25 veterans are dying by their own hands.  

An American soldier dies every day and a half, on average, in Iraq or Afghanistan. Veterans kill themselves at a rate of one every 80 minutes. More than 6,500 veteran suicides are logged every year — more than the total number of soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq combined since those wars began.

WTE Online: CRMC offers psychiatric service through computer

This is a great idea for a rural state (Wyoming) which has high risk factors for suicide, domestic violence and substance abuse -- and one that serves its 580,000 residents with just 30 psychiatrists (one per 19,333 people), most located in cities: CRMC offers psychiatric service through computer -- Wyoming Tribune Eagle Online

Bring Change 2 Mind teams up with "Extreme Makeover Home Edition" to provide a home to vet with PTSD

I'm not a big fan of reality shows. But "Extreme Makeover Home Edition" is one of the better ones. It's less about strange behavior and more about helping people. Producers select a deserving family and builds a new one or fully renovates the old one on camera. EMHE brings in its own team of designers and builders and enlists an array of local contractors. It has a green slant, with lots of effort to use alternative energy sources and recycled materials. The show's host is the energetic Ty Pennington. Watching the show, I imagined that Ty was a hyperactive kid who drove his family and teachers crazy. He's his own alternative energy source.

The next EMHE is co-sponsored by one of my favorite orgs, Bring Change 2 Mind. Its goal is to remove the stigma of mental illness. BC2M has a video, directed by Ron Howard, that shows a crowd in a subway station (Grand Central?). One man wears a white T-shirt that reads "Post Traumatic Street Disorder" and he's accompanied by his "Battle Buddy." A woman wears a "Depression" T-shirt and is hugged by her "Better Half." Glenn Close, "Sister," poses with her real sister, "Bipolar." The video ends with the labels disappearing from the T-shirts and people going about their business.

Glenn partners up with Pennington and company on the most recent EMHE project, this one for a veteran with PTSD and his family.

There's no bigger mental health issue now than the challenges faced by our returning veterans. That includes PTSD.

Marion Mealing sends this from the National Federation of Families for Children’s Mental Health:

This Friday, November 4 at 8 p.m. (ET) “Extreme Makeover Home Edition” is featuring an organization about which I feel strongly: Bring Change 2 Mind. 

Bring Change 2 Mind is an organization dedicated to fighting the stigma of mental illness, and providing information and support to those living with mental illness.  Bring Change 2 Mind has been a partner with the National Federation in the fight against mental health stigma.

The two-hour show will take you through how Extreme Makeover Home Edition built a home that better meets the needs of Allen, who is living with PTSD, , his wife Gina, their children, Makale and Dreyson, and their dog Frankie. Throughout the episode, Glenn Close (Bring Change 2 Mind's founder) talks about the organization and their mission.

Will you join me and tune in for what promises to be a heartwarming story?

http://bringchange2mind.org/ehme

5K walk raises awareness for PTSD after suicide by Fort Collins soldier who was treated at Cheyenne VA

Here's a sobering statistic from a story in the Fort Collins Coloradoan:

The Veterans's Administration Regional Medical Center in Cheyenne "in fiscal year 2011 (through July) had 1,954 veteran patients with PTSD, comprising 10.7 percent of the veterans seen, according to VA spokesman Andrew Ruben."

That breaks down to almost 200 patients a month being treated for PTSD. And that's only at one VA Center in our little corner of the world.

U.S. Army Spc. Nicholas Larson of Fort Collins was treated for PTSD at the Cheyenne VA. It wasn't enough. Larson, a 22-year-old Iraq War veteran, killed himself May 12, 2010, leaving behind a wife and son, among other loved ones.

Elizabeth Larson-Haag (sister) and Larson's mother, Monica Meisner, have since started A Soldier's Silent Cry, a petition for the U.S. military to require that troops who have served overseas undergo regular mental-health evaluations.

They are organizing a 5K run/walk that walk starts at 10 a.m. Sunday beginning and ending at Veterans Plaza at Spring Canyon Park in Fort Collins. Contributions benefit Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors, which helps people who have lost loved ones in the military.

More staggering stats:

PTSD affects 11 percent to 20 percent of veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs' website.

Ruben at the Cheyenne VA said veterans struggling with PTSD can find assistance at their local medical center, which can be found at http://www.va.gov or by calling the 24/7 Veteran Combat Call Center at (877) 927-8387.

For more information about registering for the walk or the petition, visit http://www.asoldierssilentcry.com or call (970) 581-7905.

