War vets say stress debilitating

A song brings sadness over a lost friend. A simple visit to a hospital brings with it the imagined smell of burned flesh.

Loud noises bring on rages for no reason. Images too awful to describe fill dreams.

And for Zimmerman a trip home to the Allegheny County community of Churchill from the airport becomes a vivid ride through the desert in a Humvee.

"I think that was scarier than anything I experienced in Iraq," Zimmerman, 25, of Churchill, Allegheny County, said of his first flashback upon arriving home from war.

Zimmerman, a former Marine and current Army National Guardsman, and Anderson, 47, of Washington, an Army master sergeant, both spoke of their experiences dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, during the second part of a two-part discussion on the disorder and the Iraq War Wednesday night at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg.

Anderson, Pitt-Greensburg's ROTC instructor, and Zimmerman, a psychology major at the Hempfield campus, said they are receiving counseling for the disorder that began while both were serving in Iraq in 2004.

Zimmerman was trained as an airplane mechanic and ended up in Iraq on a last-minute change of orders. He was supposed to be on a Navy ship in the western Pacific.

He ended up doing jobs he was never trained for -- convoy security, prison guard and vehicle checkpoint commander.

Zimmerman was searching one of those vehicles, which turned out to have plastic explosives loaded and ready to detonate, when the driver pulled a homemade pistol on him.

"He pointed it directly within two feet of me, and he pulled the trigger and it malfunctioned, and I just stood there and for what seemed like a couple of hours I stood there," Zimmerman said.

In reality, Zimmerman managed to disarm the car bomb while his fellow Marines took the man into custody.

"I don't remember doing any of that," he said.

But his therapy has helped him remember those things -- a key to treating his PTSD.

Anderson said he first experienced symptoms of PTSD while in Iraq, shortly after a suicide bomb exploded in his unit's mess hall in December 2004.

One by one, he received reports of men dead or dying.

"These are like my kids," he said. "They are my children in a way."

And as he was "up to his elbows" in blood, working to stop the bleeding on one of his soldiers, he felt like he was in slow motion.

"It felt like it was taking me minutes instead of seconds to do that," he said. "... I stopped feeling things that day, and I didn't feel anything until months after I came back."

His wife, Barbara, can attest to the change.

"It's like, 'Who's that stranger? I don't know him anymore.' The body's there, but the personality is gone. The zest for life is gone," she said.

And there was worry that any noise would set him into a rage.

"As much as they love you, as much as they care for you, you just don't know what they're going to do at that time," she said.

Barbara Anderson worked to get her husband into counseling.

"I cannot tell you what would have happened without that," Jamie Anderson said.

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