“Nationally, the VA is getting a very bad rap – and deservedly – but the Durham (N.C.) VA Center saved my life,” says Toni Taylor.

            Mike Orban isn’t a journalist writing about other people’s experiences. Instead, he’s a ’Nam vet who never really recovered from losing his soul in combat. And his book, Souled Out, examines his years of pain with searing detail and unflinching honesty.

Mike writes about his year-long fight in 1971 to stay alive on the killing fields of Tay Ninh Province in the Central Highlands, with every sense on high alert to protect him from ever-present danger. He writes about how empty it made him feel when he realized there was no legitimate purpose to his mission, that he was merely killing others so they wouldn’t kill him. And he writes about the anger he felt toward the Washington bureaucrats who so needlessly sacrificed the lives of young American soldiers that they deemed expendable.

But unlike so many war books, this part is designed merely to give us a taste of what Mike went through. Most of Souled Out is about the aftermath of war and how he no longer fit in.

Mike compares himself to an abandoned house with a leaking roof, sagging floors, dirt-smeared windows and rotting furniture on the inside, but with a fresh coat of paint on the outside. All his energy for the next five years went to keeping up that façade.

But it wasn’t until 1976 when he volunteered to go to Africa with the Peace Corps that he noticed a huge positive change. Part of it was the beauty of the jungles of PC Gabon, and part of it was living among rural natives so close to nature. But finally he realized that he simply needed to help others to make up for the harm he had inflicted in combat. It felt so good that after three years in Gabon, he joined USAID for another two years in Cameroon.

Returning to America in 1980, he began a long slide downward, working just enough to pay for food and alcohol as he scrounged off his brothers and sisters and as he did his best to avoid facing the major problems in his life.

At the end of that long road, Mike faced a grim choice: suicide or recovery. And recovery meant facing the demons that he had worked so hard to avoid. But in 2001, he committed himself to a 90-day inpatient PTSD program at the VA hospital in Tomah, Wis., to begin that process.

Writing became part of his painful examination because writing requires honesty and because once those words are on paper, they can’t be ignored. So writing became an important part of Mike’s therapy.

Souled Out is one vet’s story, but it’s designed to educate other vets and their families so they don’t feel alone with their guilt, their depression, their sorrow and their rage. Showing how one vet achieved an inner peace gives a game plan for others to be able to duplicate it. So writing became another part of Mike’s therapy.

Finally, writing a book forces the author to promote it. That means speaking before civic groups, vets’ organizations and virtually anyone else willing to listen. Again, that’s therapeutic for a vet accustomed to isolating himself.

In some respects, Souled Out is just one of many books detailing the odyssey of a warrior coming home from war. But it’s much more than that because at the end of the day, Mike summoned up the courage, energy and resolve to fix the roof and the floor, pitch out the rotting furniture, clean the place up and slap a fresh coat of paint on the walls so he can live again in that once-abandoned house.

Like every restored home, there are always new problems and fresh additions to the maintenance list. But there’s a real joy in seeing fresh life in this house … and this author.

Over the course of a year, many books roll across my desk. But Souled Out has a permanent place on my personal bookshelf. It’s available at www.mikeorbanptsd.com or at Amazon.com. You can also call 262-247-2456 for signed copies, volume sales or info on PTSD.

The VA released its own damning report this week about wait times for veterans to get appointments at their hospitals and clinics. It pretty much confirms what most of us have seen in practice. But most vets have a highly skeptical view of government reports — particularly VA reports – so it’s good that acting VA Secretary Sloan Gibson has also ordered an independent, external audit of the scandal.

It will be interesting to see whether the situation worsens when outside auditors examine the VA health care system. But frankly, it’s hard to believe the system could be any worse than the VA has acknowledged.

According to the VA’s inspector general, 100,000 vets are experiencing excessive wait times for current medical appointments, and many others have fallen through the cracks without having been scheduled for appointments.

