(MAN SPEAKING)
(ANGELO SPEAKING) May 22, 1861
Kind friend Laroy I am well.
I am far away and in the army and fighting for the stars and stripes.
I love the old flag dearly.
ANGELO: Dear Laroy, camp life is not home.
A sergeant of Company D committed suicide.
He seemed to be a little shattered.
He took his rifle and loaded it when there was no one about
and put the muzzle into his mouth
and tucked the gun off with his toes.
There has been 100 or more of the boys who have gone home.
They are cowards.
I won't disgrace my parents by deserting or turning back.
A soldier's life is hard but I should be able to take care of myself.
(GUNS FIRING)
ANGELO: July 24, 1862.
Dear Laroy, it was a terrible sight.
I saw hundreds of dead men.
I trust and hope my life will be spared to see you once more.
Write soon. Write soon.
ANGELO: My right hand man was one to fall.
Bloom was shot by my side. He died that night.
Northrop fell a few yards to the left.
Maxson fell dead within a few feet of him.
How changed things are from last year.
As my mind turns back to the past enjoyments,
it seems like a dream.
Many was the time that I saw things that will be remembered until death.
ANGELO: The 18th was spent burying the dead.
It makes me feel lonesome.
So many killed and wounded.
I can't see any end to this war.
ANGELO: No one except he has been a soldier
can imagine what a fighting man has to endure.
How many young men are ruined by this war?
ANGELO: October 12, 1863.
Dear Laroy, I am not so well.
I am clear off the hooks.
They took me before the board and they decided to discharge me from the service.
They say I will not be fit for the field this winter.
(GUN FIRES)
IKE: I found him lying on the ground on his back.
His gun was between his legs,
the muzzle on his breast.
ALICE: I remember that when my brother Angelo came home from the Army
he looked wild.
And when he was raving, it took my father, mother and half-sister
to tie him down to the bed.
LAROY: It seemed that something he did in the Army preyed upon his mind
and wounded him.
SYBIL: He seemed to be worried and he said everybody hated him
because he had killed people.
JOHN: If ever a man's mental disorder was caused by hardships endured
in the service of his country,
this was the case with my son.
THOMAS: I loved no one of my men more than I did Angelo.
He came up to my ideal of the youthful patriot,
the heroic American soldier.
JAMES: Oh, thank you very much,
it's an honor to meet you, thank you.
James, this is Mr. Chuck Engel.
He runs the Deployment Health Clinical Center.
JAMES: There's a lot of confusion about post-traumatic stress.
What are some of the physical manifestations?
Well, the hallmark symptoms are the agitation and being keyed up and on edge.
You know, what we call hyper-arousal where you're, you know,
as soldiers say, "I'm jacked up, I'm ready for a fight,
"I'm ready to save somebody's life,
"I'm ready to combat the enemy."
And the problem with PTSD is those symptoms don't go away when we come back home.
It's almost... It's almost like a seizure where it, uh...
They don't have control, they don't know when it's going to happen,
and they have to constantly plan
so that, uh, if it does happen, they're in a place where they can recover.
So what about the people that don't get it?
Is there anybody that you can honestly say was
in a great deal of intense combat situations and comes back completely fine?
Yeah, I'd say, it's pretty... Those folks are pretty rare.
I mean, there's that mythology of the warrior that,
uh, you know, the only thing you should feel
when you shoot an insurgent is recoil.
I mean, there's that whole mystique.
I would say that nobody is really unscathed
unless you really have no compassion for human life.
If you have a total disregard maybe the only thing you feel is recoil.
Everybody else carries something with them.
WOMAN: Move it, we need a litter! We need a litter!
We need the litter!
I was never afraid until, uh, we started receiving casualties on our end.
(GUNS FIRING)
We lost eight in one day.
That was the first deaths in our unit.
That's when it was real,
that's when I started being scared.
(WAILING)
BOBBI: I saw babies that were decapitated.
They all had their feet cut off.
Uh, that's the thing.
I don't really like to look at feet anymore,
so, um, I can still see their faces.
