Local Home » Local Coping with combat
SCOTT HADLY, NEWS-PRESS SENIOR WRITER 
April 2, 2006 7:28 AMCombat veteran Jonathan Church didn’t panic when he saw the 6-foot shark circling below his surfboard.
Instead, the now-retired U.S. Army Reserve command sergeant major, who had just returned from Iraq, became enraged.
“You don’t know who you’re (messing) with,” the fit 60-year-old yelled at the shark. “I will kill you. I will pull you onto the beach, massacre you and barbecue you for dinner.”
A moment later, Mr. Church realized his reaction wasn’t the healthiest response to the dangerous predator. It became his own moment of clarity. Mr. Church, who served for a year with a civil affairs battalion near Baghdad before returning stateside at the end of 2004, realized he was still decompressing from the stress of combat.
“I didn’t see one-tenth of what some of these young guys – these heroes – saw every day,” he said. “And some of them are having a tough time. It’s a tough adjustment. I tell 'em it takes a full year to get back to normal.”
The reaction helped push him to do something for his fellow veterans, and in the last year he’s informally become the friend, nursemaid, battle buddy and de facto life coach for about a dozen young men struggling with their return from war. He’s not a trained psychiatrist or therapist. He doesn’t sit these men down on a couch and talk to them. He just takes them surfing.
“The worst thing that can happen is that a person isolates himself,” said Mr. Church. “That’s where surfing comes in. It’s a way of no-stress socializing with other surfers. It’s fun. You’re out in nature with buddies. You might go to church or go on a hike in the mountain, but for me it’s surfing because I’ve always done that.”
Two strangers who are out surfing suddenly have a whole nonthreatening way of communicating, he said.
"You’re out there and you’re saying ‘Hey did you see that wave?’ " he said. “It’s an important way to sort of re-socialize with people. Go have fun and get a feeling that everything is right with the world.”
Sitting on his surfboard on that day a year ago, Mr. Church looked at the beauty of the clean peeling waves at Coal Oil Point, thought about the absurdity of his reaction, and laughed.
“Imagine surviving a year of combat only to be eaten by a shark,” he said later. “Now that would be funny.”
But that experience and the anger that bubbled up inside him helped Mr. Church understand more fully the kind of post-traumatic stress some of his fellow soldiers have struggled with. He’d seen it among the crew of young men and women he served alongside while attached to the 425th Civil Affairs Army Reserve battalion based in Santa Barbara, and in other veterans he’s met over the last year.
“They have a variety of issues and, you know, being their sergeant major I’m the person they can talk to,” he said.
What he tries to tell them is that there’s nothing wrong with what they’re going through. It’s tough to figure out how many combat veterans suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. It surfaces often as nightmares or conscious memories triggered by sights, sounds or smells during which people essentially re-experience a trauma with much of the same anxiety and fear they had when it was really happening.
A recent Pentagon study that depended on self-reporting by soldiers found that anywhere from 8 percent to 20 percent of combat veterans suffer from readjustment problems.
There are plenty of others who adjust just fine, but it is rare that someone goes through combat or witnesses that level of violence without somehow being changed. In fact, the effects of combat on soldiers is well documented, going back to the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta before the birth of Christ. It’s been called battle fatigue, shell shock and, for a time before the First World War, “soldier’s heart” because it was associated with a rapid heartbeat.
Sometimes those effects are profound, and at other times they are more subtle, but they are always there. In the last few decades the military has learned from its experience with Vietnam veterans to better handle the effects of combat. The best way to cope, the military has found, is for veterans to talk about their experiences with other veterans, said Joe Narkevitz, a therapist with the VA in Ventura and himself a Vietnam veteran.
Though he hates the term, Mr. Church believes that post-traumatic stress disorder is a normal reaction to combat. He prefers to refer to it as “battle rhythm,” and says the guys he speaks with are still trying to get in sync with the pace of civilian life.
Though he believes some of the young men he’s talked to need more intensive therapy or group therapy and refers them to the VA for help, Mr. Church said many just need someone to talk to who actually understands what they’ve gone through.
About a year ago he decided to do something and began helping a handful of recently returned combat veterans readjust to life back home.