“On May 15, 2014, VHA had over 6 million appointments scheduled across the system,” according to the audit. “Nationwide, there are roughly 57,436 veterans who are waiting to be scheduled for care and another 63,869 who over the past 10 years have enrolled in our healthcare system and have not been seen for an appointment. VA is moving aggressively to contact these veterans through the Accelerating Access to Care Initiative.”

About 70 percent of the 731 facilities reviewed were using alternatives to wait-list procedures to make the wait-list times appear shorter, the audit found, and more than 10 percent of the 4,000 employees interviewed said they had been instructed in how to falsify wait-list data.

At a House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs hearing Monday evening, Richard Griffin, the VA’s acting inspector general, said his office is reviewing 69 VA medical facilities and is coordinating with the Justice Department when inspectors identify potential criminal violations, according to the Wall Street Journal.

“The issue of manipulation of wait lists is not new to VA,” Griffin told the WSJ. “And since 2005 the [inspector general] has issued 18 reports that identified at both the national and local level deficiencies in scheduling, resulting in lengthy wait times and in negative impact on patient care.”

Accompanying the release of the VA’s review data Monday morning, Gibson announced a hiring freeze among senior positions at the VA and said the VA will “trigger administrative procedures” against senior leaders in charge of problem facilities.

And he said he had ordered an outside audit of VA health care facilities to confirm the VA’s OIG report.

In recent weeks, I’ve been biting my tongue and refusing to write about the growing scandal in the VA, triggered by the allegations out of Phoenix about obscenely long wait times, officials who falsified wait time records, and vets who tried to hold officials accountable being denied service the longest.

My reason for silence is that I have been refusing to participate in a public charade.

In America, we tend to react to scandals like these without ever fixing anything. There’s a crescendo of blame that leads to investigations until our fickle public attention shifts elsewhere, at which time everything returns to normal. I’ve refused to get involved until now because our vets are too important for this to proceed as normal.

This scandal followed a predictable pattern until VA Secretary Eric Shinseki tendered his resignation. Then his replacement, Acting Secretary Sloan Gibson, took an unusual step with an unusually strong initial statement:

“Not all veterans are getting the timely access to the healthcare that they have earned,” Gibson said. “Systemic problems in scheduling processes have been exacerbated by leadership failures and ethical lapses. I will use all available authority to swiftly and decisively address issues of willful misconduct or mismanagement.”

First, I agree these are leadership issues. Most of the VA personnel I’ve known have been overworked and trying hard. But many of them struggle in conditions their bosses should have been working to prevent. Over the years, I’ve learned that weak and insecure bosses surround themselves with losers who make them look better – and they tend to protect these failures so they don’t look like failures themselves.

So those were encouraging words. But only words.

Still, this is a promise to which we can hold Gibson accountable. For that reason, I’d encourage President Obama to keep the acting secretary in place long enough to see whether he can deliver on that promise.

And there are three main ways we can know whether the acting secretary is living up to his word.

First, the Department of Veteran Affairs Office of the Inspector General has been publishing individual reports this year on specific VA offices, rating them on honest wait times and how well they follow the protocols. Gibson should act on those reports, firing the VA directors whose facilities are failing and putting directors of the borderline facilities on probation.

Second, the acting secretary should take a look at the obscene amount of merit bonuses paid to VA employees whose job performances don’t justify such rewards. Directors of borderline facilities who have approved exceptional bonuses ought to be given the boot as well.

Third, Gibson should rate all VA facilities by the length of time it takes for vets to get appointments with doctors, then track their improvement in three-month intervals, again removing the directors whose facilities fail to improve.

As I’ve been writing these words, I’ve been interrupted several times by phone calls from a former Army Ranger named Danny Reed II, a West Virginian who had been involved in the “rescue” of Private 1^st Class Jessica Lynch from insurgents in Iraq. Reed has known since 2003 that he has seven bulging disks in his spinal cord as a result of his jumps out of helicopters, but he ran into trouble with the VA when the pain became severe this year.