It's a particularly disturbing feeling,
feeling someone's heart beating from inside their body.
I still wake up with horrible nightmares from that sometimes,
crying and scrubbing my hands, trying to get blood that's not there off.
I don't want to talk, I don't want to eat,
I don't want to sleep, I don't...
I don't want to move.
I just want to sit in a corner and just be a vegetable.
When I came back it was, uh, paranoia.
A lot of paranoia, emotional detachment.
Um, you know, my spouse and I, you know, had basically grown apart.
Some things you just don't want to remember and you block them out.
And I've been blocking it for so long.
I couldn't pinpoint a direct day where it'd be like,
"Oh, yeah, that happened and that's what caused it."
I couldn't do it, um, I just...
I just know that...
It's just... It's not the same anymore.
Never in a million years did I ever think that...
That I would lose my mind.
(MUSIC PLAYING)
WOMAN: That was the truck that Noah drove to a pit
and then put his dog tag to his temple,
and then put the gun to the dog tag and he pulled the trigger.
And in one perfect shot,
he was gone.
This is the same gun my son used to kill himself.
And I will tell you the truth, this gun is nothing.
It's worth nothing.
All it's good for is to kill yourself or to kill somebody else with.
You can't... This isn't a deer rifle,
this isn't a bird gun, this is trouble.
(SIGHS DEEPLY)
I also have Noah's pocket knife.
And the pocket knife was used to stab himself in the face.
He did this with each one.
Stab them to the dash of his truck.
All of them through the face
because he didn't want to look at himself.
Even before he shot himself with the gun,
he shot the mirror in his truck out so he didn't have to see his face.
I hate this picture.
(SOBBING) It's the anger and the hate and the disillusionment
and the eyes.
That's not my son.
He doesn't think he's worth anything and you see it.
And he hates himself.
My son has started dying slowly
from the inside
and eventually the inside died so completely
that he put that gun to his head and he killed the outside as well.
That's what post-traumatic stress does to you.
It kills you from the inside out.
These are Noah's dog tags from when he was serving.
When my son put the gun to his head,
he had lodged
his dog tag to his head before he pulled the trigger.
So I called the police station and I asked them if they still had the dog tag.
My son couldn't escape the horrors of serving two tours in Iraq.
He couldn't forgive himself for some of the things he did
and he thought of himself as a murderer
and a bad person
because he still had the urge to hurt people, kill people.
The United States Army turned my son into a killer.
They trained him to kill to protect others.
They forgot to untrain him,
to take that urge to kill away from him.
This was found in his truck.
Last letter he ever wrote.
One he never planned to leave and one I never planned to share.
And it says, "I never planned to be that one to leave a note.
"I am writing it sober, but I won't be for long.
"Mom, I am so sorry.
"My life has been hell since March, 2003,
"when I was part of the Iraq invasion.
"It has nothing to do with anyone.
"Don't stress about this.
"I'm freeing myself from the desert once and for all.
"I thought shit would get better, but I was wrong.
"Well, I'm getting drunk now, so I'm more opened up.
"I have been planning on doing this a long time.
"Time's finally up.
"I am not a good person.
"I have done bad things.
"I have taken lives.
"Now it's time to take mine."
(CHUCKLES)
(MEN SHOUTING)
(BOMBS EXPLODING)
AL: I enlisted when I was 17 and a half.
I forged my mother's signature 'cause 18 was the age.
I enlisted in the Air Force.
And I wound up as a co-pilot on a B24.
The heartbreak was you would fly with a flight of four planes
and you look by and you find two went down alongside of you.
And you look around and then you'd see one spinning out of sight
and you know that 10 men went down.
And then you see if you would count the chutes and see if they came out.
If nothin' came out, then you know it was an awful loss.
You would take the fellas out.
The horrible things that they had, the faces gone, the bodies exposed...
Trying to hold their guts together, all this... I hate to even talk about it.
You were really scared because sometimes they'd pepper the livin' hell out of you.
I came back one from one mission with over 300 holes in the aircraft.
You get on the ground and said, "I'm not goin'.
