Chapter 1

Transcript

Kris: So rather than act as a forward observer, I couldn’t call for airstrikes or mortar strikes in such a densely populated area. They made me an on the ground intelligence reporter and what that meant is I go out with the same fighting gear as everybody else in the infantry battalion that I was in. My M4, hundreds of rounds, grenades but I also had with me a GPS locator, a camera and a notepad. And it was my responsibility to record everything that we did. So most of the time, most missions, I think [pause] most veterans will tell you are really boring. You go out and nothing happens. So in Sadr City, the biggest problems were with their infrastructure. So sewage, water, electricity, trash. So I’d be documenting that type of thing, the state of the city in different parts of it. 

But then there were, you know, days where we would go out and we’d get a call to come respond to a body that was found. There’s a lot of sectarian violence in Baghdad, and we would show up and it would be my job as the photo documentarian of the platoon to basically photograph the faces of these victims of torture and murder. In one case, in May of 2005, there were over a dozen bodies that were exhumed, and it was my job to photograph all of them. And I didn’t realize at the time but that,that was something that was affecting me in a profound way. Having the feeling of the loss of mission in terms of that first interaction with the Iraqis of being treated as an occupier as an invader, rather than a liberator, and then seeing the ugliest of humanity. It was tough to deal with. At 19 years old, I didn’t have the vocabulary to describe what I was going through. I didn’t have the training or knowledge about things like post- traumatic stress disorder in terms of signs and symptoms, or what to do when those symptoms pop up.

So I went through a year in Iraq where that was kind of the thing. There were weeks where nothing would happen and then you’d have one crazy day where you were either  getting shot at or one of our platoons gets hit by an IED. But we were lucky. Our deployment was not nearly as bad as most people in 2005. Most other areas received some like really serious injuries and deaths. We lost one person during our year long deployment.

So when I got back from Iraq, things were immediately different and I didn’t recognize it. I felt like the whole world had changed. You know, this is a time when MySpace was the social network. As someone who wasn’t in school, like I couldn’t be on Facebook, right. So my view of the world was through that social media (MySpace) and emails from my friends and family.  So when I got back, it felt like technology had advanced.

Like, my friends had new personalities,  people were off living their lives, while mine was kind of frozen in time from the moment that I stepped on that plane.

So one of the first things that happened were kind of the classic symptoms of PTSD that showed up when I got home for New Year’s Eve and was at a party with a bunch of kids that I grew up with. At the stroke of midnight, I’m outside and one of the neighbors sets off fireworks. And you know, I was drunk, but I remember this clearly. Having this sensation that I couldn’t stop my body from responding to the noise, but at the same time being fully aware that I’m in the United States, that there’s no enemy here. It was this crazy contradiction, where I was basically having a panic attack and literally ran into some bushes in the middle of the night. But at the same time, like knew, it’s just fireworks. This is something… like I love fireworks.

So my career went really well despite these challenges that I was facing. They were all personal, personal relationships. It was drinking outside of duty. You know, where I was getting blackout drunk.But my commanders never saw that side of me. I performed very well on any tests I ever faced, whether it was physical or mental or when it came to job performance. So I was assigned additional duties that people with much higher ranks typically had. I was promoted to sergeant in just about two years with my unit, which is extremely fast. So all the while I’ve got like a different life as soon as I take off my uniform when I go home. It’s like I’m a different person in uniform, Type A, achieving anything that I wanted to, but then coming home and kind of having to deal with the things that I experienced in Iraq. At the same time, I didn’t understand that I was dealing with stuff in Iraq.

I like a lot of the folks that are employed, was kind of in denial. You know, it’s kind of a tough guy thing. Like ‘our deployment wasn’t that bad, I didn’t get hurt. There’s no reason that this would follow me home.’ And a lot of the guys that I deployed with were experiencing the same symptoms. So to us, looking at our peers, you know, that’s how you gauge your sense of normalcy and we’re just surrounded by guys experiencing the same thing. So, you know, we’d be getting blackout drunk, and were like, well, this is what we do for fun, you know? So, one of the things that I came home with, and this is with hindsight, the benefit of hindsight and lots of therapy and learning to identify my symptoms and what triggers these types of things, is I used to drink vodka just straight out of a plastic bottle, like the cheapest you could buy, because in my mind, it was the closest thing to rubbing alcohol and I was trying to clean the deployment out of me. The smell of that mass grave that we uncovered in May of 2005, didn’t leave me for years. I felt like it was stuck in my sinuses.