He told me that he waited seven hours in a VA emergency room before doctors sent him home without any help. He waited three months for an MRI, which showed that one of the bulging disks had herniated. And he’s facing spinal cord surgery Thursday in a civilian hospital because he says he can’t get adequate help in a VA hospital.

I hear stories like these all the time, and they’re an outrage. The acting secretary has promised swift and decisive action to correct this outrage, and we all should hold him accountable.

Researchers at VA hospitals across the country are finding that vets with post-traumatic stress disorder are more likely to suffer from heart disease as well.

However, there’s no scientific explanation for why it’s happening.

“There’s now a large body of evidence that unequivocally links trauma exposure to poor physical health,” Dr. Paula Schnurr of the VA’s National Center for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder told VA Research Currents. And some doctors are seeking a causal link between PTSD and coronary heart disease.

Last year, researchers at the San Francisco VA Medical Center published a study of 663 vets at two sites in California. About a third of the vets met the criteria for PTSD, and 17 percent of them also had reduced blood flows to their hearts, a condition known as ischemia. Only 10 percent of the non-PTSD vets experienced ischemia.

After researchers corrected for clinical and demographic factors influencing heart disease (age, past heart disease, inflammation, obesity, alcohol use, sleep quality, depression and social support), PTSD was associated with twice the risk for ischemia, according to VA Research Currents.

Furthermore, researchers found that the more severe the PTSD, the greater the risk of heart disease.

That’s in line with another study published last year analyzing data from the VA’s Vietnam Era twin (VET) registry, which includes about 7,000 twin pairs, all of whom served in the U.S. military during the Vietnam era. It also found heart disease more than twice as likely among vets with PTSD.

Findings like those leave researchers grappling with a host of questions.

Inflammation has been associated with PTSD, and it’s also a major factor in heart disease. Could this prove to be a causal link? Or does the problem lie with the bad health habits frequently associated with PTSD, things like smoking and drinking and not exercising? Does the inability to sleep well diminish the immune system’s ability to protect the heart?

Or do stress hormones damage blood vessels over time? Many combat vets are locked into a state of hyperarousal in which they’re reliving past traumas and preparing for future ones. This is a very physical process with norepinephrine and other stress hormones making the heart beat faster, constricting the arteries for higher blood pressure, and pumping more glucose into the blood for instant energy. This is great for an emergency, but if it happens over and over again, it can wear out arteries and heart muscle.

All these factors are plausible, and it’s likely that they’re all interrelated in ways we don’t fully understand yet.

Dr. Schnurr told VA Research Currents that she leans toward the allostatic load theory as an explanation. That holds that each of these physiological stress factors contributes to the overall wear and tear on the body cumulatively.

“For the most part, the biological changes we see are not clinically remarkable,” she was quoted as saying. “So it’s hard to argue that any by themselves could lead to the types of physical health changes that we see in PTSD. So conceptually, this theory makes sense.”

And it also suggests strongly that treating PTSD can reduce the risk of heart disease.

Sad news today. A homeless vet named Mel died early this morning in Benefis Healthcare in Great Falls, Mont. He was 70 years old.

I first met Mel when he was living under a bridge over the Missouri River, literally in sight of my office at the Great Falls Tribune. I had been writing about the first Great Falls Stand Down, organized by the local Vets 4 Vets group to bring medical care and survival gear to homeless vets, and one of the vets told me about Mel.

So I walked down to his camp one day and asked permission to enter.  Mel had been expecting me because his dog, Sarah, had alerted him that someone was coming. A slender man in an Army fatigue jacket with a salt-and-pepper beard and cautious eyes, Mel weighed the request for a moment, then granted permission.

