Page 1003 - Total War on PTSD

everything else. But when I went through the Hyperbaric Treatment here in Virginia, I actually gained about 10% of my short-term memory. So, it really has helped. I have been involved in supporting the Bill relating to Hyperbaric Treatment for Veterans for PTSD, TBI, etc., for a lot of stuff. We are waiting on whether it got passed through the finance committee and are pushing to have Tricare take care of it so that it wouldn't be a burden on the states involved. There are actually four states that got passed that, if you are a Veteran and you ask your physician to recommend the Hyperbaric Treatment to help with your PTSD. They can put in a referral and Tricare pays for it...or the VA itself will pay for it.
I was raised in a small town in southern Arkansas, I spent my summer working on the farm or if I was not horseback riding, I was playing war games out in the woods on the eighty acres that I lived on. I was only seven in 1972 when my family moved from California to Arkansas. The biggest change in my life journey was at the age of eighteen when I joined the military. It was my choice and my way of finding myself and who I was. I signed up and became a Mechanical Engineer for the U.S. Army. It was something that had never crossed my mind before then, but I found I was good at it. The transition from civilian life to military life was like night and day. The first new thing I had to adjust to was the lack of freedom. I had to give up a lot of my self- determination and submit myself to commanding authority. I was required to fall in line with the other components of a giant machine where individuality has no part. To adapt to the military and its unfamiliar conditions, Soldiers had to find themselves. In times of war, there were even more demands and the danger of being wounded or killed was clear, tangible, and ever-present.
September 11th, 2001 was the day that started a chain reaction of events, ultimately leading to the accident that caused the disability that will be with me for the rest of my life. I remember it like it was yesterday. I was heading back overseas. It wasn’t my first deployment into a war zone—I had been on active duty in both Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm. Everyone seemed so focused on the war in Iraq and on the many service personnel who had come back with PTSD. My friends John Smith and Joe Panned and I went out to recover some equipment that had broken down during a military patrol a couple of hours earlier one day. After returning to camp, on the way back to our tent to do some laundry, we witnessed an eighteen-
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