HUFFINGTON
10.07.12
COMING HOME
and killed. Beavers was on call 24/7.
“When the bell rang, we had 45
minutes to dress, load up the truck
and get a security briefing,” he said.
He’d lie half-awake sweating on his
cot, knowing when the bell rang
he’d be heading out again where
insurgents would try to kill him.
“Every time the bell rang I thought,
‘I could die,”’ he said.
After one powerful IED blast
wrecked his truck and left him
unconscious, he woke up in the
base hospital where he says he
was prescribed various pain and
anti-anxiety medication, including morphine, oxycodone, Roxicet,
dilaudid and Xanax, to get him
back on duty and keep him there.
Not for another year would the
military begin routinely sidelining
soldiers exposed to blast.
After his 12-month deployment
was over, he was transferred to
the 25th Infantry Division in Hawaii, and four months after he got
home from Iraq he deployed again.
This time he was in combat for
15 months. He returned with the
shakes, hearing problems and raging nightmares about the things
that he saw and did, “things that
were inhumane that still stick
with me to this day and I’m
trying to get through that.
“I’d wake up in the middle of the
night and hear the bell going off,
or I’d be yelling ‘Kill him!’ and seeing snipers at the window,” he said.
“My wife was scared of who I was.”
After Army doctors in Hawaii cut
him off from prescription drugs,
Beavers started buying illicit medication to try to calm things down.
He was never tested for or diagnosed with Traumatic Brain Injury,
so he was never offered therapy or
any other treatment.
Three weeks before he was due
for another Iraq tour, Beavers was
discharged from the Army after
having tested positive for drugs.
Back home in Philadelphia, he
stumbled into the VA medical center and asked for help. He got it:
he was diagnosed with Traumatic
Brain Injury and PTSD; counselors
helped him win a 100 percent disability from the VA and he began
counseling sessions for his PTSD.
But like many other veterans,
he found the VA itself was overwhelmed. “I was being seen four
times a week, then three, then two,
then once every two weeks, and
then once a month, because they
had such a caseload,” he said. “I
felt like I got thrown to the back
of the bus, and that kind of threw
me into a bad depression. I didn’t