It turned out the Mel and Sarah had been living in a pup tent with a fire pit on the sand bar just outside it for the past eight years.  Mel had been deployed to Germany in the early ’60s and returned to find that he could never find himself again. He hid in a bottle for years until one day when he decided he didn’t like the man he saw in the mirror, so he quit drinking about 20 years ago.

A couple of cops had suggested he pitch camp under the bridge. “They knew I didn’t drink or do drugs, and they knew I wouldn’t be a bother to anyone,” he told me. “They inspected my gear and figured I wasn’t going to turn into a Popsicle. They still come by and check up on me every once in a while.”

Mel survived the brutally cold Montana winters sleeping in an extra-cold military sleeping bag with a lighter-weight bag stuffed inside it. On the coldest nights, Sarah would wiggle in with him.

But about a year later, vandals found his camp and destroyed it, ripping his tent up and throwing his gear in the river. So he got another tent, more sleeping bags and cooking gear, and he set up a new camp in the side yard of a vacant house owned by another vet in town. A fence and shrubs offered privacy, and Sarah continued to pull guard duty.

Mel and Sarah survived by Dumpster diving. His only income was the 300 or so dollars he earned a month by recycling aluminum cans.  “You’d be amazed at the stuff I find that people have thrown away,” he told me. “I could have a whole bandoleer of cell phones. And the funny thing is that most of them work.”

Mel and Sarah were a familiar sight on the streets of Great Falls, so a lot of folks were saddened three or four years ago when Sarah was hit by a car and killed.

None took it harder than Mel. He was lost without his companion, but he couldn’t bring himself to adopt a new dog. It was the end of an era for him, and in many ways, the approaching end of the road.

As I was talking with friends about the new vets’ court in Great Falls a couple of weeks ago, I asked about Mel and was told he was a patient in Benefis, the local hospital. I was also told that a battle with cancer had left him not much more than skin and bone.

So I called to cheer him up and told him that I was hoping he’d be out of the hospital soon and back out on the streets and in the alleys with a new dog.

“That’s a hope,” he agreed, but there was no conviction in his voice. I had a strong feeling he’d given up.

So it was no real surprise to get a call early this morning that Mel had passed. But it was a sorrow. And it was a reminder that there are all too many vets around our country who need our help in putting their lives back together and who need our friendship for a touch of warmth in their cold and lonely lives.

Vets helping vets has always been a powerful force, but now they’re getting support from the legal profession.

Knowing the emotional trauma that many vets bring home from combat, more than 130 communities around the nation have set up special courts to help vets deal with their legal problems. Great Falls, Mont., is one of the latest outposts dedicated to providing help to criminal offenders, rather than just punishment.

It’s the right thing to do for those who have served their country, says District Judge Greg Pinski, and it also makes sense because most vets who graduate from such a program don’t get into trouble again. On average round the country, 70 percent of the participants complete the vets court program, and three-quarters of its graduates are not arrested in the following two years.

The Justice Department says there are about 140,000 American vets in jails or prisons today, and 60 percent of them have substance abuse problems. Six years ago, the Rand Corp. surveyed returning Iraqi/Afghan vets and predicted that one in three of the 2.6 million troops deployed there would return home with PTSD, TBI or a major depression. VA figures have borne out that prediction, although its TBI diagnoses have fallen short of the mark.

The vets court in Great Falls kicked into operation last Veterans’ Day, and it currently has eight participants who agree to 18 months of intense supervision. The photo at the beginning of this blog shows Col. Robert Stanley, commander of Malmstrom Air Force Base in Great Falls, speaking during opening ceremonies. To his right is Judge Pinski, while one of the first vets to sign on as a mentor, Rodger McConnell, is at the far left.

“We designed a program that provides the structure that vets were used to in military service,” says Pinski. “I tell the vets that the easy way out is just to go to jail. This program is very intensive. Many of the participants have alcohol monitors, and they all get random drug tests three times a week.”

