1) PTSD afflicts many veterans returning from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, yet the Pentagon and VA healthcare systems have been slow to recognize and treat it. As a result, some veterans' untreated PTSD has led to domestic violence, suicide, and other violent crimes. 2) Stephen Sherwood murdered his wife after returning from Iraq with untreated PTSD and survivor's guilt. Archie O'Neil also committed violence due to untreated PTSD from collecting bodies in Iraq. 3) While veterans' organizations push for better mental healthcare, some continue to deny any link between PTSD and postwar violence. Without proper acknowledgement and treatment of PTSD, its consequences will continue.

1. PTSD: The Consequences of Negligence and
Negation
By Luisa Muñiz
On August 3, 2005 the Larimer County SWAT unit in Colorado was called to a Fort Carson
domicile after neighbors reported hearing gunshots. When the SWAT unit arrived, they found
the body of a woman with five shots in the head. The victim was 30-year-old Sara Sherwood; her
killer was Pfc. Stephen Sherwood, her husband of seven years who, after murdering Sara, had
killed himself with a shotgun blast to the head. Sherwood, called an “outstanding soldier” by
Fort Carson officials, had enlisted in the Army the previous year in order to obtain medical
insurance after learning that his wife was pregnant. In May 2004, he left his family to go to
South Korea, where his brigade was stationed, and then went to Iraq to join the rest of his unit.
Merely a year later, Sherwood returned home to the cheering crowds welcoming the thousands
of soldiers from Sherwood’s brigade. Only nine days later, these same crowds grieved over the
actions committed by Sherwood.
“He came back as a different person,” said Robert Sherwood, Stephen Sherwood’s father, in an
interview to the Gazette back in 2005. Several months before killing his wife, while on a two-
week leave to celebrate the first birthday of his child, Sherwood learned that the other soldiers
from his unit had been killed in a rocket attack. “When he got back to Iraq, everyone was dead,”
said Robert Sherwood, “he had survivor’s guilt.” In a later interview to the New York Times,
Sherwood’s parents lamented the fact that their son had not received counseling after returning
from Iraq. “It all would have been different. We could still have them with us.”
Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, can develop after someone experiences a traumatic
event. Generally, it leads to anxiety, depression, sleeplessness and other symptoms that can
interfere with life, which can ultimately contribute to domestic violence, divorce and suicide.
According to Matt Howard, former U.S. Marine and Co-director of Communications for Iraq
Veterans Against the War, PTSD can be treated with proper counseling. However, he says,
“when people are exposed to serious trauma and don’t get it treated, it is a serious risk factor for
violence.”
According to a 2014 national report released by the Institute of Medicine, a non-profit
organization that works outside the government, roughly 8% of the 2.5 million of soldiers who
served in Afghanistan and Iraq has been diagnosed with PTSD. According to the report, the total
pentagon spending in PTSD as for 2004 (three years after the Iraq war started) was of $29.6
million. In 2012 that amount jumped to $294.1 million, almost ten times what it have been spent
eight years earlier. As for hospitalizations for PTSD, between 2006 and 2012, the number
increased by 192%.

2. “The acceleration of PTSD among service members and veterans is staggering,” said Elspeth
Ritchie, a long-time Army psychiatrist now serving as the chief clinical officer for the District of
Columbia's Department of Mental Health. She told TIME that the numbers surprise her even
though she has dealt with the issue for several years.
These numbers, however, not only reflect on those veterans who served in Afghanistan and Iraq.
According to the IOM report, older veterans are showing signs of PTSD. In 2013, the US
Department of Veteran Affairs diagnosed 62,536 new cases of PTSD among veterans who
served in wars other than Iraq and Afghanistan. One third of the new patients are Vietnam-era
veterans. According to the report, the number of veterans seeking PTSD care increased from
190,000 in 2003 to more than 500,000 in 2012.
The Marine Way
Archie O’Neil was a gunnery sergeant whose job in Iraq was to collect and handle dead bodies.
He returned home in 2004 but he was not the same. “It was like I put one person on a ship and
sent him over there, and they sent me a totally different person back,” his wife, Monique O’Neil,
testified. According to her, O’Neil moved into his garage once he returned home. He only ate
M.R.E.’s (an individual field ration bought by the U.S. military for its service members to use in
combat) and drank heavily. He wore his camouflage uniform and carried his gun at all times
“even to answer the door.”
O’Neil became increasingly paranoid and fearful: “We thought he only needed time,” his wife
told the NY Times. On the eve to his second deployment to Iraq, O’Neil shot Kimberly O’Neal,
his mistress, supposedly after she threatened to kill his family while he was away. His lawyer
argued that “the ravages of war provided the trigger for the killing.” However, in 2005, a military
jury sentenced O’Neil to life in prison without the possibility of parole. According to his lawyer,
O’Neil was aware of his mental state but he did not seek help because “he did not want to
endanger his chances for advancement.” “The Marine way,” said his lawyer at a preliminary
hearing, “was to suck it up.”
“Nobody wants to be that guy,” Seth Strasburg, an Iraq combat veteran, told the NY Times, “the
guy who says ‘I got counseling this afternoon, Sergeant.’” In 2006, Strasburg was charged with
manslaughter after killing a 21 year-old man in a party during a home leave. Allegedly,
Strasburg shot the man after a heated conversation about war. He said that he knew something
was wrong before the killing occurred, however he was never screened for PTSD. He even
admitted to not taking the Army’s mental health questionnaires given out at his tour’s
end seriously: “All of us were like, ‘Let’s do this quickly so we can go home,’” he told the NY
Times.
“The real tragedy is that many [veterans] don’t want to seek help,” Lawrence W. Sherman,
director of the Jerry Lee Center of Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania, told the
Washington Post, “most of them learn that they have PTSD after their arrests.”