"I'm not goin' up anymore.
"I'm gonna get killed the next time I'm over there."
In the old days it was called "battle fatigue" and it was a no-no.
Nobody wanted to get stuck
with battle fatigue.
"Lack of intestinal fortitude,"
they would put in your record
and nobody would want that.
You didn't want that on there,
that was the worst thing.
I found out that everybody has a breaking point.
I felt like I was the only one in the whole world
that came out of the war
with something wrong with my head.
I never even talked to my own wife about the war.
I didn't think it was a good thing to bring up.
We had separate beds because
I had bad nightmares and came flying off the bed,
screaming my mother's name out.
I couldn't tell anybody.
I thought every bartender in Brooklyn was my psychiatrist.
I was in the 213 anti-aircraft battery.
We landed in North Africa.
And we took an awful shellacking up there.
We were in severe bombings and shellings.
And I kept praying the Hail Mary.
But I started to get very severe headaches
and I wound up home January 7th, 1945.
The war was still on.
And two weeks later, I wound up at a Bronx 81,
and they put me in the psycho ward.
There's an awful lot of guilt in thinking that you should have done better.
I was having bad nightmares.
I still have bad nightmares.
And it takes all goddamn night to kill somebody.
You weren't the same what you went away.
You went away as a young kid down here.
You came back, some of us came back as war weary.
You were not normal in any aspect at all.
It wasn't... You didn't get out of there
and the next day sit down at the table and say,
"Well, I'm home now, and we can go on from there."
That didn't work at all! That adjustment was tough!
It was extremely tough.
I come back as a raving lunatic.
I, uh... I wanted to stay into flying.
I couldn't get a... I was lucky I got a driving license.
And I was so crazy in the place I lost that one in about a month
because I had about four
drunk driving on there.
Going through lights meant nothing to me, speeding meant nothing to me.
I was totally uncontrollable.
I lost eight jobs in one week.
I had nobody to turn to. Nobody.
Went to the VA. They had an onslaught, so many people there,
they just... "Uh-huh. Yeah, take these pills and go home. You'll be fine."
No psychiatric help. Nobody understood PTSD.
Nobody understood it.
They scoffed at it. "Nonsense. They're faking."
So you took to drink like that.
And a bad marriage. Abusive father. My fault.
My marriage. My fault.
I'm not blamin' anybody else like that and it took me a long while to cope.
A long while.
Today, my children, still not talk... They do not talk to me.
I have three boys that I haven't seen in 25 years.
Everything that was horrible stayed with me.
Never could talk... I have four kids,
and they never even knew I was in the Marine Corps.
I couldn't get anything out.
There was no... All I could do was inhale,
I could never exhale.
ABNER: I was in the 4th Marine division.
They had been to Saipan, Tinian
and the last one was Iwo Jima, was where I got hit.
The first landing, the first day,
I lost everybody but three.
That evening, a mortar shell hit the gun emplacement we were at
and killed Barney, who was a corporal with us,
and also Schultz, who were my closest friends.
But Schultz was still alive, he got hit in the head
and I held him in my arms all night and got him back to the beach in the morning.
And that was what Iwo Jima was about.
It was a killing field.
And it just goes inside.
You can't get it out
because it's like you have a camera in you.
During the Bulge, we were dug in
and there were only two of us.
And we looked out, and there were four German soldiers coming.
No, I break about this, I'm sorry.
'Cause we shot them.
One of them was alive,
but I don't know whether he was just passing away gradually.
However, he pointed to, you know, his pocket,
you know, "Family, family."
So, we took it out and there was a picture of his children and his wife.
And he passed off, passed away.
When you see a man with his children and his family he's just like we are.
ABNER: How do you explain to anybody
the horrors that you saw and touched
and just soaked into your whole body,
your brain, your mind, everything?
It finally consumes you, if you let it.
I have a grandson who's in Iraq now,
who's first lieutenant.
But every time he goes out in the field, for two weeks and I don't hear from him,
I'm landing again.
The bad, all the bad that can come up, comes up.