We found these bodies in a trash dump, which was also the lowest area around the city. So it’s naturally where all the sewage flowed. And as I was photographing these bodies, there were flies everywhere, landing on the bodies, and then they’re landing on my face. And you know, what are the flies going for? Moisture. Crawling into the corners of my eyes, trying to get into my nose, landing on my lips and I felt at that moment, like death had just gotten inside. So when I came home and I’d be drinking the closest thing I could get to rubbing alcohol. If it wasn’t vodka it was Everclear. My roommate would find me passed out in the shower with the hottest water that would come out of the pipes. You know, my body all pink from I guess first degree burns.

So I kind of realized that my childhood dream of joining the army had turned into a nightmare. I no longer wanted to be a part of it. I felt completely disillusioned with the war by then. I was frankly jealous of all my friends who didn’t join the military, who were going off to college and having fun, meeting new people, gaining new skills while I was blowing stuff up, you know, and entering a room to clear it with a weapon. My friends were learning about economics. So I  became obsessed with the idea of: Okay, my enlistment ends in May 2007 and after that, the following September, I’ll be in school. 

So I applied to a bunch of SUNY colleges, State University of New York colleges on Long Island in New York, and was accepted to a bunch of them. And then January 2007, George Bush announced the troop surge and the plans deployment date, my unit had one in like October or November, maybe December of 2007. But because of the troop surge it got boosted up to May, the same week that my contract was set to expire. So there used to be a program called Stop Loss, where if you were within 90 days of a deployment, they would hold you in that unit to deploy and come home plus 90 days on the other end. So I knew full well that at that point, the reason for the troop surge was we were essentially losing this five year war in Iraq and I knew what kind of violence we’d be facing when we got there. To accept this idea of having my contract extended and be deployed the same week that my contract was supposed to end was kind of the straw that broke the camel’s back. 

That’s when I had my first panic attack at work. I used to pride myself in being like, super fit. We do these things every morning, when you’re in the military, you workout with your unit. So we used to do these long distance runs, and I was a cross country runner in high school, so this was like my strong spot. So we’d run out say three miles, and then they release us and we go back three miles at our own pace. I would always be the first one back from my platoon. I used to get back before everyone like 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes before the rest, and kind of sit down, meditate, reduce my heart rate and just kind of calm down. Not in any sort of like spiritual meditation. Frankly, I just wanted to stop sweating because it’s Georgia, it’s fucking hot. 

So there’s this one day when we do this release from, and I come home, I come back to our lot. And I try to do this meditation thing but my heartbeat, it’s just pounding faster and harder than I had ever felt before. I’m feeling sick. I’m feeling a tightness in my chest. In that moment, I thought I was having a heart attack. I thought maybe I pushed myself too hard on this run. So, I ended up going to the hospital and getting checked out. The doctor, the physician who I saw,  runs an EKG on me, they do x-rays, all sorts of stuff, and the guy goes to me, after like a full day of tests, he says to me, “Well,you’re like the healthiest kid I’ve ever seen. There’s nothing physically wrong with you, do you think this might be related to stress? Is there anything that’s stressing you out?” At that point, it was the first time that I really verbalized what I was going through, to anyone. So I told him about how my world had been turned upside down and how I was expecting to get out of the army, go to college, and instead I am getting dragged into another deployment that frankly I didn’t sign up for. So that’s when I began treatment. I go over to the mental health clinic. And  I use the word ‘treatment’ with air quotes, because it was anything but helpful.

