Guide Plt.2129
April 8th, 2009, 13:02
http://images.military.com/NL_WK/1,14845,6872,00.html
Happened on this in that email thingy and thought somebody could use it sooner than later or.......yeah, ok........
Rusty :rankm-lcpl:
The Battle After the Adrenaline Fades
http://images.military.com/cs/Satellite?blobcol=urldata&blobheadername1=Content-Type&blobheadername2=Content-Disposition&blobheadervalue1=image%2Fjpeg&blobheadervalue2=inline%3Bfilename%3DAdrenaline040 309.jpg&blobkey=id&blobnocache=false&blobtable=MungoBlobs&blobwhere=1209979962902&ssbinary=true
April 03, 2009
Marine Corps News
MARINE CORPS BASE CAMP LEJEUNE, N.C. — For Sgt. Chris Soldano, an infantryman with two combat tours to Iraq, long after the smoke has cleared and the adrenaline has faded, his own war still rages on. However, not all his battles are fought under the searing desert sun. The fight of Soldano’s life might just be his struggles to heal the scars of war.
Soldano deployed with Regimental Combat Team 2 during the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003. During this tour, he served as a platoon sergeant while his unit ventured further north than any other unit to capture the hostile city of Nasiriyah.
What followed was a vicious battle that cost the lives of 18 Marines. Despite these casualties, Soldano and his fellow Marines prevailed over an enemy that resorted to wearing civilian clothes and firing from houses inside a crowded city center.
Soldano returned to Iraq with 2nd Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion in 2005. It was there his vehicle was struck by two enemy mortars in an attack so devastating other members of his convoy initially reported him as dead, yet despite the damage to his vehicle and his body, Soldano continued to fight.
“With everything still being in such a frenzy, heart beating, things going a mile a minute, and adrenaline just going haywire, I jumped down from the vehicle and my legs just collapsed,” said Soldano. “My ankles, my feet, and all the soft tissue in my legs, it just destroyed them, but with all the adrenaline pumping through my body, I just picked myself up and kept going. I didn’t think anything of it. It wasn’t like I was going to leave my Marines.”
Soldano remained with his unit in spite of his injuries until his unit returned to Camp Lejeune. Yet, it was only once he returned to America that he began to recognize his injuries were more than physical. Soldano suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
He sought solace as best he could with a fellow Marine, his brother-in-law, Cpl. Jared Kremm. When Kremm deployed to Iraq two months later, Soldano was still readjusting from combat. He wasn’t prepared for the tragedy he would soon face.
“I was still trying to figure out what I’m really doing. Then, no more than 30 days later, [Kremm] got killed,” said Soldano. “Next thing I know, I’m making arrangements to pick his body up at Dover Air Force Base and driving him to New York to bury him. Everything was falling apart, and everything kept spiraling down - worse and worse and worse.”
Things didn’t turn around for Soldano until his assignment to the Wounded Warrior Battalion – East in Dec. 2007.
“When I first came here to the Wounded Warrior Battalion, I couldn’t even begin to express how bad I was,” said Soldano. “I would have minor episodes, micro-seizures, there were even points in time when I would collapse.”
Soldano has undergone dozens of procedures from orthopedic surgeries for his leg injuries, to counseling for his PTSD, to neurological exams for traumatic brain injury. He said that he has seen the greatest improvement through a program that partners the Marine Corps with East Carolina University.
The program is called Training for Optimal Performance, or TOP, and it works by teaching Marines to control their bodies’ physiological reactions to stress. According to the project’s director, Dr. Carmen Russoniello, relaxation and meditation can control basic physical reactions like heart rate and brain waves to defuse harmful levels of emotion related to combat stress.
“The memory never goes away, but your physiological reaction to it changes,” said Russoniello. “Chris [Soldano] is learning now that when he starts to sense he’s losing control, that he can do some things to gain control and manage the situation. They teach themselves that they can allow themselves to visit that emotion.”
Russoniello is an expert in the field of PTSD, and not just because of his education and research. Back in 1968, Russoniello dropped out of high school to join the Marine Corps during the height of the war in Vietnam. His experiences as a machine gunner working directly with the Army of South Vietnam left him personally affected by PTSD.
“The thing with PTSD is that there is this inability to attach emotion to the experience,” said Russoniello. “It’s very frightening to attach emotion to the experience, but to heal, you have to do just that.”
Soldano recognizes that the road to recovery is a hard path to follow, but he feels that the skills he has learned in the TOP program will prove invaluable along the way.
“I know that I’m not going to be able to just make everything I feel go away, and I know that a lot of these things that I’ve gone through are things that I’m always going to experience for the rest of my life,” confessed Soldano. “You can’t just make these things disappear, but with the tools that I have and the things that I’ve learned, I’ll be able to cope with them.”
Even now, Soldano sees the good that has come out of the darkest periods of his life.
“Sometimes you can’t help but think of the horrors of some of those times, but during some of those times when things were the worst, that’s when people were the best,” said Soldano.