I know, but how can I tell my grandson
that he's not coming home the same person that left?
I wasn't the same person that had left.
(PEOPLE CHEERING)
AKINSANYA: I was in country, I think, 9 months.
And as a combat illustrator in Vietnam my job was to be in a combat zone
and draw everything that I saw.
And that's the bodies, that's everything.
That's me. I was a 20-year-old Marine in Vietnam.
Fine physical specimen of a young man.
Hold it up and spread it out.
Attack! Attack! Kill, kill, kill, kill!
(GROWLING) And you growlin'.
You know, the Marine Corps teaches you how to be like an animal.
You fightin' somebody, you growl, you know, like a dog.
Give me some cover!
You growlin' at 'em, and you're fightin' 'em, and you're tryin' to kill 'em,
and you're tryin' to do whatever you can to 'em,
just like a mad dog.
And, uh, I was a good mad dog.
I mean, they trained my ass really, really well.
And I don't know how to get rid of it, you know.
(MACHINE GUNS FIRING)
All these dead bodies, they just keep coming.
Saw so much stuff.
It's like all full in my head.
I saw this guy up in a tree.
And I looked at his face, and the strangest thing.
His eyes were open, and they were blinking.
They were blinking real fast and he was, uh, still alive.
It's one of the images that I wake up screaming about,
but it won't go away.
We're pulling into General Odierno's quarters.
He is the commanding general of all operations in Iraq.
JAMES: You think post-traumatic stress is
more prevalent in this war than in other wars?
I think society changes over the years.
I think that we're much more aware that there is problems with post-traumatic stress.
I think Vietnam has helped that,
because we had so many Vietnam veterans who had post-traumatic stress
and we never dealt with that problem.
You know, we train from the time you first come in from the Army
or the Marine Corps or anywhere else.
It's about being mentally and physically tough,
so it becomes difficult for some of these individuals to admit they have a problem.
I think I read 15%, maybe, of people think they have, are diagnosed
with post-traumatic stress.
We think it might be as high as 30% actually. Oh, really?
Who have some level ofost-traumatic stress.
I think people don't understand what people go through here.
You don't know when it's gonna happen.
You might think you're okay,
then all of a sudden you go from complete calm
to absolute chaos like that. (SNAPS FINGER)
And that has an impact.
Nobody's immune, nobody's immune.
Have you felt any of this stuff?
Well, um, back in 2004 my son was shot.
He was on a patrol not too far from here, in Baghdad actually,
probably five kilometers that direction.
The RPG came through the door,
took off part of his right bicep,
came across his chest and took off his left arm
and then went in and killed his driver who was sitting next to him.
Um, I think it made me understand
that there is a cost to what we do here
and, you know, again as I said,
it's pretty personal business and that came very personal when that happened.
Uh, this is Camp Slayer.
It's an operating camp, so they run convoy security, force protection,
things like that out of it.
What deployment are you guys on?
This is my second.
Here? Yeah.
This is my second here, fifth overall.
Third to the Middle East.
So then you go home.
Yes.
(BOTH CHUCKLE)
And...
You know, I came back at 26-years-old.
I was engaged at the time.
Not anymore. Can't see no wedding band.
Uh, and my life had been flipped upside down.
I mean, the state was in shambles, Rita hit,
what, three weeks after we got home. JONATHAN: Yeah.
And that part hit more where we all lived.
Then the things started happening to me personally.
Sleep cycle being nothing.
I think it took me four months
to be able to actually fall asleep before 4:00 in the morning.
And that was with the help of medication.
JAMES: Medications or sleeping pills?
Ambien. I was taking Ambien to help me fall... To finally get me on a sleep cycle.
Um, depression.
Be just feeling burned out.
I mean, it's nothing, not that anything we did here was terribly hard.
We had hard days,
but the days upon days upon days of living at such a high alert level
physically will burn your candle out.
I remember we were running through the neighborhood.
I mean, and there's gunfire going on all over.
You don't know where the gunfire's coming from.
You don't even know if they're shooting at you, to tell you the truth.