There was an army psychiatrist who we used to have the opportunity to see once a week and there were two hour group meetings that was really the only thing available. Not enough doctors on this base to handle this rapid deployment, multiple deployment scenario. And the same hospital that served active duty troops like myself was serving military families who lived on the base too. So pretty much, my only option for treatment was to go to these two hour group meetings that were in a small room that was packed with people and each person had a completely different problem. I was suffering from PTSD from combat exposure, which, frankly, I didn’t understand at the time. I didn’t know why I was feeling the way that I did or going through what I was going through. But it was also this terrible scenario where the person next to me, who is in this group therapy session, is a woman, the daughter of someone in the military, who might have been sexually assaulted, and we’re supposed to tell our stories in front of each other, basically begging for medicine. Over the two hour meeting, it would usually be like an hour before the psychiatrist actually showed up and then when she did, there’s like two dozen people sharing 60 minutes to get their story out and basically begging for medication. That was the only way you’re getting better because talk therapy was not happening.

So I get medicated, my medications going up and down and between different drugs.

So I’m going to these weekly meetings and the only people who know are my direct supervisor, and my two soldiers who I was in charge of and responsible for, because I would disappear for two and a half hours once a week. So, I swore everybody in the secrecy, this is a point when PTSD is not part of the American lexicon, you know, its an acronym to me that for a while I didn’t even know what it stood for. And at that time in the military, it didn’t matter if you broke your foot or if you were experiencing mental health issues, you’re treated the same way, and it’s garbage for getting hurt. It can end your career. So I’m going to these meetings, I’m only getting worse. You know, it’s the opposite of treatment. Its just a triggering moment and these group meetings are like new forms of trauma that got worse and worse and worse. I’ve also got these health issues going on. I don’t know if it was related to my drinking and vomiting or if that sensation that I had that like death was inside my sinuses turned out to be a physical problem. I ended up having my deployment delayed by a month because I needed surgery to fix my sinuses.

And that’s when I spent a long period of time alone. They’ve given me Percocet, to deal with the pain of the surgery, which didn’t. I can handle pain pretty well and I grew up as a straight edge, I’m not a fan of pills. So I have this pill bottle sitting around and the night before I was supposed to show up for my deployment, I ended up walking out onto a field, where they plant a tree for every soldier who’s fallen in the division in combat. And that place has always kind of felt like a graveyard. They have a plaque and a name, and it’s kind of like if you can’t visit your buddy at his grave site, this is the next best thing. 

So, I go out with this bottle of pills and a bottle of vodka and intend on dying. Now, thankfully, my then roommate and best friend that I had since basic training, our careers just kind of kept us next to each other, he noticed that I was missing. And he had kind of well had a front row seat to everything that I’ve gone through, whether you know stuff that I’ve gone through in Iraq and everything that I went through at home. In that month when I was staying home recuperating from the surgery, he noticed that I was just getting darker, more angry, more depressed. When he noticed that my bags weren’t packed the night before I was set to deploy, he called the police and had a search party go out, and they found me. So the next thing I remember is being handcuffed to a gurney.

Up until that point, my career had gone really well. I was well liked, both by my peers and my supervisors. I had been promoted ahead of my peers. The military had been doing everything they could to get me to reenlist even though I didn’t want to be in. But from that moment that I woke up, everything changed. I was treated like a criminal.

So I ended up on a mental health board, isolated there to stabilize from somewhere between like 10 days and two weeks. And after all that I had been through, that was the single scariest situation that I had ever been in. Because when I was up there, the same psychiatrist who was showing up late to those meetings, was kind of the one in charge. And she was saying things like “Well  if you don’t get better, then you just have to stay up here indefinitely.” And when she said the word indefinitely, I believed her. As it being retaliation for my symptoms and that I would just be kept isolated, you know, no phone, no internet. Just stuck with a bunch of people who had their own mental health issues and some seemed very dangerous. So I basically started saying like, “yeah, my suicide attempt was just a fluke. I feel better. I’m ready to go.” And the guy who was the commander, who they call the rear detachment commander, the guy who runs the company from stateside while the rest of the unit is overseas, tells me he’s like, “Listen, I have known you forever.” [pause] He used to be in charge of me at one point when we were in Iraq, and is like to me “I think you got totally fucked and I just want to see you get out of here.” 

