When Ohio psychologist and Army Reserve Colonel Kathy Platoni heard panicked civilians shouting and saw them carrying the wounded toward her Fort Hood building last week, she thought it was yet another training exercise. Too quickly she learned that the scenario was real. The San Diego psychiatric nurse, Captain John Gaffaney, died in front of her. "He tried to rush the shooter and took at least five rounds," Platoni told me by phone from Fort Hood. "He fought so hard to stay alive."
I had met Platoni in August when her 467th combat stress control team passed through Los Angeles. The reservists, along with the 1908th medical detachment, were heading for Northern California's Camp Parks to train before deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan next month. At the time, I was researching a story about post traumatic stress disorder for Los Angeles magazine, and seven reservists talked with me around a hotel conference table. In the group was Major L. Eduardo Caraveo, a warm and thoughtful Virginia psychologist who had succeeded Platoni on a 2004 deployment as combat stress team officer in charge at Guantanamo Bay.
My plan was to reconnect with Platoni, Caraveo and their colleagues after their 14-month deployments so that I could write about their experiences. Three months after our Los Angeles meeting, Major Caraveo was dead, one of 13 killed, including five mental health workers, allegedly by Nidal Malik Hasan, the army psychiatrist authorities are blaming for the shooting frenzy
The military will get a bad rap over not stopping the madness before it happened; for not spotting and ousting a disturbed -- perhaps fanatical -- soldier. But Caraveo, dressed in fatigues, weary from jet lag and speaking in a softly accented voice that indicated his roots as a Mexican immigrant, talked in August about the difficulty of integrating the concept of mental health into an environment whose dominant motif is war. The military, he pointed out, is a world of its own, and its psychologists and psychiatrists are doing nothing less than attempting to upend an entrenched culture.
"It's a very difficult task. It's going to take a while, but I think we're making definite strides," Caraveo said, about the millions of dollars the Department of Defense has been pouring over the past few years into research, new treatment programs, and PR campaigns designed to reduce stigma. "It's an opportunity to act in a prophylactic way, rather than be reactive," the major said. "I think in the past, we have been more reactive. Sometimes it's too late."
Sadly, it was too late for Major Caraveo and the other Fort Hood victims. "He filled our souls," Colonel Platoni, who is also Clinical Psychology Consultant to the Chief, Medical Service Corps., says about her fellow soldier. It may not be too late for some of the ground troops in Iraq and Afghanistan as Caraveo's 1908th medical company, and the 467th, which also suffered losses at Fort Hood, want to continue with their deployments, according to Platoni. "If they split us up and send us home, they'll traumatize us even more. We're hanging tough, but we need each other, and we're geared up for the mission," she told me yesterday.
Like many military mental health reservists, the colonel shuttered a private practice and left a worried spouse behind to deploy to Afghanistan and embed with troops. This can mean living in tents and huts, eating and hanging out with the soldiers to build trust, then helping them cope with their boredom as they wait for something to happen, and their fear when it does. Emotional fallout from the war continues as alcoholism, PTSD and suicide rates mount. But how much worse might they be without these stress team workers?
"I think most of us make a choice to do this kind of stuff and make sacrifices, so at that level we can identify with the troopers," Caraveo said, as we sat around the table. "Typically, when you put on a uniform, you don't talk to other people about emotions. So when they start talking to us, it's very humbling for them and very humbling for us. We help."