And I remember thinking, "This is some Black Hawk Down stuff that we're doing here.
"I'm in the Louisiana National Guard! (LAUGHING)
"I'm supposed to be at an LSU football game right now."
And, uh, that was a long day.
And, I mean, you had days like that that would
compile into other days that would compile into other days.
It's hard to be taught to do what we do.
You know, it's combat arms and then they expect you to just turn it off.
And that's the hard thing about being in the Guard is
that you go back and they expect you to just get back in society.
JAMES: Who's they?
Family, friends, whoever else. And the Army.
In early April of '06 is really when I hit rock bottom.
I actually, uh,
contemplated suicide for a while.
It had really gotten to the point where,
you know, I didn't know what it was.
I could... Mentally I didn't know where I was. I was lost.
And I really felt like I was feeling my way with my hands in the dark.
It's like you just can't get straight. Yeah.
You just can't get yourself right.
And no matter what you do...
JAMES: Even talking to other people, talking to each other?
No. Nothing helps.
It's just... You just can't figure yourself out.
It will tear you apart. It will tear your life apart.
And many a soldier has met an end at his own hand
or at a bottle or something because they didn't know what to do.
This is a photo of Jason. This is his senior year photo.
Um, Jason was with the Third Infantry Division.
He did his tour of duty in Iraq.
I like to see it when I walk through the door every day.
We're a military family. Um, both my brothers served.
I served with my brother in the 5th Special Forces Group.
That's me, long time ago.
A whole bunch of pounds ago.
I was probably about 19 years old in that picture.
This is my son, Christopher.
Christopher did his tour in Afghanistan
and, uh, came back home to us.
Chris's mom was a soldier, both of Chris's uncles were soldiers.
Chris's brother was a soldier, Chris was a soldier.
So, uh, wee pretty much a family of soldiers.
That's the flathat we were presented, uh, the day that we buried our son.
When Jason was over in Iraq,
he showed signs and symptoms of major depressive disorder.
On this table is basically the culmination of the efforts
of 15 Freedom of Information Act requests.
Eventually Jason was sent to see a psychologist.
The individual never looked at Jason's questionnaire
where Jason himself says he suffers from being uptight and anxious
from depression, from hopelessness and despair.
The thing that bothers me most
is that in his own writing Jason complains
of having thoughts of killing himself.
The individual that saw my son, this is what he said.
"The evaluation revealed this service member does not
"currently meet criteria for any mental disorder."
Jason called me on the phone and he said,
"Dad, this guy talked to me for 10 minutes and gave me a test
"and he told me that I was faking everything.
"And, just be a man and go back to my unit."
And I said, "Jason, there's no way anybody can look at a test and talk to you for 10 minutes
"and make a diagnosis.
"I want you to go back there and get a second opinion."
And he told me, "Dad, it's not gonna do any good.
"They have the paperwork and they're on me like sharks.
"It's not gonna do any good."
And he hung up the phone and that was the last time I talked to my son.
They drove him back to his barracks,
gave him his weapon
and his ammunition,
told him to go to his room
and to clean his weapon.
Told all his buddies to stay away from him.
I don't know what they were expecting to happen.
It's not just the soldier that's in combat that comes down with PTSD,
it's the entire family.
I can't sleep at night.
I lost my job.
I used to train medics for special forces.
I have a recurring dream.
I worked on a soldier once
who had been shot in the face.
But in the dream,
I go to my aid bag
and I come back from my aid bag
and I'm not working on that soldier anymore.
It's my son.
And every time he asks me why I can't help him.
That dream kicks my ass.
MAN 1: Gentlemen. MAN 2: Hi,how are y?
Sir.
MAN 3: Hi, how are you doing?
General Chiarelli, Mr. Gandolfini. JAMES: Nice to meet you.
CHIARELLI: I'm Vice Chief Staff of the Army
and I was asked by the Secretary Army
and the Chief of Staff of the Army almost a year and a half a ago
to try and drive down the Army's suicide rate,
when we experienced such an increase of the number of suicides that we had.
What resistance are you meeting?
There's got to be some internal resistance, I would think.
