Imagine a treatment for PTSD that incorporates philosophies from around the world, especially those that have been used in entire nations that have been traumatized?

The stories in Great Britain are just as heart-breaking as of those that I've talked about in the United States. Consider the story of Duane Telfer:

Peter Stone was approaching the end of a long career in the army when he witnessed an event in Croatia in 1995 that was to ruin the next decade of his life. Walking through a village, he came across three Croatian children, aged 11, nine and seven. A father of four himself, Stone's instinct was to talk to them. He even reached into the pocket of his uniform and offered them some chocolate. Later, passing back through the village, he saw them again. They were lying in pools of their own blood by the roadside, their throats cut - punishment for speaking to the enemy.

What is it to bear a soldier's heart? On one hand, you are trained to protect yourself, your buddies, but also to kill your enemy and protect the innocent. What if you are unable to do these things? What happens to a man's spirit when such trauma is inflicted on it? 

Stone was an experienced soldier. He had served in Northern Ireland, the Falklands and Croatia. He had seen death and despair, and he had endured and pulled through explosions himself. And yet it was this singular, horrific event that was to be his unravelling. "Those children were innocent," he says, his voice faltering, "and I could not get the memory of them out of my mind, I could not get the thoughts to go [away] that I was responsible, that if it were not for me, they would still be alive today."

Years later, Stone was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a common problem that usually becomes apparent in soldiers years after the experienced trauma. It is often triggered by a second, unrelated trauma. In Stone's case, it was the death of his son in a car crash, two weeks before his son's 21st birthday, in 2001. He had been out of the army for a year then, his marriage having broken down due to the stresses of his job.

He began to have nightmares about the Croat children and about his son, and would wake up screaming and sweating with his heart pounding so hard he thought he was about to die of a heart attack. He became so terrified of the nightmares that he could not go to bed at night. He could no longer work. He could no longer do anything. It was as if his system had shut down. Within weeks, he found himself homeless, to be picked up later by a hostel for ex-servicemen and then transferred to Oswald Stoll, a sheltered housing complex for homeless ex-servicemen, where he has been ever since.

Can you imagine an experience where in a moment, you go from an intelligent, competent person to someone who is tormented by nightmares and a constant fear that you're about to die? 

Soldiers suffer from PTSD. So do abused children, women who have been raped, assault victims. And yet, we distinguish between being a victim, in which such psychic violence is committed against you, and the soldier, who, we have somehow convinced ourselves, has been trained to turn his very humanity off. Have we somehow come to the belief that this volunteer army deserved what it has experienced in combat? 

In England, two women started a new program.

The four-day Warrior programme was launched last year by two women, Eva Hamilton and Charlotte Cole. It is ambitious in that it requires a huge leap of faith from people often broken by war, to embrace a world of healing that sets store in good breathing, t'ai chi, meditation, cognitive therapy and the Hawaiian Huna technique of forgiveness (participants are encouraged to cut the imaginary cord holding them to the object of their anger). It was born after Hamilton decided to pull together the two overriding aspects of her life - her own depression and her experience of working with the homeless.
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Invariably, veterans were in homeless hostels for a number of reasons: alcoholism; broken marriages; depression; physical disability from combat. But perhaps the most fundamental problem was despair with life, due to an inability to cope with civvy street, where they often felt abandoned and misunderstood. This was true with even their closest family and friends, with whom many of them could no longer connect after experiencing the trauma of war.

Cole, who is responsible for developing Warrior's strategy and infrastructure, says: "All of us are just two bad decisions away from a cardboard box, and for these men they find themselves dealing with terrible circumstances. The shock is how quickly they can become homeless and spiral downwards."

 I want to repeat that sentence: All of us are two bad decisions away from a cardboard box.

All. Of. Us. 

I have written of my own experience with temporary homelessness and soup kitchens. 

What is it going to take for the American public to start demanding that our government work to heal the men that we have injured? Is it going to take one of them going nuts in a public and very tragic way? 

Telfer first went to Helmand province in Afghanistan at the end of 2005, where he was shot in the foot in a friendly fire incident. He recovered and was determined to rejoin his battalion, now deployed in Basra. "What I saw broke me," he recalls. "I was very close to one guy, he'd helped me through because he was more experienced, he looked after me. We were fighting together and then he was shot. I held him. And you're thinking, 'He's been shot and I'm telling him he is going to be OK' and you know, you know he is going to die. I was just so terrified. All of the time. You are forced to be a man out there, there is no time to be weak, you have to be strong. If you cry, you are a sissy. 'Be a man!' you tell yourself. You know why you are there so you tell yourself to get on with it. There is no one to talk to, maybe your mucker, but you don't want him to see you as weak. It is a prison in your mind."

And yet the experience of the men on the Warrior programme, combined with anecdotal evidence, seems to suggest that the very crux of what is considered a good soldier is predicated on not admitting or showing emotional weakness or uncertainty. According to the Warrior participants, feelings are complicated further by the sense of inherent pride in becoming a soldier and the subsequent feeling of failure if emotional problems arise.

For more information about Warrior Programme, click the link.

 And please, as I mentioned yesterday, please write letters to your congressional representatives, senators, General Shinseki. Anyone, anyone whill will listen.