So they tell me that I’m going to get an honorable discharge and I am going to be out of the military by the end of the summer. Then a couple weeks go by and I haven’t seen any paperwork for this stuff and that same guy, that  rear detachment commander, a staff sergeant infantryman, comes up with two pieces of paper of counseling statements. Now normally you get regular counseling statements in the military every month, it’s like a job performance checklist, areas where you can improve and if anything exceptional happens gets included there. But they can also be used for incident specific events. So these two separate counseling statements, one was for missing movement, which is a crime in the military and what that means is, is that I didn’t get on the plane when I was supposed to deploy. And the second was for malingering, which is a medical diagnosis. And an infantry man with a high school education is not qualified to diagnose anyone for anything. 

So after those council statements they quickly told me that they were going to give me Article 15s. That’s a non judicial punishment, where it’s basically as if a mid-level manager can take away your pay for two weeks. And when you face these articles, you can refuse them and say that you want a trial by court martial. So that’s what I did. And I thought it was only reasonable because I was being told that I’m a malingerer by someone who doesn’t have a medical background. And the fact that they were trying to charge me with missing movement when the reason why I missed movement was because I was handcuffed to a gurney after surviving a suicide attempt.

So when I demanded trial by court martial, they rescinded the article 15 minutes and decided instead to issue me a general discharge. That’s one step below honorable and a step above other than honorable. So, by the end of summer of 2007, I was back to living in my childhood bedroom. You know, I’d gone from being Sergeant Goldsmith back to Kris. And rather than, having a ceremony for leaving the military, which is what normally happens when people leave, I was given the boot and basically told that my service and sacrifice was not honorable and frankly not worth it. So with the general discharge, I still had access to VA benefits in terms of health care. I did not have access to the GI Bill. 

So my route of recovery and employment,and  you frankly, the dream of college that I’ve been obsessed with, after coming home from Iraq, all became impossible. So I basically spent the next couple of years in a dark haze. I don’t remember my early 20s. I was drinking all the time. Spent every dollar that I made in Iraq that I had saved. I spent something like $17,000 at the town bar in three months. You know, because at that point, I was still suicidal. I was like, “Well, fuck it, you know, I may as well go out with a bang.”

So, after a few months, my mom  basically told me “Listen, if you want to stay in this house, you need to go to the VA. I heard that you can apply for benefits where they pay you monthly if you’re disabled. So you should go try that.”  So I went online to the VA s website to apply for services and  within two weeks I was at the VA hospital for the first time. And the first time I was at the VA hospital, I was diagnosed with PTSD right then. Now while I was in the military, and receiving treatment, instead of being diagnosed with PTSD, they diagnosed me with adjustment disorder, which has the same signs and symptoms. The difference between adjustment disorder and PTSD, is PTSD is persistent, whereas adjustment disorder is a temporary dysfunction or response to a stressful condition. Now, I’ve been told by doctors that if you have a diagnosis of adjustment disorder and the symptoms last longer than six months, they pretty much have to say this PTSD.  Between my diagnosis and my discharge I didn’t have six months. You know, there was no opportunity for me to be correctly diagnosed. At that time the army was trying to say that PTSD isn’t real, it isn’t a problem. So they were making real efforts to hide the issue.

So the VA saved my life. I was able to get therapy, medication and work out the issues that I’ve been through and the issues that are arising each new day as I’m going through this alcohol case. Over the course of about five years, I went through hundreds of appointments.  I wanted to get better and every time that I started getting better, I would just stop going in for appointments and then I would fall off a cliff again. I went through a lot of cycles of highs and lows, where I think okay, like life is good now, and then a week later I’m not able to get out of bed.

I eventually get a job at this photo booth company. NYC photo booth. Where I was dragging  800 pound booths, like physical photo booths, like the old Coney Island style where you get into it to take photos, and I go to weddings, ordinances and stuff and frankly, the reason why I could handle that job is because I could drink on the job. You go to parties and there’s an open bar.