It's a very difficult thing 'cause you're fighting a culture,
a culture that really doesn't believe in these things.
It doesn't believe that injuries you can't see
can be as serious as those injuries you can see.
The idea that somehow you aren't a weaker person
because you see something that no human being should ever have to see,
that, that causes an injury to your body
is hard for some people to accept.
And we are never gonna totally convince everyone that these are,
you know, hidden injuries, as serious as losing an arm or a leg,
and are things, quite frankly, the science behind them
and how we treat them is just not as mature
as it is for some of the other wounds of war.
So let's say that you're out on the frontline
or forward operating base or something
and you have a soldier that is a great soldier.
He is great at what he does, but he has PTSD. You see it.
Would you take him off the line even though he's doing his job?
That's exactly where we're trying to get.
Rather than ignore this, if we saw a soldier
who had a gash in his leg and was bleeding,
would we take him off the battlefield and get him the care he needs?
God dang rights we would.
And if we see a soldier today who's suffering from PTS,
or traumatic brain injury or any other kind of behavioral health issue,
we've gotta take him off the battlefield.
We've gotta get them the help that they need.
Only bad things happen when you wait to treat an injury.
REPORTER: Anticipation grew as the plane carrying Lance Corporal Nathan Damigo
landed at San Jose International.
I am, like, excited and happy and glad he's safe.
(PEOPLE CHEERING)
REPORTER: A Bay Area Marine is home from Iraq.
One thing is for sure, he'd like to see everyone come home soon.
Just, uh, keep up the fight and, uh, keep up your morale and get back soon.
When Nathan first came home, we definitely saw things
that were out of character for him.
He was having horrible nightmares.
He even woke my husband up several times
because he was having terrible nightmares.
CHARILYN: The first time that the crime made sense to me was
when one of the psychologists that had worked with him
explained to me that in his mind he was having another nightmare.
He was drunk,
he was confused, he was probably suicidal.
When he came up on this guy,
all of a sudden, he went into combat mode.
He was back in Iraq in a heartbeat
and he was taking the guy down and doing his job
at a checkpoint in Iraq.
It wasn't until he was actually on the ground in handcuffs
that he realized this wasn't a nightmare,
that this had been real.
That's when the real nightmare began for all of us.
Yeah. That's...
We were all in shock 'cause it's so not Nathan.
(BUZZING)
JOSH: Tomorrow, Nate is going to be turning himself in
to spend the next six years in jail.
Today, we're basically just trying to do anything to not think about that part of it.
Right now that means me going through a tattoo.
(BUZZING)
What do you think about like when people say
what doesn't kill you makes you stronger?
Do you hear it a lot? When people like ask you about stuff?
Well, I've heard that term but obviously, you know,
people get back from Iraq and they're not stronger.
(CHUCKLES)
Hadn't thought of it that way.
So obviously that's a bullshit fucking term.
You never think it would happen to you.
Never in a million years did I imagine I'd be sitting in a cell, you know,
for an armed robbery charge.
I can't say it's right to point a gun at somebody,
you know, that's wrong. I know that, you know?
But you know, when you're running around in Iraq,
you know, pointing guns at people all day,
you know, not that big of a deal anymore.
Do you think it was PTSD, Nate?
I know it was PTSD.
CHARILYN: We're supposed to be in court at 9:00,
and then the judge will actually give the official sentence
and at that point he'll be taken into custody.
Are you staying here tonight?
We have to come pick you up? What's the plan?
Um, I'm staying here and I don't know.
I could just... I could meet you guys down at the courthouse,
or, I don't know, whatever.
You okay?
NATE: No. No.
As okay as I can be.
I don't want you to stress out about me, okay?
I won't.
I can be as tough as you can, okay? (SNIFFLING)
All right.
NATE: I know when I signed up for the Marine Corps
this isn't where I thought it would kind of end.
JUDGE: The court finds that the base term as to count one to second degree robbery
shall be three years.
The court further finds that the firearm allegation having been
pleaded and proven by the defendant's admission,
that three years is to be added to the base term
to be served consecutively for a total of six years.
