Hello my name is Owen Thomas I served 6 proud years for the red, white, and blue and asked for nothing in return till now. The result, I suffer from these illnesses which effect my everyday life. You know what, I would do it all again for each and every person in this country. I want to share my story in hopes it will help. I have a 70% service connected injury (PTSD) and I have been waiting my disabity from the VA for over 6 years. Now that they have finally accepted my application they only back paid me 6 months so now that i was able to take care of most of my bills and pay things off. I now recieve 1440 a month it helps me and my 3 kids alot. I grew up in eaton rapids michigan and want to move back to be with my family so I can have their support.
Since I have lived here in Tennessee i have had many different jobs through many places and keep geting laid off or just fired. So I really havnt been able to work much along with the medications i take for the PTSD alot of jobs will not hire me.This has made it financially hard on us since me and my fiance were both in full time school and me being in and out of jobs. she is getting her bachelors at Baker online and I finished my bachelor's at university of Phoenix for criminal justice. So now that my student loans are due along with my other bills now that i am geting behind on payments its brought my credit down to now i cant get a house for me and my family.
I am an American Soldier and I have PTSD. I refused to admit it to myself even when the Army doctors would question me. I refused to talk to anyone about it. I was afraid of how Army leadership would react if I had that on my record; it was known that marks like that on your record will hurt promotions, even if they say it does not. I was a Soldier. I was tough. I just needed to rub the patch, suck it up and drive on, which drive on I did until one day in 2010, (4 years after I last left the battlefield). I don't know what the trigger was. Maybe it was the young Soldier walking by. Maybe it was the faces of the children I see that were killed in Iraq as I take my daughter into school. Maybe it was blood from my fellow soldier whose head was just cut off as we were driving down the road. Iraqi's hung fishing line across the roads to complete this task. I don't know what the trigger was, but it hit me hard. A big piece of me wanted to go back to battle because the battlefield made sense; coming home to emails, kids, and "politics" did not. I also knew that if I went back, a bigger piece of me might be lost and i wouldnt want to come back home again.
The home I came back to was not the one I left. My Family was not the same, I was not the same. I felt that something important was stolen from me and there was nobody I could talk to about it. This was especially true when I returned from Iraq my first tour because I came home to my wife, house, clothes, and even vehicle all gone. She had left me, and I didn't have anywhere to go and nothing to my name since she even emptied the bank account. Nobody except the guys I was over there with knew me now and had my back. I would look for combat patches, look for buddies to talk to, look for the Soldiers who went through what I went through and felt the same way I did. There were many of us. Our experiences were very different but we had one thing in common. We felt different, but we were not crazy or have some defective genetic failing.
It just was hard for us to come to terms with all the death, destruction and pain we had participated in and witnessed. We were all reluctant about "officially" talking to someone. Even if we needed help, we would not go to it as we thought leadership would use that against us for assignments and promotions. We felt we were alone. We were trapped in our own memories, sometimes trying to ignore them and often not being able to. We watched as our suicide numbers went up and are still going up.
The Army leadership has tried and is trying to change this trend and is having some success. I cannot say that a piece of me at one time did not wonder if the world, my Family, would have been off better without me
PTSD and other mental illnesses do not pick a nation, skin color, adult or child, they are not only military related, and do not choose an age. My belief is it does happen to what I call “the best of the best”, the strong ones. I have found that in the world of PTSD you will find the most understanding, compassionate, and caring people that would give you the shirt off their own back if they could. I find it sad that these very people are the ones judged and carrying the stigma that goes with mental illnesses/disorders. They didn’t ask for this to happen, just as a person fighting cancer or one whom has lost a leg did not ask for it, it just happens.
GOD BLESS AMERICA
