“Santos”

I mean, if I had some measure of success, I could say, yeah. Hey, do it this way or do it that way. I don’t know what to tell them other than don’t give up. Just getting the diagnosis don’t mean shit. I mean, all that tells you is that there’s a couple extra remarks in your medical records, but there ain’t no damn, there’s nothing they can do for you. Now I’m reading that, I just read this maybe a couple days ago that I could be genetically passing something down to my kids that were born after I got back from the Gulf, so it doesn’t look too, the news keeps getting worse. Like chromium. I mean you get exposure to chromium, that tweaks the DNA. Your kids wind up with some disease. So did I inadvertently pass something down to my two kids that were born after with my current wife? I don’t know.

Stayed the same as far as the muscle aches and the fatigue. I would say, if I was to look at a graph, I mean I’d just say just over the years I've just gotten worse and worse and worse. And I don’t know whether we can attribute that to just old age or if Gulf War Illness is something that gets worse and worse over time. I mean, I don’t know. I mean that's something that the VA does, and I don’t even think they even know.

Just recently I started going to this group. It's called [group name redacted]. It's a fly-fishing group that, I don’t know if you guys have got that up there in [location redacted]. You know about it? So I just recently started going to, my wife has been kind of coaxing me to, I mean the first one I went to, I sat in the car for an hour and didn’t go in. I never made it in. I sat outside in the parking lot. I just couldn’t get the courage to go in. But that's what it was like soon after getting out of the Army, going back home to my family. Other people were having these big welcome home parades and the ticker tape and the barbecues and the hero's welcome. I mean they gave that to me too, but I sat there numb. I sat there numb. I just couldn’t get into it. It's like you get into an accident on the day of your big birthday party. It's like you're no longer in the mood to enjoy your birthday party because you got, it felt like just something was just not right. I don’t feel right being here, and I feel that way all the time.

I deployed all of my chemical detection equipment on their Bradley fighting vehicles, M1 Abrams tanks, combat support vehicle. The M8 chemical agent alarm system is an automatic, it's basically a mobile testing laboratory that constantly tests the air for a number of different chemical, weaponized chemical munitions, the nerve agents, the blood agents, blister agents, choking agents. So that was basically my role. 

They considered the, they said, okay, we think we won the ground war. Hold your position. Wait for further orders. It was during that time that they blew up that ammo dump, and all my alarms started going off. So part of our procedure was to verify those results using a separate method, so I think it was the M256 chemical agent detector kit. This is a field kit that we're trained to use, and basically you break these little glass ampules. That fluid goes onto a little test pad, and you break them in a particular sequence. You wave that in the air 30, or is it three minutes, and then you get different color changes. Then that tells you whether or not you have, it's positive for different types of chemical munitions, and it was coming back positive for nerve agents. So the M8 alarms were going off, verifying with the M256 kits. We called that in, and everybody was put in MOPP level four. MOPP level four is where you put on all your protective equipment, gas masks, but they were very reluctant to keep people in that protective posture because that reduces the efficiency of everything. When you're wearing that suit and that gas mask, I mean you're not as efficient as you would be had you not been wearing that stuff. So those reports went up that we were getting, they're like, well, how can that be? No one is shooting. Nobody is shooting. At the time, I did not know that there was an ammunitions dump nearby that was blown up and that we were directly downwind from that. So it's my firm belief that all of us that were exposed, once it was determined that we weren't getting shot at by anybody, they gave the all-clear signal. I said, well, how can you give the all clear? We're still getting positive readings. Not only are we getting positive readings on the M8 alarms, we're getting positive verification tests on the M256 kits. 

I don’t know whether or not we were getting exposed to persistent or nonpersistent chemical. All I know is that we were getting positive for nerve agents. Positive for nerve agents. The respiratory protection that we had at that time was the M17A1 protective mask, which is basically a negative-pressure respirator with charcoal-based filters […] So if you had a minute small leak that you could not tell when you were just putting your hands over the filters, guess what? You were getting exposed. Low levels, but who knows what low levels of nerve agent sarin will do to the human body. Well, I think we're finding out, right? 