This is about the only thing I can handle. Eventually, at some point, I started building these photo booths, custom designed things. I had done some woodworking in high school as part of a blue collar training program. Then Hurricane Sandy happened. It wiped out the photobooths. We had like  five feet of salt water come through and destroyed everything that I built over the last two years, it destroyed all the tools that I had been using. So my boss had to lay me off, he didn’t have a choice.

So Sandy taking away that job is probably one of the best things that ever happened to me. Because at that point, I went back to the VA, and they said, “Hey, you know, with your general discharge, you’re eligible for this program called voc-rehab, or vocational rehabilitation. It’s not an education program. It’s a job program, but education can be one realm.” So I went and took the aptitude tests and went to the Manhattan VA central office to meet this voc-rehab counselor Chris Holder, a combat Marine, disabled himself, had used voc-rehab. And he’s like, “Listen kid, you’re going to school. This blue collar stuff, you got to stop.” And frankly, after almost losing my thumb on a table-saw the year prior, I was ready to give up the blue collar life. So I started Nassau Community College in Long Island, still living in my childhood bedroom. And over the course of a semester I kind of found purpose again, and I found a community. Over the course of one semester I went from being the guy who literally sits in the corner of the Veteran Center with my hoodie over my head, just doing homework silently and not talking to anybody, to being elected as the president of the Student Veterans America chapter and representing 350 some odd vets. And from that position,  I was able to lead again, I was able to, to do good again. I by chance happened to tell my story to the community college’s lawyer and he had been a congressional staffer, a very senior congressional staffer for Senator Carl Levin. And, you know, he heard my story, basically everything I’ve told you up to now, and he said, “You know what, there ought to be a law and I know how to do that.”

So he helped me learn to write an op-ed, learn how to write a press release, how to write a research paper. I started studying the issue of bad paper, the issue of veterans getting kicked out without access to benefits. I’m so glad that I, by chance, met this lawyer and then he became my first real mentor in my life because I came to realize that I wasn’t alone. There are hundreds of thousands of vets who have had their benefits taken away through administrative discharges, many of them,like me, suffering from PTSD and being punished for those symptoms. So that research was another big step towards recovery, coming to realize that I am not some anomaly who experienced this terrible thing. Finding out that it was a systemic issue is actually, in a way, comforting, because I knew that I wasn’t specifically victimized. So I went to the [Capitol] Hill for my first time in like 2014 with a couple of vets, a year after I started at Nassau, and brought a research paper that I had written and a one pager explaining the issue of bad paper. And my mentor had called some old friends to take meetings with me. So I met with members of Congress, mostly congressional staff,  and told them my story and I talked about how I was trying to get my discharge upgraded.

Index

0:00 Being an Intelligence Reporter and the Job It Entailed

1:43 Loss of feeling in Iraq and Seeing the Ugliest of Humanity

2:46 “We Were Lucky”

3:10 Coming Back from Iraq and Viewing the World Differently

4:05 The New Years Eve Party 

5:18 Reflecting on His Career 

6:14 “When I Took Off the Uniform I Felt Like a Different Person”  and PTSD symptoms

7:37 Drinking Vodka to Cleanse Himself of the Deployment

8:15 Witnessing a Mass Grave, Photographing Them, and the Mental Aftermath

9:25 Becoming Disillusioned With War

10:33 Reflections on George Bush Announcing the Troop Surge .

11:35 “The Straw that Broke the Camel’s Back” 

13:50 First time Verbalized His PTSD symptoms and Beginning “Treatment”

15:05 Going to the Only Treatment Group Available

16:50 Going to Meetings and Health Getting Worse

18:45  The Suicide Attempt

20:45 Being Treated like a Criminal 

22:33 Being Discharged from the Military with Punishment

25:05 Going from Seargent Goldsmith to being Kris 

26:43 Being Diagnosed with Adjustment Disorder.

28:45 Wanting to get Better but Being Dragged 

30:43 Going back to the VA 

31:28 Going back to school
34:15 Going to Capitol Hill for the first time and Meeting with congressional staff