How Should the Military Treat Vets with PTSD Who Lose Control?
FAIRBANKS, Alaska Staff Sgt. Robert Carlson raised the gun to his head. In the parking lot of their duplex, his wife was calling the police.
Please help, she cried. He punched me in the face.
His intention, Carlson later said, was to kill himself. Instead, alone on the second floor of their house, he lowered the gun from his head, pointed it toward a window and squeezed the trigger again and again, nine times in all.
Some of the rounds went into the roof of a garage, just below the window. Two rounds hit apartment buildings across the street. One round flew into the headlamp of a responding police SUV.
That was July 2012. Now, two years later, after being found guilty of assault with a deadly weapon and sentenced to eight years in prison, Carlson wonders about the fairness of such a punishment. I know I did wrong, he said recently from the detention facility at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state. But is jail time appropriate for someone who, before he fired those shots, spent 16 months in Iraq, followed by 12 months in Iraq, followed by another 12 months in Afghanistan?
Forty months total at war: He survived a blast from a suicide car bomb. He killed an Iraqi insurgent as the mans children watched in horror. He traded places one day with a fellow soldier who then was killed by a snipers bullet, standing in the very place where Carlson would have been if he hadnt switched. Did his years in combat mean he was deserving of compassion?
Compassion or conviction thats the choice more and more communities across the country are facing as the effects of 12 years of war are increasingly seeping into the American legal system.
The vast majority of veterans who suffered mental wounds in combat do not commit crimes, but post-traumatic stress disorder has been found to increase the risk of criminal behavior, especially when combined with alcohol, family stress or feelings of anger. Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who reported problems with PTSD and alcohol were seven times as likely to engage in acts of severe violence than veterans with neither of those problems, according to a 2014 study conducted by researchers affiliated with the University of North Carolina School of Medicine and the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Another study by the same research team found 23 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans with PTSD and irritability issues had been arrested since returning home from combat, compared with a 9 percent arrest rate for all of the 1,400 veterans in the survey.
What to do with such soldiers when they commit crimes? When are wounds such as PTSD or traumatic brain injury a cause of a good soldiers criminal behavior? When are they simply an excuse?
Carlsons case shows how complicated answers to such questions can be. Prosecutors, his defense attorney, grand jurors, commanders, battlefield comrades all have come to differing and evolving conclusions, as has Carlsons wife, Chelsey, who when the bullets began flying took cover and then watched in horror as her husband emerged from their apartment. His gun was pointed at his chin.
Just shoot me! he was yelling to officers whose guns were drawn, too, according to police reports.
Earlier that evening, the couple had gone out drinking with friends, returning home after 3 a.m. He had fallen asleep on the couch. She had been watching a movie with a girlfriend when he flung open the door to their bedroom and, accusing her of infidelity with another soldier, demanded to see her cellphone.
Their fight spilled down the apartments stairs and into the parking lot, where he hit her in the face with his hand and she fell to the wet grass. If the cops show up, there will be blood! he screamed, according to witnesses, as he headed back inside.
Now a half-dozen police were fanned out around her husband. I messed up! I just want to talk to my wife! he was screaming.
A cellphone video captured what came next. Carlson was on his knees, the gun still pointed to his chin, his finger on the trigger. He pressed his forehead to the ground and lay motionless for several seconds as if he were about to shoot himself. Then in a quick motion, he ejected the magazine from his pistol and flung the unloaded weapon at the police, who rushed him, jumped on him and restrained him.
Chelsey Carlson was sobbing hysterically. Her friend and a neighbor held her and tried to comfort her, while she begged the officers to let her talk to her husband.
What am I going to tell Bobs family? she cried as the officers loaded Carlson into a police car. What am I going to tell our son?
Tell them the truth, an officer replied. Tell them he beats on women.
Intent to kill
Andrew Baldock, the local prosecutor, had no doubt that what occurred that night was a serious crime, deserving of serious punishment.
