BY DAN HILDEBRAN
Telegraph Staff Writer
KEYSTONE HEIGHTS— Lake Region residents gathered at the Keystone Heights Cemetery for Memorial Day and heard an emphasis on veterans who may initially survive their battlefield experiences but who ultimately succumb to the trauma inflicted by war.
AMVETS Post 86 Chaplain Billy Hall echoed the tone of other speakers at the event when he said many servicemen and women fell on the battlefield but did not die there.
“A lot of them walked among us for a long time,” he said. “They didn’t know they were killed overseas with Agent Orange and the Gang Green and the PTSD and the suicides. These are our fallen heroes too, and they died in combat. They just didn’t know they were dead yet.”
Hall encouraged those in the audience to watch their veteran friends for signs of distress and intervene when appropriate.
“So, watch how you talk to your veterans,” he said. “You don’t know what they’re dealing with today. You don’t know what they’re dealing with yesterday or tomorrow.”
Keynote speaker Retired Lt. Col. Paula Fraley said she is a living example of veterans who suffer after battle.
Fraley said she was a mental health counselor at Camp Victory and Camp Liberty near Bagdad during the Iraq War.
“I took care of everything from counseling individual soldiers: privates to general officers,” she recalled. “One of my duties was to take care of those who went out with the photographers and had to take pictures of the body parts to identify them, some soldiers that were hit by the IEDs and other reasons for their death.”
Fraley added that she also debriefed units that had lost soldiers in battle.
“And then I worked with the chief psychiatrist in reporting up the chain to the U.S. operations, the number of suicides in the field,” she said.
Fraley said that after her year in the middle east, she realized that she needed some of the help she had been providing to others.
“I took care of everyone except me in Iraq,” she said, adding that mental healthcare providers forget that they also oftentimes need treatment.
“I was having periods of— just for no reason — just breaking down and crying,” she recalled of the period after her return from the war. “And my aunt said one day, ‘You need to see somebody.’ So, I went to the VA for some treatment, and I’ve been under their care still now, diagnosed with medical depression or major depression or PTSD.”
Fraley said another blow came after a 2 a.m. knock on the front door of her Indiana home.
“I looked out, there was a deputy cop out there,” Fraley said. “He asked if he could come in and sit down.”
The family gathered around the kitchen table and the officer asked Fraley if she had a son named Benjamin Nobles in Missouri.
“I said, ‘Yes.’ My son was in a helicopter unit, and he was a Black Hawk maintenance chief,” Fraley said. “He told me there’d been an accident by hanging, and so I called my sister and headed straight to Missouri.”
Fraley said her son was being kept alive on a ventilator.
“He lived about a week on a ventilator,” she said, “and it’s the hardest thing in the world when you’ve got to turn a ventilator off on your kid.”
Fraley said the Missouri and Indiana National Guards gave Benjamin a professional and dignified service honoring her son.
“They used the Bible verse from Ecclesiastes:” she said, “’A time to be born and a time to die.’”
Fraley said she was touched when everyone from privates to the colonel gave her son the final salute.
“It was amazing,” she said. “So professionally done. And I was okay until he handed me that U.S. flag off of that coffin, and I lost it.”
Fraley said she later joined a grief group at her church.
“It’s been the grace of God, the love of people and friends that have brought me through all this,” she said, “without it, I probably would have committed suicide too.”
Fraley said that at one point, after getting the news about her son, she couldn’t breathe and she couldn’t think.
“I was hurting emotionally so bad,” she said, “and then as I was at the V.A., I had a wonderful therapist, a psychologist who tried to take me back in my emotions to where I was in Iraq and the things I had to deal with there and with all the deaths in my family when I returned.”
She said that in addition to her son’s passing, her father, two uncles, and her first husband died.
“My mother was in a farming accident in August, and she lived until February of 2010.,” she said. “In June of 2010 is when my son committed suicide. So, I had all that stuff in me and then plus what I saw in Iraq, and it just was too much for me to deal with. So, the VA has been very good to me.”
Fraley said another big part of her therapy was a cross-country horseback ride from Mexico to Canada.
“It took four-and-a-half months to get from the Mexican border to the Canadian border,” she said. “We were six weeks in New Mexico. We went through Colorado, Western Nebraska, South Dakota and North Dakota. I saw some beautiful land that y’all don’t ever see.”
Fraley said that since 2001, over 40% of the 1.6 million veterans returning from deployment report post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression.
“Many of the service members do not seek help,” she said, adding that they feel seeking help will damage their careers.
“But it’s not a weakness,” she added. “If you really feel like you’re depressed or you have PTSD, you need to go get help.”