It is therefore the judgment and sentence of this court
that the defendant be imprisoned in the state prison for six years.
He is remand into the custody of the sheriff who is ordered to transport him
to the reception center at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility.
CHARILYN: If this can happen to my son, it can happen to anybody out there.
PTSD is a real thing.
It's like they put him through a paper shredder.
They took him when he was 18 and put him through a paper shredder
and then sent him back to us.
We get to put... Try and put all the pieces back together.
Sometimes it's like Humpty Dumpty.
They don't go back together.
There's going to be pieces missing.
He'll come through this.
He's strong, we're strong. We're going to get through it,
but it won't be the same.
HAYDEN: November 1, 1918.
Within a half hour after reporting for duty,
I received an order to proceed to the front.
Brief, apparently simple to execute,
it was the cause of the most perfect hell to me.
HAYDEN: I followed an abandoned railroad.
I was in the woods.
Shells came over
and one time I dropped and heard a man laugh at me.
He was a dirty, nonchalant boy,
not as bluffed as I had been by the shelling.
I looked to the front again and just as I did so,
I heard the most terrifying thing I had ever heard in my life,
the malicious scream of a big shell.
I dropped. I crumpled up. I simply collapsed on the ground.
But I did not get there fast enough.
As I was falling, the whole world blew up.
Blue layers of smoke were lying all about me.
Then, I heard a man screaming in agony.
Another and another were lying quietly on the track.
Then, my eyes rested on what was left of the boy who had laughed at me,
the blood pumping out of his body like red water from an overturned bucket.
(CHEERING)
HAYDEN: The armistice came along in a few days.
I was glad,
but I wished to high heaven that my head would stop its ache,
its throb, its feeling as if it were in a vise.
The regimental surgeon began to dope me.
I couldn't eat. I didn't sleep.
And then, that dream!
It would wake me up in a sweat.
I would hear that fluttering, whimpering squeal.
And then I would see myself lying on the ground with my face gone,
and the blood pumping itself out of the pieces of the boy
who had laughed at me.
(SHIP HORN BLOWING)
(PEOPLE CHEERING)
HAYDEN: The year that followed was dominated by misery and mental anguish.
If I knew that I was doomed to go through that period again,
I would not face it.
I closed up like an oyster,
for I realized that my friends,
my country, spoke a different language.
Back, and yet not back at all.
I still could not sleep.
An insane desire to kilmyself,
as four other friends had done,
took possession of me.
I would toy with my automatic and think how best to do it.
I went to an old friend and pretty soon he was driving me to Walter Reed Hospital.
A year later, the doctors had done all they could,
and I kept searching for the spark in the emptiness
that would hint of the life to come.
I began to read the papers.
Ex-soldiers not cared for,
thousands who needed hospital attention who were not getting it.
There was trouble in Washington over the means to care for these men.
What was wrong with my country?
I wish that I could properly describe the feeling of utter aloneness in the world.
How dreadfully alone a shell-shocked man can be,
even though surrounded by those who love him most.
BILLY: I thought I deleted them all, Marie.
MARIE: Well, you still have those?
Nah, I thought I had deleted 'em.
Why you looking at me like I'm crazy?
Yeah, now I'm in trouble.
Car bomb hit our front gate.
So this was after all the bigger pieces of bodies were taken.
By this time my job was... It was done.
And this is the aftermath of it, so...
BOY: What's worse? The aftermath?
Turn that way.
MARIE: Yeah, you can't see those photos.
Most of the time I don't know why he even has any of 'em.
Because of him being over there, that's why he is how he is today.
Why you even have any of that to look at?
BILLY: It's still part of my life.
But to me, it'd be a part that you would want to try to forget about.
And not still have it fresh in your mind.
These are pictures from all my deployments.
Mainly from 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006.
MARIE: Billy was in Iraq for a total of 29 months with three tours.
Then he was sent home because of the problems he was having with PTSD.
'Cause you look at the pictures, look at your leg.
Every time his anxiety starts going, his leg starts shaking.