Carlson hit his wife three times in the face. He threatened that there would be blood if she called police. He fired nine shots, five in the direction of a responding police officer. You can certainly see the intent to kill, Baldock said.
The charge he thought most appropriate after considering all of the evidence: attempted murder.
Like a lot of district attorneys in towns near big military bases, he was seeing more and more current and former soldiers with no criminal histories doing some crazily violent things, he said in a recent interview.
Most of the time these cases involved heavy drinking and allegations of cheating spouses or girlfriends, Baldock said. Usually, the defense attorneys claimed their clients untreated PTSD caused the violence. Baldock found it almost impossible to untangle the various causes.
No time to dig
Because Baldock had to get the case to a grand jury quickly, there was no time to dig into Carlsons service history. The prosecutors job was to focus on the facts from the night of the shooting, all of which told him that Carlson was a danger to the community who fired his gun deliberately and needed to be punished.
That was the case he made to the grand jury. He called a crime-scene expert who showed jurors where the bullets from Carlsons gun landed, as well as the detective who interviewed Carlson and the other witnesses in the housing complex. He called the first patrol officer on the scene.
And he called Chelsey, who talked about the fight, how Carlson had threatened her and then hit her. She also described him as a caring father who had gone to war for too long, suffered from PTSD and had fired blindly out of the window as a release rather than a desire to kill.
Carlson served as a machine-gunner and on sniper teams in Iraq and Afghanistan. If he wanted us dead, wed be dead, Chelsey remembers telling the grand jury.
Baldock had taken more than 600 cases to grand juries, including many involving domestic violence in which the victimized spouse pleaded with jurors for mercy. He was good at his job and could count on one hand the number of times he had not been able to persuade a grand jury to move a case forward to trial. This time, though, the grand jury chose not to indict Carlson on any of the charges. They felt sorry for him, Baldock would later say. Frustrated and angry, he shared the news first with police officers and the detective who testified before the panel. Well decide what our next step is going to be, he said.
Army jurisdiction
That next step involved the Army, which assumed jurisdiction of the case and, before Carlson could be released from jail, charged him again with attempted murder. He picked up two attorneys: a young Army captain and Chris Zimmerman, a 64-year-old civilian lawyer who led his defense.
While the prosecutor focused on one night, Zimmerman decided the best approach for a defense would be to focus on an Army career defined by steady promotions, awards and hidden mental wounds that, he would show, grew worse with time.
A combat award described Carlsons poise and skill in killing a fleeing Iraqi insurgent during his first tour. Absolutely unlimited potential, said a performance review, written after the second tour. Promote to (sergeant first class) ahead of his peers, said his last evaluation.
An Army psychiatrists evaluation, which Zimmerman requested, described the mental toll of all that combat. Carlson had been hiding on a rooftop when he received the order to kill the unarmed insurgent. The mans children the eldest of whom looked to Carlson no older than 8 started screaming before the mans body hit the ground. Carlson told the psychiatrist he thought of those children sometimes when he looked at his then-3-year-old son.
His toughest moment, he said, came near the end of his first tour when he asked to be moved out of the machine-gun position in his armored vehicle. The soldier who took his place was struck by a snipers bullet that blew through his skull.
Sense of guilt
Six years later, Carlson said he felt a lingering sense of guilt and responsibility for his friends death. Back from Afghanistan, he struggled with drinking, fits of anger and feelings of anxiety that led him to start carrying his gun with him on routine errands in town. He told the psychiatrist that on the night of the shooting, he hoped the police would kill him.
To Zimmerman, the performance evaluations and the psychiatrists PTSD diagnosis told the story of a good soldier, a good guy, who had broken under the strain of more than three years of combat, someone who needed treatment and not prison time.
Nonetheless, Zimmerman knew the Army system. He also knew military judges often viewed mental-illness defenses with more suspicion than sympathy.
His suggestion to Carlson was to cut a deal with prosecutors to drop the attempted-murder charge and the possible 25-year sentence that came with it. In exchange, Carlson would plead guilty to multiple counts of assault and both sides would agree to cap his prison time at no more than eight years. Well beat the cap, the lawyer promised. They didnt.