As the first group of study participants wraps up their training, the TOP program is expanding from two to three days a week to help meet the demand from today’s wounded veterans.
However, there are no easy answers in the fight against PTSD. Nearly 40 years after his return from Vietnam, Russoniello still experiences flashbacks and can vividly recall painful memories of combat. Yet, Russoniello hopes the treatments his team at ECU are developing can improve the lives of the new generation of veterans.
“I look back and see myself in these guys. I know at that time (after Vietnam) there was not a lot of support, nor were there a lot of people that could really understand the types of issues that we were feeling at that time. So in a sense it’s an obligation that I feel, but at the same time it’s a privilege,” said Russoniello.
Russoniello believes that the Marine Corps’ efforts to improve the lives of wounded service members has attracted the attention of Vietnam veterans, and this previous generation hopes these new methods of treatment will ensure a brighter future for America’s young heroes.
“I don’t know how this person got my home phone,” said Russoniello, “but somebody called and left a message and it was a Vietnam veteran, and all that he said was ‘They never did this when I came home. Thank you.’”
Meanwhile, Soldano has already begun looking past himself and is working towards creating yet another resource for combat veterans such as himself.
“I was able to use all these tools together to get me from a point where I was almost non-functional, to a point today where I can do things I never thought I’d be able to do again,” said Soldano “I can give back today - to other people, other Marines, other people who are in the same spot I was in. That is important to me. That’s my goal.”
On his own time and initiative, Soldano has built an online recreation of the new Wounded Warrior barracks within the social network ‘Second Life’ to provide veterans a place to meet, attend PTSD support groups, share information, and hopefully even hold virtual meetings with counselors and mentors from anywhere on the globe.
Although Soldano’s project is only in it’s beginning stages, Russoniello has great hope for both its potential to reach out to other veterans and to show the progress Soldano has achieved.
“What I saw was a person who was very quick to anger, seemed agitated, seemed depressed at times, to a person who over a period of time became more friendly with people, more open, (and) shared more experiences,” said Russoniello. “Perhaps the biggest change I saw was from an individual who seemed lost and uncertain about what happened in the past to a confident person who can set goals and is getting close to seeing that future,” said Russoniello.
Soldano medically retired from the Marine Corps Mar. 30. However, he still remains a Marine at heart. He plans on continuing to use his talents and experience to reach out to fellow veterans with PTSD to make sure no Marine is left behind.
“I’m a firm believer that your experience is what you make of it,” said Soldano, “and my experience was unique. I was surrounded by a lot of great people, and I’ll never forget them.”
The war may be over for Soldano, but his fight on behalf of his fellow veterans has just begun.
Happened on this in that email thingy and thought somebody could use it sooner than later or.......yeah, ok........
Rusty :rankm-lcpl:
The Battle After the Adrenaline Fades
http://images.military.com/cs/Satellite?blobcol=urldata&blobheadername1=Content-Type&blobheadername2=Content-Disposition&blobheadervalue1=image%2Fjpeg&blobheadervalue2=inline%3Bfilename%3DAdrenaline040 309.jpg&blobkey=id&blobnocache=false&blobtable=MungoBlobs&blobwhere=1209979962902&ssbinary=true
April 03, 2009
Marine Corps News
MARINE CORPS BASE CAMP LEJEUNE, N.C. — For Sgt. Chris Soldano, an infantryman with two combat tours to Iraq, long after the smoke has cleared and the adrenaline has faded, his own war still rages on. However, not all his battles are fought under the searing desert sun. The fight of Soldano’s life might just be his struggles to heal the scars of war.
Soldano deployed with Regimental Combat Team 2 during the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003. During this tour, he served as a platoon sergeant while his unit ventured further north than any other unit to capture the hostile city of Nasiriyah.
What followed was a vicious battle that cost the lives of 18 Marines. Despite these casualties, Soldano and his fellow Marines prevailed over an enemy that resorted to wearing civilian clothes and firing from houses inside a crowded city center.
Soldano returned to Iraq with 2nd Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion in 2005. It was there his vehicle was struck by two enemy mortars in an attack so devastating other members of his convoy initially reported him as dead, yet despite the damage to his vehicle and his body, Soldano continued to fight.
“With everything still being in such a frenzy, heart beating, things going a mile a minute, and adrenaline just going haywire, I jumped down from the vehicle and my legs just collapsed,” said Soldano. “My ankles, my feet, and all the soft tissue in my legs, it just destroyed them, but with all the adrenaline pumping through my body, I just picked myself up and kept going. I didn’t think anything of it. It wasn’t like I was going to leave my Marines.”
Soldano remained with his unit in spite of his injuries until his unit returned to Camp Lejeune. Yet, it was only once he returned to America that he began to recognize his injuries were more than physical. Soldano suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
He sought solace as best he could with a fellow Marine, his brother-in-law, Cpl. Jared Kremm. When Kremm deployed to Iraq two months later, Soldano was still readjusting from combat. He wasn’t prepared for the tragedy he would soon face.