They’re also required to attend therapy session to help them stop drinking or control their anger. “If they miss a program, they may be sentenced to eight hours of community service or 30 days of Alcoholics Anonymous,” Pinski says.

The only requirement for entrance into the program is that the county attorney has to approve, and he’s unlikely to agree if it’s a serious offense.

“We’re really interested in working with vets who have committed crimes due to substance abuse or mental illness,” Pinski says. “But our greatest difficulty is identifying the vets in our criminal population as quickly as possible. Our law enforcement tracks various aspects of a person’s life, but military service isn’t one of them.”

Crimes involving weapons and violence can’t be ruled out automatically, however. “Violence and weapons are part of the military culture,” explains Pinski.  “The stress of war and then returning home from deployment tend to lead to an increase in family stress levels.”

That pretty much describes Dave Belcher, one of the court’s participants.

Belcher is a medically retired Army platoon sergeant who received the Bronze Star for valor during Operation Desert Storm and Operation Shield. His platoon with the 1st Armored Division was in the first wave to cross into Iraq and make contact with the enemy in February 1990.

It was total destruction, loss of life and bloody,” he told me several years ago. “Once you go through war, it’s always black and burned. One of my tracks got hit by friendly fire, and we lost one of my drivers.”

When he came home, suffering also from a traumatic brain injury, Belcher turned to alcohol and later to counseling. “Mr. Belcher’s sleep is sporadic, and he has nightmares on a regular basis of the carnage of the Iraqi bodies he witnessed while in combat,” wrote his counselor, Tony Rizzo. “He has had periods when he feels as though he was actually back in Iraq. All his senses are acute: he smells the death, hears the crying and screaming and the sounds of combat. He feels he is there and loses touch with reality until someone or something brings him back. He continues to be triggered by the sounds of children crying or screaming, even if they are only playing. Loud unexpected noises or the sight of smoke remind him of burning enemy vehicles. The sight or smell of blood or burned flesh, even barbequing, can cause him distress.”

He was also subject to rages triggered by just about everything during which he’d yell, throw things or smash them. His wife Daneil found herself walking on eggshells, and that only made things worse. She kept an overnight bag in her car so she and their daughter Katie could flee and spend the night in a motel.  “I remember wishing I could go through one day without him calling me a ‘stupid, fucking bitch,’” she told me several years ago.

The couple separated at that time so Belcher could have a private space to retreat to when he was feeling tense; you can read a fuller account of their story in chapter 5 of my book, Faces of Combat: PTSD & TBI. Unfortunately, the Belchers are reportedly in divorce proceedings now and Belcher ended up in vets’ court after a violent altercation with a girlfriend.

“He’s making amazing progress,” said Pinski. “He’s one of those guys who does everything that’s required of him plus a little more.”

Watching over the participants and keeping them on track are a dozen other vets who serve as mentors. For them, helping other vets is part of the therapy.

Few feel it more keenly than Rodger McConnell, who returned home from service in Vietnam with serious PTSD and cognitive damage that he tried in vain to self-medicate away.

“Seven years of drinking after Vietnam left me in a downward spiral,” McConnell says. “It’s been a long time getting back to normal, to peace and happiness.  But I decided to become a helper. I believe that communication, rather than just bullshit, is essential for mental health.”

Now he’s president of the local Vets 4 Vets program and one of the organizers of the Great Falls Stand-Down, which provides services, clothing and gear to homeless vets. He runs a local access radio program for vets, and he was one of the first volunteers at the vet court.

“We couldn’t have gotten this court up and running without Rodger,” says Pinski. “
And I think Rodger gets a lot of therapy out of a program like this. Rodger never was able to take advantage of programs like this when he returned after ‘Nam so it’s great that he and the other mentors are able to get a secondary benefit from it.”

It’s such a win-win situation that vets’ courts have been springing up around the country after the concept was pioneered in 2008 by Judge Robert Russell. He remembers that he had been having difficulty motivating a defendant, who was also a ‘Nam vet, so he asked a staff member who was also a vet to talk with him. That made such a positive difference that he decided there should be an institutional way to utilize vets as mentors.

