Ptsd

The four men - all Vietnam vets - drove for about an hour on a rainy Saturday morning to play softball. By 10 a.m. they had reached their destination - Graterford Prison, a gray- walled fortress totally out of place in the middle of fields of golden wheat and green corn. It was not the game that had brought these men to this dreary place. Rather, it was to share a bond with the men inside - a bond that included combat in Vietnam, rejection at home after the war, and a period of adjustment during their mid-20s.

Ian Smith had a plan. After 8 1/2 years as an Army intelligence analyst, he was ready for a change. He had enlisted in 2000, not long after turning 18. After two deployments in Iraq, the young sergeant was ready to return to school and explore his options. He'd done his time, served his country, and now it was time to focus on himself. As it turns out, serving others had more of a hold on him than he'd imagined. After his discharge in February 2009, he leapt into his new life.

Army Spec. Bryan Adams saw the signs of trouble. People were shuffling away as he and other members of his unit walked down a street in the Iraqi city of Tikrit in October 2004. Off to the side, two children sitting on a curb appeared frightened, as though they knew what was about to happen. "I looked at their huge eyes, literally took five steps, then heard the gunfire," said Adams, 25, of Palmyra. "I was hit in the left leg, stumbled a little, and started running. " Bullets peppered a wall next to him. One hit his hand before he got around a corner "out of the kill zone.

One woman left Johns Hopkins' intensive-care unit believing her husband and nurse had been plotting to kill her. Another ICU patient had flashbacks of hospital walls covered in blood. A third had visions of big spiders riding bicycles in her room. Suddenly, a favorite hobby, gardening, felt creepy. Doctors used to think patients returned to normal after the delusions and hallucinations of ICU delirium stopped. They're learning instead that some leave the hospital with terrifying false memories, often of being assaulted or imprisoned.

America's first and second ladies made a show here Wednesday of enlisting the nation's three million nurses in their Joining Forces program to improve services for soldiers and their families. At the University of Pennsylvania's Irvine Auditorium, Michelle Obama and Jill Biden thanked 150 nursing organizations and 450 nursing schools for pledging to train current and future nurses to treat soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder, traumatic brain injury, post-deployment depression, and other visible and invisible wounds of war. "This is truly amazing what you're doing," Obama told the crowd of about 1,100 nurses, nursing students, nursing organization leaders, deans of nursing schools, and a few soldiers.

Missing legs, arms, multiple amputations. These injuries are the visual emblems of the war in Iraq. But it is the invisible psychological harm - primarily post-traumatic stress disorder - that is the most pervasive and pernicious injury from this war and that is emerging as its signature disability. Veterans' advocates say it is the number-one issue facing soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. The scope of the problem is daunting: 35 percent of Iraq veterans sought psychological counseling within a year of coming home, according to the Department of Defense.

This is a war story told by an eyewitness. Kevin Purcell does the driving - in a Prius, no less - as we visit the battlefields of his youth, familiar places he hadn't set foot on in decades. Here's where somebody got shot, here's where somebody got stabbed. And here, he tells me, is where "grown white men were swinging baseball bats at grown black men who were swinging back with their belts and broom handles. " For a boy of 10, as Purcell was in 1969 when these events took place in his Southwest Philadelphia neighborhood, it all seemed unreal.

Chief Warrant Officer Kevin Ellicott's nightmares can be tough to explain. But Sierra understands. "She's actually woken me up when I was having one," says the 43-year-old Marine, whose peppy black Lab puppy is "helping me find my new normal. " Sierra is enrolled in the new Semper Fido program at K-9 Basics Dog Training & Clif Wyck Kennels in Marlton, where I checked out an open house Saturday. K-9 co-owner Lisa Berg says a Good Morning America story inspired her to establish Semper Fido in November 2010 with Ellicott's help.

MOUNT RAINIER NATIONAL PARK, Wash. - An armed veteran of the war in Iraq suspected of killing a Mount Rainier National Park ranger evaded SWAT teams and dogs for nearly a day, but he couldn't escape the cold. A plane searching the wilderness for Benjamin Colton Barnes, 24, discovered his body Monday lying partially submerged in an icy mountain creek. "He was wearing T-shirt, a pair of jeans, and one tennis shoe. That was it," Pierce County Sheriff's spokesman Ed Troyer said.

The families of Vietnam veterans afflicted with a disorder that causes them to relive combat experiences are suffering and require more state aid, veterans said at a public hearing Thursday. About 40 veterans and their families attended the hearing at the Gloucester Township Municipal Hall, the second held by the state Commission for the Study and Treatment of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in Vietnam Veterans since the commission was established in January 1989. The first hearing was in November in Jersey City.