“I was still trying to figure out what I’m really doing. Then, no more than 30 days later, [Kremm] got killed,” said Soldano. “Next thing I know, I’m making arrangements to pick his body up at Dover Air Force Base and driving him to New York to bury him. Everything was falling apart, and everything kept spiraling down - worse and worse and worse.”
Things didn’t turn around for Soldano until his assignment to the Wounded Warrior Battalion – East in Dec. 2007.
“When I first came here to the Wounded Warrior Battalion, I couldn’t even begin to express how bad I was,” said Soldano. “I would have minor episodes, micro-seizures, there were even points in time when I would collapse.”
Soldano has undergone dozens of procedures from orthopedic surgeries for his leg injuries, to counseling for his PTSD, to neurological exams for traumatic brain injury. He said that he has seen the greatest improvement through a program that partners the Marine Corps with East Carolina University.
The program is called Training for Optimal Performance, or TOP, and it works by teaching Marines to control their bodies’ physiological reactions to stress. According to the project’s director, Dr. Carmen Russoniello, relaxation and meditation can control basic physical reactions like heart rate and brain waves to defuse harmful levels of emotion related to combat stress.
“The memory never goes away, but your physiological reaction to it changes,” said Russoniello. “Chris [Soldano] is learning now that when he starts to sense he’s losing control, that he can do some things to gain control and manage the situation. They teach themselves that they can allow themselves to visit that emotion.”
Russoniello is an expert in the field of PTSD, and not just because of his education and research. Back in 1968, Russoniello dropped out of high school to join the Marine Corps during the height of the war in Vietnam. His experiences as a machine gunner working directly with the Army of South Vietnam left him personally affected by PTSD.
“The thing with PTSD is that there is this inability to attach emotion to the experience,” said Russoniello. “It’s very frightening to attach emotion to the experience, but to heal, you have to do just that.”
Soldano recognizes that the road to recovery is a hard path to follow, but he feels that the skills he has learned in the TOP program will prove invaluable along the way.
“I know that I’m not going to be able to just make everything I feel go away, and I know that a lot of these things that I’ve gone through are things that I’m always going to experience for the rest of my life,” confessed Soldano. “You can’t just make these things disappear, but with the tools that I have and the things that I’ve learned, I’ll be able to cope with them.”
Even now, Soldano sees the good that has come out of the darkest periods of his life.
“Sometimes you can’t help but think of the horrors of some of those times, but during some of those times when things were the worst, that’s when people were the best,” said Soldano.
As the first group of study participants wraps up their training, the TOP program is expanding from two to three days a week to help meet the demand from today’s wounded veterans.
However, there are no easy answers in the fight against PTSD. Nearly 40 years after his return from Vietnam, Russoniello still experiences flashbacks and can vividly recall painful memories of combat. Yet, Russoniello hopes the treatments his team at ECU are developing can improve the lives of the new generation of veterans.
“I look back and see myself in these guys. I know at that time (after Vietnam) there was not a lot of support, nor were there a lot of people that could really understand the types of issues that we were feeling at that time. So in a sense it’s an obligation that I feel, but at the same time it’s a privilege,” said Russoniello.
Russoniello believes that the Marine Corps’ efforts to improve the lives of wounded service members has attracted the attention of Vietnam veterans, and this previous generation hopes these new methods of treatment will ensure a brighter future for America’s young heroes.
“I don’t know how this person got my home phone,” said Russoniello, “but somebody called and left a message and it was a Vietnam veteran, and all that he said was ‘They never did this when I came home. Thank you.’”
Meanwhile, Soldano has already begun looking past himself and is working towards creating yet another resource for combat veterans such as himself.
“I was able to use all these tools together to get me from a point where I was almost non-functional, to a point today where I can do things I never thought I’d be able to do again,” said Soldano “I can give back today - to other people, other Marines, other people who are in the same spot I was in. That is important to me. That’s my goal.”
On his own time and initiative, Soldano has built an online recreation of the new Wounded Warrior barracks within the social network ‘Second Life’ to provide veterans a place to meet, attend PTSD support groups, share information, and hopefully even hold virtual meetings with counselors and mentors from anywhere on the globe.
Although Soldano’s project is only in it’s beginning stages, Russoniello has great hope for both its potential to reach out to other veterans and to show the progress Soldano has achieved.
“What I saw was a person who was very quick to anger, seemed agitated, seemed depressed at times, to a person who over a period of time became more friendly with people, more open, (and) shared more experiences,” said Russoniello. “Perhaps the biggest change I saw was from an individual who seemed lost and uncertain about what happened in the past to a confident person who can set goals and is getting close to seeing that future,” said Russoniello.
Soldano medically retired from the Marine Corps Mar. 30. However, he still remains a Marine at heart. He plans on continuing to use his talents and experience to reach out to fellow veterans with PTSD to make sure no Marine is left behind.
“I’m a firm believer that your experience is what you make of it,” said Soldano, “and my experience was unique. I was surrounded by a lot of great people, and I’ll never forget them.”
The war may be over for Soldano, but his fight on behalf of his fellow veterans has just begun.