Russell began by studying the nation’s drug courts to see how they worked in addressing various issues facing vets. Then he went to Rochester’s VA hospital seeking volunteers to become mentors.

The court was so successful that VA Secretary Eric Shinseki visited to learn more about it. Impressed, he threw his support behind it, and the VA has hired more than 170 veteran justice outreach specialist to work with vets courts around the country. The VA has announced plans to hire another 80 of the vet specialists this year.

There are also two federal vets’ courts, and Attorney General Eric Holder is a big proponent of starting more.

Holder recently visited Roanoke, Va., to attend the opening of the nation’s second federal vets court. He was quoted by MSNBC as saying, “The program we’re here to celebrate today provides a lot for preventing recidivism, reducing relapses, and empowering veterans convicted of certain non-violent crimes to join their communities as productive, law-abiding members of society.”

That pleased Judge Russell, who said: “It’s tremendous for the federal government to have the understanding of the needs of our veterans.”

Like Judge Pinski, Holder clearly sees the benefits of a vets’ court. “It’s morally the right thing to do,” he says, noting that these reforms make the criminal justice system fairer and more able to treat each defendant based on his situation and conduct.

As Iraq has steadily fallen back into the hands of the insurgents, many of the veterans who fought to make it safe for democracy have despaired, many finding their symptoms of PTSD increasing as they realize the futility of their sacrifices.

The worst blows came late last year when Ramadi and Fallujah, both major battlefields for American and Iraqi soldiers, fell with only token resistance from the Iraqi Army.

“A lot of vets were quite upset about it,” retired Marine Corps Lt. Col. Mike Zacchea told me this week. “But I was just very disappointed.”

It was a bitter disappointment, though, because Zacchea had been in charge of training the Iraqi Army a decade before, and he’d built close bonds with many of the Iraqis that he fought with. In fact, Zacchea was the first American honored by the Iraqi government with the Order of the Lion of Babylon.

On Veterans Day 2004 while clearing buildings during the height of Operation Phantom Fury, the second battle for Fallujah, Zacchea had his shoulder broken by a rocket-propelled grenade that exploded just behind him. As he hit the ground, chips of concrete blew into his face from sniper bullets.

“They’d try to get one Marine down in an open area and try to lure the other Marines to come get him and then they’d pick them off,” Zacchea told Entrepeneur.com. “I was the bait in the trap.”

Two other Marines managed to pull Zacchea to safety, and he elected to stay with his unit rather than being airlifted to Germany for treatment. For a fuller account of Zacchea’s combat experience – and the aftermath – see chapter 5 of my book, Faces of Combat: PTSD & TBI.

Bitter as the disappointment was, it forced Zacchea to take a hard look at Iraq and the American intervention in their civil war, so he wrote an Op-Ed piece for the Sarasota, Fla., Herald Tribune, to be published last month, timed to coincide with the visit to Sarasota of former President W. Bush.

First he listed the facts: that nearly 4,500 American service members were killed and 965,000 vets have been treated at VA hospitals, many for PTSD and TBI. About 914,000 vets have filed disability claims with the VA, leading to a cost of $1 trillion, plus another estimated $1 trillion per decade for the next 50 or 60 years.

All for nothing. America didn’t win the war, and the Iraqi people are living in conditions far worse than they endured under Saddam Hussein. Some 134,000 Iraqi soldiers and civilians were killed in that conflict, and another 4 million were displaced and became refugees.

“The U.S. is neither more secure nor better off for our nine-year military failure in Iraq,” wrote Zacchea, who was awarded the Bronze Star Medal for Valor with a gold star in lieu of a second award. “”President Bush deployed 2.6 million American service members into combat in Iraq, and our nation has nothing to show for it.”