When he talks to veterans having trouble adjusting, he tries to remind them that they’re not crazy just because they might have problems getting in sync with civilian life again.
"I tell guys, ‘If you don’t have nightmares, trouble sleeping, anger issues, problems with your wife or your girlfriend; if you don’t think about your weapon or ending it all, there’s probably something wrong with you,’ " Mr. Church said.
Some of the men he counsels are on the edge, he said. He worries about them and the toll the transition takes on them and their families.
Sgt. Seanessey O’Dowd, 24, sat on a chair on his front porch chain-smoking. Deep dark rings circle his eyes from lack of sleep. Sgt. O’Dowd, a paratrooper who served with the 82nd Airborne, first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq, would much rather be back with his squad in a combat zone, but he rotated into a new assignment helping to recruit new soldiers on the Central Coast.
But the war comes back to him often in scents and sounds. The smell of a dead animal brings him back to patrols along the dangerous city streets of Fallujah. Silence keeps him awake at night, so he sleeps with the radio or television on at all times. During the day, he might duck at the sound of a car door slamming. When he drives, he is constantly looking at the side of the road, racing past garbage cans as if he were racing past a roadside bomb like the one that blew him out of a Humvee in Afghanistan.
The explosion killed two of his friends and left him deaf in one ear and with shrapnel in his side that still oozes out periodically. He remembers standing in the open roof at a machine gun and reaching into his vest for some candy he was about to throw some kids when the explosion ripped through the Humvee. The next thing he remembers is being on the ground, trying to get his legs under him and looking for his weapon. He tried to yell orders and check on his men on the radio, but the explosion had knocked the wind out of him and he couldn’t talk.
A tough and dedicated soldier who was awarded a bronze star and purple heart during his two tours, Sgt. O’Dowd said he had a hard time admitting he was having problems. In an odd irony, he found his assignment as a recruiter – back in his home town – to be more stressful than combat. Part of the problem, he said, was not having someone who could relate to his experience. It was also difficult knowing his fellow soldiers were now back in a war zone without him.
“I was having bad dreams, and I had some anxiety once I realized I was leaving my guys,” he said. “For awhile I couldn’t sleep, and I had a whole world of issues.”
Sgt. O’Dowd said he felt more comfortable in combat in part because he had a mission “to fight bad guys.” He was part of a team of men he considered brothers, and he felt he was doing something that mattered. Removed from that and coping with the delayed stress became very difficult, he said.
Sgt. O’Dowd has a group of friends who also grew up here and served in combat. He met with them, and that helped, but he still struggled with his memories. Then last year, he met Mr. Church at a Veterans Day event.
"He was just like, ‘Hey let’s go surfing,’ " Sgt. O’Dowd said.
A few days before Christmas last year, they went surfing with Sgt. O’Dowd’s dad, Patrick O’Dowd, at Campus Point.
“It was great, kind of like closure on my combat experience,” said Sgt. O’Dowd. “It felt like everything was suddenly like it had been before I left.”
A lot in Sgt. O’Dowd’s life had changed, but the waves and the water remained the same as they had been before the war.
“Something about that was very comforting,” he said.
Out in the water joking with his dad and Mr. Church he felt suddenly normal, Sgt. O’Dowd said. Unlike his sessions with a therapist, this was very basic.
“It was noncomplicated,” Sgt. O’Dowd said. “It’s like everybody has this shared experience, and you’re out there with a bunch of guys who know what you’re going through. It’s more relaxed.”
He’s kept it up, paddling out with Mr. Church and a handful of soldiers from the local recruiting office and a collection of others recently back from war.
For Mr. Church, the experience is equally rewarding and therapeutic, he said.
When he was in Iraq, he agonized sometimes over the safety of the young men and women in his command. Now that he’s back, he still worries and feels obligated to watch over them.
“I do this because I can and because it’s the right thing to do,” he said. “Twenty years from now these young heroes are going to be the ones running the country. We need to take care of them. We need to welcome them home. That’s a lesson we learned from Vietnam, that and, you know, if you have a problem with the war, don’t take it out on the soldier. They did their job for you.”
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