After a five-hour sentencing trial, the judge sentenced Carlson to eight years. Where are they going to send me? he asked his attorneys, who explained the next steps. He would be flown to the prison at Joint Base Lewis-McChord and would have a chance to apply for clemency, which was now his best hope.
Clemency quest
As soon as Carlson arrived at the prison, his military attorney started putting together his clemency packet. It included the psychiatrists report, Carlsons service records, a trial transcript and two dozen letters from friends, family members and former soldiers, each making the case for compassion.
This was happening at a time when the military legal community was having its own debate about what to do with soldiers like Carlson. The Judge Advocate Generals Corps main academic journal, Military Law Review, published a groundbreaking and controversial article by an Army prosecutor that called for major changes in the way military courts handle troops with PTSD and traumatic brain injury. The systems narrow focus on discipline over treatment failed to acknowledge the mental wounds that were causing some soldiers criminal behavior, wrote Maj. Evan Seamone, the chief of military justice at Fort Benning, Ga. The result was a military justice system at odds with itself, one that was creating a class of individuals whose untreated conditions endanger public safety and would, without treatment, grow worse over time, Seamone wrote.
Carlsons military attorney made a version of this argument in his clemency packet. If clemency was denied, Carlsons fellow soldiers would be demoralized by the knowledge that the institution they have so sacrificially and faithfully served has discarded one of their brothers when he was weakest and most broken, the lawyer wrote. Hard prison time will not resolve the trauma in Staff Sgt. Carlsons life that led to this incident. … This is someone who needs to heal.
The clemency packet was sent to Maj. Gen. Michael Shields, the commander of all Army forces in Alaska, for final determination. As it turned out, Shields had been Carlsons brigade commander during his longest and toughest tour, which gave his family and friends hope. Thirty soldiers died under Shields command in Iraq, each of them remembered by a small granite marker at Fort Wainwright.
On the desk in his Army office, the general keeps a book that contains pictures of those soldiers and copies of the handwritten letters that he sent to their families.
The clemency packet arrived at Shields office on a Monday, and his answer came back on a Friday afternoon. The sentence is approved . . . and will be executed, the general wrote. The clemency request was rejected. Asked recently about his decision, Shields said he would not discuss Carlsons case.
Living in the past
Five months after Shields decision, Carlson was starting another day in the base prison. Like all of his days now, it began at 5:30 a.m. in an open bay with about a dozen other inmates, almost all of them Iraq and Afghanistan veterans serving time for drug offenses, assaults or stealing from the Army. The inmates are assigned work details in the prison laundry, carpentry shop and vegetable gardens. They clean and mop their living bays, which consist of bunks, one shared television and some board games. A few times each day, a guard escorts them to the chow hall, the library or a small weight room. Each night the lights cut out at 10.
You find yourself living in the past, Carlson said of his life now. I go back to that night, back to everything that led to me being here.
Carlson said he deserves punishment. He also said he deserves mental-health counseling but is not getting any in jail, that the closest the prison offers is a weekly PTSD support group led by a chaplain and a couple of outside veteran volunteers.
Chelsey doesnt visit Carlson the couple divorced recently but they still speak occasionally on the phone about the shooting, their lives and their 5-year-old son, who lives with Carlsons parents. Carlsons plan when he gets out of prison is to be with his son. I want to go back to being a father, he said. He also wants to seek treatment for his PTSD, although his dishonorable discharge could make it hard for him to receive it through Veterans Affairs.
For now, though, that future feels far away, he said, especially compared with the past, which is where his mind usually goes during quiet moments at the end of the prison day. He revisits the chaotic chain of events that ended an otherwise honorable Army career the paranoia and anger, the gun pointed at his chin, the nine shots through the window, the ride away in the police car.
How did I get out of control so quickly? Carlson said he asks himself again and again, along with other questions.
What made me snap?
What happened to me?
Theres just a lot of what-ifs, he said.
Tags: Veterans News