BILLY: This was my team.
This is who I was in charge of.
Everyone came back alive, but almost everyone here,
they have severe PTSD.
I guarantee you, if they don't have it, they don't admit they have it.
The ones that do know, I keep in touch with them.
So, that's me right here.
MARIE: Even though he wasn't shot, or physically blown up
with shrapnel or anything, he still died over there.
'Cause of who he was, was left over there.
BILLY: I showed him one picture one time
'cause he was begging and asking
and, uh, he wanted to know why I was like the way I am.
And, uh, I showed him. Which one did I show you?
The little girl in the back of the truck.
I showed him real quick and he closed his eyes.
He wanted to know why I am the way I am,
so I said, "Okay, I'm gonna show you this."
It freaked me out. a little bit, didn't it?
She has to be Kayla's age.
Just by looking at her height and...
I don't know. Probably six or seven?
MARIE: He just kind of withdraws himself
and sits a lot in front of the computer,
which makes it hard for us because we would like for him to interact with us
more like he used to.
I miss when he used to do that.
We feel like we've been cheated out on so much
because he was gone for so long and now he's home,
but he's not home like he was.
It sucks.
I know he knows it sucks.
Call it PTSD, post-traumatic stress, I don't know.
I call it horrible.
But I know it doesn't just affect me, it affects my wife.
MARIE: And the kids. And the kids.
I didn't want to hit her, so I just punched the wall.
That was my... I tried to... I'm gonna eventually fix it.
But that scared me when I did that 'cause I lost control of myself.
It was two or three times.
u hit.
BILLY: Never hit you though.
No, but, you've come close.
Too close.
I was petrified, I've never been that scared of him before in my life.
So my first instinct was to just leave.
Take the kids and go.
Because I... It was hard for me to trust him again.
To be able to feel safe with him.
Why'd you wake me up?
'Cause you woke me up but then that was it.
BILLY: It was 'cause I had a nightmare.
I didn't know where I was.
I was making sure I was there in the right spot in my bed
and not in a... MARIE: War zone?
War zone.
Oh, Walmart. I can tell already it's busy.
There's gonna be a lot of noise.
A lot of people.
He's constantly surveying,
watching everything, making sure nothing bad is gonna happen.
It depends if he has a good day or a bad day.
If he can make it through the trip to Walmart or not.
Milk and juice, lunchmeat, bananas and some cereal.
See, a lot of times when we're in the store, too, I tend to
walk in front of him and faster
because I feel I need to move faster to get done before his time limit.
Kayla.
Kayla sometimes helps me so I wanna bring her back over here.
Get up here.
She helps me, she helps me get through some things, so...
What?
Sometimes you help me. Oh.
It's, uh, getting close.
Plus we got people staring at us.
(STUTTERING) And I know this is putting,
um, stress on, on Marie.
(STUTTERING) 'Cause I said I just...
I'm also stuttering a little bit more so,
um, shit.
Just bananas and lunchmeat.
Okay. Where's the bananas?
Something happens, it just happens inside. I can't stop it.
MARIE: It just takes over. It just takes over.
I don't know how to stop it.
I mean, it's been two years after the fact since he's been home.
So how long does it take?
BILLY: I've done some terrible, terrible things
and then, you know, some people say,
"You just have to get over it," or...
You know what?
You do the things that I've done and you try to get over it.
It's easy to say get over it, those are just words.
(LAUGHS)
And then they say, "Well you know, you were just doing your job."
So my job is to basically kill people?
How is that doing my job?
I mean, yeah, sure,
I killed people to save my own ass,
but if it wasn't... Yeah.
I did it well enough to save, to survive, but...
Yeah, but damn.
And I brought back every one of my troops.
I did it well.
And I got a medal
right there, on my wall.
And then...
Now I have, uh, nightmares about it
almost every night.
Not just that story, but I have nightmares of other things,
but, um, I've seen what humanity can do.
I've seen humanity at its worst.
(STUTTERING) And I with struggle that,
struggle with that
on a daily basis.
(PEOPLE SCREAMING)