But that's what it was like soon after getting out of the Army, going back home to my family. Other people were having these big welcome home parades and the ticker tape and the barbecues and the hero's welcome. I mean they gave that to me too, but I sat there numb. I sat there numb. I just couldn’t get into it. It's like you get into an accident on the day of your big birthday party. It's like you're no longer in the mood to enjoy your birthday party because you got, it felt like just something was just not right. I don’t feel right being here, and I feel that way all the time. So it was back during that time I got out of the Army, went back to [location redacted]. The company that did hire me in [location redacted], they were very Veteran friendly. Pro-Veteran company. Three-quarters of the company were Veterans. The owner of the company was not a Veteran, but he made it a point to hire Veterans, so one of the reasons why I was able to get in was because he liked my background. 

Something he noticed right after Gulf was chronic fatigue: “It’s like if you haven’t gone to the gym in a year, and then one day… you work out really, really, really hard, what are you going to feel like the next day? I mean every day. It’s miserable.” A 2-mile run felt like his “body just got run over by a steamroller,” and taking out the garbage is a struggle. 

It just got too physically painful. I mean physically painful on my legs, on my joints. Physically painful while I’m actually physically exercising, but then afterwards, it would hurt so bad that I could barely walk the next day. Literally, I could barely walk the next day…Sometimes I can be sitting, and I can just feel the pain shooting down from my neck into my shoulders, both shoulders at the same time. Two hours later, it's my right knee. It's never, there's never any pattern to it. It's one day it's the knees. Some days it's the knees and the elbows. Some days it's nothing. Some days it's my back is killing me or my ankles. They're so sore, and I almost, I can’t walk. 

So how many times can you keep going on sick call? So now I've got my bosses in the Army looking at me like what the heck's the matter with you? How come you cannot, why do you keep going on sick? We need you here. We need you leading your guys. I was a squad leader at the time. I had 12 guys that worked for me, so you can’t keep going on sick call, so I just learned to shut up and just to start dealing with that pain. But I’m finding out that the guys that I deployed with, they're feeling the same thing. These guys are having similar symptoms, the muscle and the joint pains and always feeling exhausted. Now when I first came into the military, I mean I come from a long line of military. My father was retired Army. Both of my brothers served. My brother was an [job redacted]. My other brother, he was in [job redacted]. My uncle is a combat-wounded Vietnam Vet. So it was expected of me to join the military, and it's all I ever wanted to do. And when I went to boot camp, I finished first in my class. You can look this up in my military records. Went to AIT. Top 10%. Went to the advanced course, PLDC, Primary Leadership Development. I was the youngest [rank redacted] in the [Division redacted]. [Age redacted] sporting sergeant stripes. The military was my life, and by the time I got back from the Gulf, within months, I had my bosses, I was up for reenlistment, telling me, you know what? Maybe you should get out now while you can still get out with an honorable. My whole attitude on the military changed. I started getting into arguments with my boss. I mean the slightest little things would offend me. I just could not get along with people trying to get, it's like, well, why do you need to go on sick call again? You don’t understand. I’m in a lot of pain. Well, they don’t look at it that way. They look at it like you're a slacker, like you're a piece of crap, that you're just trying to get out of having to go do something that you don’t want to do. Field duty, training, and stuff like that. No, that's not it. I mean the military was my life, and now it's to the point where my bosses are telling me, you should probably think about getting out before we throw you out. So my performance evaluations after coming back from the Gulf just tanked. I mean, they tanked. They have what they call NCOERs, Noncommissioned Officer Enlisted Reports. That's your report card. And the NCOER that I got while I was in the Gulf was fine, but then you look at my NCOERs when I got back from the Gulf, they just got worse and worse and worse over time.

But that's what it was like soon after getting out of the Army, going back home to my family. Other people were having these big welcome home parades and the ticker tape and the barbecues and the hero's welcome. I mean they gave that to me too, but I sat there numb. I sat there numb. I just couldn’t get into it. It's like you get into an accident on the day of your big birthday party. It's like you're no longer in the mood to enjoy your birthday party because you got, it felt like just something was just not right. I don’t feel right being here, and I feel that way all the time. I started working with inmates, and I found that I could relate more to an inmate than I could with my wife. I felt more comfortable being in a room with robbers and gang bangers and murderers than normal people, and I still don’t know why that was. I got along very, very well with them. But when I got myself out of that environment, when I left the facility and went back to my employer, I felt that people were against me again…I was having a lot of problems dealing with people. Well, I pretty much, I mean I have no friends here. Zero. I don’t associate with anybody. I have no, just recently I started with this [Veteran group], and that's… the only socialization I've had other than my wife and my kids… I don’t have a group of friends I hang out with. I don’t have any regular meetings or athletic clubs I participate in. I usually stay away from people. I’m usually, almost always by myself. And on the nights that my nightmares get too bad, if it's not as cold as it's been, sometimes I'll sleep in my truck. Sometimes I'll just leave the house. I'll be gone for three, four, five, six, seven, eight, 10 days, and I'll go to some logging road up in the mountains and just sleep in my truck.