Adding salt to an open wound, Congress passed the 2013 Bipartisan Budget Act, which cut benefits for retired and disabled veterans to 1 percent below the rate of inflation, just as Anbar Province was falling to the insurgents.

“Thus the Americans who suffered the worst consequences from the war are asked to sacrifice even more,” Zacchea wrote. “This violates every American’s sense of fairness.”

This week, House Speaker John Boehner tried to repeal the cut in vets’ benefits by tying it to a measure to raise the debt ceiling and keep the government running, but he threw in the towel a day later, saying that conservative Republicans opposed the plan and House leaders worried the Democrats would not go along with it.

“These are the Republicans, the richest 1 percent of our population, unwilling to pay for the expenses of the war they incurred,” says Zacchea.

In his Op-Ed piece, Zacchea’s conclusion is this: “The American people have been enormously injured by the Iraq war as a nation, and we will continue suffering from the tragic consequences of President Bush’s aggressive war of choice, a failed neo-conservative exercise in imperial adventurism.

“I share this lesson: NEVER AGAIN should the U.S. wage an aggressive war of choice, on credit, and then not pay for the long-term legacy costs of the war, especially the medical care and benefits of our wounded, injured, ill, disabled or retired veterans.”

My sentiments exactly! Most of the other ‘Nam-era vets I’ve spoken with are saying the same thing, wondering how we got sucked into another civil war and whether we’d learned anything from our previous failures.

Obviously, Zacchea was among those seriously damaged by the war in Iraq. He received a military retirement as a result of his wounds and returned home with a huge load of anger. He married the woman he had been dating, but war had changed him, as Marci discovered several years into their marriage.

“He found out that one of his Iraqi interpreters had been killed,” she told me. “We got into a terrible fight, and he started throwing things. I tried to lock myself in the bathroom, but I couldn’t because he was right behind me. I was afraid he was going to hit me, so I brought my hand up in self-defense, but he didn’t hit me. Finally he left, and I locked the door. There was a lot of noise out there, so I stayed in the bathroom for about an hour. When it quieted down, I opened the door and found it blocked by a bunch of furniture and chairs and boxes and things.”

That anger, often unpredictable, occurred several times. “I destroyed the house on several occasions, and once when I was buying flowers for my wife, I got into an altercation with the clerk,” he told me. “She was trying to close up and didn’t want to make change for me, and I was very aggressive. She finally threw the change at me, and I caught it in my left hand and grabbed her throat with my right hand and I started to squeeze. That frightened her and it frightened me, and I ran out of the store.”

But counseling has helped, and Marci has persevered. They had a little boy, Colin, a couple of years ago, and Zacchea found that fatherhood has been hugely therapeutic. “He follows me everywhere and wants to do just exactly what I’m doing. It’s wonderful. But having a son innocent of Iraq makes me want to protect him from the consequences of my service.”

That’s not easy. “This is a long-term process,” he says, “and I still have days when I can’t get out of bed due to the blinding migraine headaches.”

Zacchea also suffered short-term memory loss and his sense of taste disappeared, both potential symptoms of traumatic brain injury. The VA tested him several times but refused to let him see a neurologist, so he finally went to nearby Yale University, requested an independent test and was diagnosed with TBI. He went back to the VA, showed them the diagnosis and challenged them to disprove it. Finally, the VA agreed and also diagnosed him with TBI.

Zacchea returned from combat to his job as a commodies analyst for a big brokerage firm in Stamford, Conn., but it didn’t take long before he was fired, a circumstance he now believes was a blessing in disguise.

He ended up by starting the Entrepreneurship Boot Camp for Disabled Veterans at the University of Connecticut in 2009, and the non-profit organization has helped 55 veterans start their own businesses so far.

The VA estimates that each disabled vet will cost the government more than $1 million in benefits and health care, but Zacchea says his program reduces those costs.