3. In some cases, however, the reality of PTSD becomes visible only to those who surround the
sufferer: “When we convince him to get out, hardly anyone notices” said Mónica Castillo,
the wife of Jonathan Castillo, a 33-year old Iraq veteran who returned to his home in El
Paso in 2009, “he passes as someone very private and timid. But at home we know there’s
something wrong.” In 2010, Castillo and his family moved to Santa Teresa because he
needed a quieter place to live in: “Almost everything disturbed him” Mónica recalled,
“anything from the noise of the cars in the highway to the sound of brushing one’s teeth…
He has gotten better, but he still can’t stand the sunlight.” Over the past six years, Mónica
has covered the windows at home, not only with heavy curtains but also with dark screens:
“He doesn’t say much about it, but he once told me about how he feared the light back there.
He felt like an easy target,” Mónica explained, “he’s so pale now but he doesn’t care. He likes
the darkness, it’s the only way he feels secure.”
Mónica says she has talked to Jonathan into counseling, however, according to her, he
refuses to believe that his situation is that severe: “I really want him to go or to talk to
someone, but since he was gotten better over the years, I think maybe he’ll be O.K.”
Earlier this year, an Iraq veteran entered an El Paso’s veteran clinic and killed one of the
doctors working there. He then killed himself while still in the facility: “When we heard that,
he told me ‘see, that’s why I don’t go to those places,” Mónica recalled, “and I told him
‘maybe that’s exactly why you should go.’”
When the system fails
The shooting occurred at El Paso’s veteran clinic came after a series of scandals involving the
U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs in recent months, especially in Phoenix, AZ, where several
veterans have died after receiving poor care in a VA hospital. It was precisely in Phoenix where
Johnathan Guillory, another Iraq veteran, was shot and killed by two policemen last February.
According to Phoenix Police Department, Guillory was armed with a handgun which he pointed
at the officers, who, fearing for their own safety, shot Guillory.
According to his wife, María García, Guillory struggled for many years with PTSD, and he
proactively sought for help: “He saw therapists, and was on the phone constantly with suicide
hotlines," she told CBS. She also said that Guillory went to their local VA hospital several times,
where he reported having mental problems: “They turned him away. They told him there was no
room, and that he'd have to make an appointment," García said, “I think the system failed him.”
According to the 2014 IOM report, the Pentagon’s PTSD treatment programs “appear to be local,
ad hoc, incremental, and crisis-driven, with little planning devoted to the development of a long-
range approach to obtaining desired outcomes.” The report also says that, while the VA’s
programs are more unified, they “have no way of knowing whether the care they are providing is
effective.”

4. “Given that the DOD and VA are responsible for serving millions of service members, families,
and veterans,” said committee chair Sandro Galea of Columbia University’s Mailman School of
Public Health, “we found it surprising that no PTSD outcome measures are used consistently to
know if these treatments are working or not,” he told TIME.
In addition to the fact that neither the Pentagon’s nor the VA’s PTSD programs seem to work,
there is still the question of who is to blame for the situation. In spite of the evidence, there are
people, in its majority war advocates, who continue to negate that the violence committed by
veterans has any relation with PTSD. In other words, they refute the idea that war has any direct
involvement with their actions. In an editorial for Slate, former Marine and author of The Evil
Hours: A Biography of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, David J. Morris said: “The idea that
PTSD is unrelated to violence back home is one of the central pillars of today’s rigid ‘support the
troops’ campaign. After every mass shooting event involving a veteran, Veterans Affairs
psychiatrists and veterans advocates deliver the same stern warning: Mentioning PTSD in
conjunction with these shootings is not only inaccurate, it hurts veterans.”
Several veterans’ organizations such as Iraq Veterans Against the War and Veterans for Peace
have called for adequate mental healthcare for all returning servicemen and women. However,
according to David J. Morris, the main issue is the fact that PTSD is still not a priority when it
comes to veterans’ matters: “The simple fact is that war poisons some men’s souls, and we aren’t
doing our veterans any favors by pretending that war is only about honor and service and
sacrifice and by insisting that PTSD is completely unrelated to the problem of postwar violence,”
he says in his editorial, “it’s not only morally irresponsible, it’s scientifically inaccurate.”