Marine with PTSD who helped others commits suicide

Soldier Loses Battle with PTSD: MyFoxHOUSTON.com

This is the saddest thing I've seen in a long time (try to ignore the annoying lead-in ad). PTSD is real, people.

U.S. Army stats: Discharges for mental disorders increase by 64 percent

Disturbing news from a USA Today story as reported in The (Pakistan) Nation on the Web:

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are taking a toll on minds as well as bodies, statistics released by the U.S. Army indicate.

The Army said the number of U.S. soldiers forced to leave the military because of mental disorders increased by 64 percent from 2005 to 2009, USA Today reported.

Last year 1,224 soldiers received a medical discharge for mental illness such as post-traumatic stress disorder.

The number accounts for one in nine medical discharges.

Army Lt. Col. Rebecca Porter, a behavioural health official, said research shows "a clear relationship between multiple deployments and increased symptoms of anxiety, depression and PTSD."

The Pentagon reported in May that mental health disorders caused more hospitalizations among U.S. troops in 2009 than any other medical condition.

Joe Davis, a spokesman for Veterans of Foreign Wars, said the military is excellent at treating visible wounds but not wounds to the mind.

Mental health issues, in war and in peace

I am not a military veteran, and only know about war second-hand.

But I do know depression first-hand. I know how DNA and bad juju can combine to make a potent cocktail of melancholia. It can lead to extensive funks or something worse. Suicide, even murderous rampages.

Vietnam veteran and former Georgia congressman Max Cleland wrote a stirring op-ed Saturday in the New York Times. He was severely wounded in Vietnam in 1968, and treated at Walter Reed Medical center for his injuries. His post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) didn't rear its ugly head until the breakout of the Iraq War caused him to relive his own experiences. He sought help by returning to Walter Reed.

I never saw it coming. Forty years after I had left the battlefield, my memories of death and wounding were suddenly as fresh and present as they had been in 1968. I thought I was past that. I learned that none of us are ever past it. Were it not for the surgeons and nurses at Walter Reed, I never would have survived those first months back from Vietnam. Were it not for the counselors there today, I do not think I would have survived what I’ve come to call my second Vietnam, the one that played out entirely in my mind.

When I was wounded, post-traumatic stress disorder did not officially exist. It was recognized as a legitimate illness only in 1978, during my tenure as head of the Veterans Administration under President Jimmy Carter. Today, it is not only recognized, but the Army and the V.A. know how to treat it. I can offer no better testament than my own recovery.

Cleland documents all of this in his new book (co-authored with Ben Raines), "Heart of a Patriot: How I Found the Courage to Survive Vietnam, Walter Reed and Karl Rove." I plan to read it. It will make a good companion piece to a book I read last summer, "A War of Nerves: Soldiers and psychiatrists 1914-1994" by Ben Shephard. In it, the author documents "shell shock," "battle fatigue," "neurasthenia," "gas poisoning" and all of the terms used in other 20th century wars to describe PTSD. A fascinating look at the inner workings of the machinery of war, especially the ongoing conflict between the needs of the soldiers for psychiatric treatment and the needs of the generals to wage war.

In the early wars of the century, the generals usually got their way. Mental health professionals on all sides struggled to address soldiers with shell shock from their time in the trenches. British doctors sent soldiers home at an alarming rate. The generals objected and the soldiers spent time in recovery near the front. It was discovered that proximity to the war zone actually worked better than sending them home to fester in a hospital or to be looked upon with pity by people with absolutely no idea of what really happened at Ypres and Paschendale and the Somme. Newspapers operated under wartime restrictions. The people at home could only guess at the scope of the horror.

Some writers and poets documented the slaughter. Wilfred Owen said it best in the preface he wrote for the book that he'd never see:

Cleland continues in his op-ed:

There are estimates that 35 percent of the soldiers who fought in Iraq will suffer post-traumatic stress disorder. I’m sure the numbers for Afghanistan are similar. Researchers have found that nearly half of those returning with the disorder have suicidal thoughts. Suicide among active-duty soldiers is on pace to hit a record total this year. More than 1.7 million soldiers have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Imagine that some 600,000 of them will have crippling memories, trapped in a vivid and horrible past from which they can’t seem to escape.

We need to make sure that returning soldiers and sailors and marines get the mental health care they need. It's crucial for them. Very important for the rest of us. Don't let those stereotypes get cranked up again. During the 1970s and 1980s, we heard a lot about "crazed Vietnam vets." An exaggeration, to be sure, as most Viet vets were working and having families and buying houses. Maybe they got help for PSTD or never experienced its effects. But there were some who went off the deep end and got all the attention.

Let's not let this bad image get started. Take care of our veterans NOW. And do it right.