By the time I came back from the Gulf, my marriage, within a span of five or six months, got the point where my ex-wife basically, my ex-wife now, basically said ‘I don’t know who in the heck you are. This is not the person that I knew. My husband went there, and I don’t know who you are that came back.’ So that's the way she told it to me. […] So my wife at the time saw that I was really kind of just closing up, putting a wall around myself. I mean I never got to the point where I was ever physically or mentally abusive to my wife or to my daughter or anybody, physically abusive to anybody like that. […] All the time I’m dealing with depression, my marriage is going to crap, I’m having nightmares. […] I was screaming my nightmares. My wife would come in the room screaming, ‘what's the matter with you?’ My wife would wind up over at my buddy's house crying. My wife, she was afraid to come home. She was afraid to bring the baby around me. So my whole world had just gone to crap in a handbasket, and I’m talking within a matter of months from the time that I got back from the Gulf. So, from that point, I mean it's just been a slow decline physically and spiritually. I noticed, oh, going back to when I was still in Germany, I noticed that sexually I had no more interest in intimacy with my ex-wife, and that was one of the big problems that, [age redacted] years old, I mean, before I went over there, that wasn’t an issue. Coming back, it was a huge issue because it was a huge part of our relationship, and now that's gone. Completely gone. And that was one of the things, and I was seeing that with my new girlfriend who I married, is now my current wife. So during that time, my relationship with everybody pretty much was starting to suffer, with my father, with my mom, my brothers, sisters, family, friends. I stopped going to family functions. I kind of self-isolated myself from everybody. Didn’t want to be around people.

I put my wife through hell, a lot of hell, and right now, my relationship with my current wife right now is really crappy. I mean we're still physically living in the same house together, and she has a lot more understanding of what I’m going through than almost anybody in the whole world, being what she does for a living, so I think if she was just Jane housewife, I’d have been divorced… But my wife knows what PTSD is, and she's the one that kind of, my relationship with my wife is close, but there's still that huge friction between us.

My bosses are really pissed off now because I've been going to the VA. Ever since I started going to the VA, that was kind of like a curse because you can’t go there at 6:30 at night because I have to go during duty hours, and the VA wanted to see me, okay, you’ve got an appointment. I said, I can’t make that. I can’t make that. So my boss, meanwhile, my boss is getting pissed off. So, anyways, so I told them, I said look, I want to see somebody for my PTSD, but it has to be off hours. So they said, okay, well, we're going to send you, since we cannot accommodate you because you're working, we're going to send you to an outside psychologist… . So I started seeing her and going in on a regular basis, on a weekly basis. And at that point, I thought that maybe seeing her was starting to help, but then the VA sent me a nastygram saying we're not going to pay for her because we’ve got facilities right here that you can go to Monday through Friday, so they refused to pay her. So it was basically the VA cut me off with her, so now I've got a choice. Either go get PTSD treatment during duty hours and risk my job, which I wound up losing anyways, or don’t get any treatment. So my options were really bad.

So it was from the time I got back till [month redacted] of '92 my marriage fell apart, I was starting to experience all of these physical symptoms, the joint aches, the rashes, the fatigue, and then what I now know as PTSD. All of those symptoms. The depression with PTSD. The only time, I mean I seriously contemplated suicide at that point. I was the unit [job redacted]. I had the access codes to more weapons and ammunition than you would want to know about, and I seriously contemplated killing myself because my career was shit, my marriage was crap, my body was falling apart. The military was everything that I wanted, everything that I had lived for. And to see it just go down the tubes like that, and what was the hardest is I just didn’t understand what was going on. I didn’t understand what the heck was wrong with me. So I was able to, the only people that I could really talk to was the people that I went over there with because a lot of those guys were having similar problems. At one point, I was sharing a barracks room with two other guys whose wives threw them out because they couldn’t get along with their wives. So it was kind of, and at the time, we thought it was kind of funny that the three of us are in a barracks room together, but over time, it wasn’t funny anymore. This is serious shit watching your whole life fall apart. Again, I didn’t understand what was going on physically and mentally.