The Chicago Tribune Magazine shares the story of a twentysomething Chicago man who joined the Army, served in Iraq as a medic, came back with severe post-traumatic stress disorder and went AWOL.

Eugene Cherry says he got minimal mental-health care during his time in Iraq. He had to skip appointments with military doctors when missions came up, and when he saw one psychiatrist, “it didn’t accomplish anything other than me being loaded up with meds.”

Once he decided not to return to battle, Cherry found it almost impossible to live a normal life again. He lashed out in anger at his mother, who reached out to a Vietnam veteran named Ray Parrish who “saved Gene’s life.”

Cherry’s work as a medic put him in a unique position, Parrish said, facing trauma on a persistent basis.
Other military personnel, like the civilian population, differ in their response to trauma, based largely on genetics, according to one doctor quoted in the story:

“The military knows that there is a spectrum of resilience,” says Dr. Joan Anzia, a psychiatrist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital who has worked with PTSD patients, “thus the selection of super-resilient Navy Seals and Army Rangers. It has nothing to do with moral strength.”

Cherry eventually got discharged from the Army, but not without a lot of legal wrangling.
And he still has a lot of pain:

“I’ve thought about killing myself numerous times,” he says. “But I refuse to be a statistic.”

His experience will be more common as more veterans return from Iraq and Afghanistan, warns Tod Ensign, director of the veterans advocacy group Citizen Soldier:

“We’ve only just begun to see the beginning of the PTSD problem. A tsunami is coming.”