“Over time, the cost of caring for veterans increases,” he told Hartford Business. “Veterans get into a negative-reinforcing loop, a downward spiral of health, unemployment and unstable living conditions. The three things feed off each other. Our program is really an intervention into the economic life of the veteran, by which we give him or her the tools to create self-employment and financial independence. This creates a positive-reinforcing loop for stable housing and mental health.”

Zacchea also works with a number of Connecticut-area businesses to promote the hiring of vets.

“My sole mission these days is to help people whose lives have been shattered by this war, vets primarily but also their families and others,” he told me.

Fighting was Martin Chisholm’s salvation, so now this 52-year-old ex-Marine is teaching a newer generation of troubled teens to fight to succeed.

“I help them find the warrior in them,” says Chisholm, who owns the Chisholm Academy of Self-Defense in Stratford, Conn. “And that allows me to be alive, to have some self-worth.”

Chisholm grew up in a tough section of Brooklynn, N.Y., and he bore a double disadvantage.   “My mother was white and my father was African-American,” he explains. “I was very picked on. Fighting gave me some protection. And it boosted my self-esteem. So I pass those skills on to other kids now.”

Boxing, kick-boxing and karate were all parts of Chisholm’s arsenal by the time he joined the U.S. Marine Corps in 1980. His platoon saw combat in Beirut, although he missed much of it for medical reasons, so he emerged without many of the physical and emotional scars of so many of this nation’s warriors.

But he didn’t escape entirely.

“Coming out of the Marine Corps, I went through my own period of drinking, drugging and partying,” he says. But his father, also a former Marine and by then in recovery just north of the Big Apple in Connecticut, intervened.

“About 25 years ago, my dad came to New York, took a look at my lifestyle, and told me I needed to get a fresh start. I began going to AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) meetings and recovery houses with my dad.”

Chisholm attended St. Michael’s College in nearby Vermont and became certified in adolescent drug addiction. Then he headed over to Bridgeport, Conn., to work with teens. “Bridgeport was a needy place, filled with gangs and drugs, so I fit right in,” he says.

But it was also a challenging place for a guy with his own addictions. “Spending a lot of time partying was not helpful to a marriage or to a job, so I finally decided I didn’t want to do that,” he says. “Then as I went through different AA meetings around the area, I discovered that the world of alcoholism was huge and it was filled with all kinds of people: lawyers, businessmen, politicians, legislators and judges.”

Today, Chisholm has been clean for a quarter-century and sober for more than 16 years. He has been married three times and has eight children, ranging in age from 1 to 31 years old.

His original youth center evolved into a martial arts studio in 1994 and more recently into a full-fledged gym. “And I go into prisons and reform schools to talk with kids about fighting and about gangs,” he says.

One of his constant messages is about sobriety, but he knows he needs to downplay it a bit so as not to alienate his audience. “I don’t want to blackball alcohol, but I do want to blackball alcohol abuse and bad behavior,” he says. “I want to teach these kids to manage or sidestep all their hurdles.”

Some of the kids in his gym come from productive families, he says, but most of them are at-risk kids from the streets.  If they can’t pay, that’s generally not a problem — he’ll find a way to let them earn their way in.

Sponsored jointly by the Stratford Police Department, he has created a program called “Our Pal Boxing” for kids aged 6 to 21. One of its missions is to help instill core values in these kids, things like focus, respect, self-discipline, self-confidence, goal-setting and perseverance.

“Martin understood our desire to do much more for our kids, so it’s been a great private-public partnership” says Stratford Police Chief Patrick Ridenhour. “It’s a great way for kids to see that officers are only human behind their badges and their guns, so we have officers in there working with the kids too.”

In addition, Chisholm helps train the police department SWAT team, says Ridenhour.

“Personally, I just love the guy,” the chief adds. “When he promises something, he’ll move heaven and earth to get it done. He doesn’t give up on anyone or anything. And we’re already seeing results of this program in our kids.”

Warriors on horseback have ravaged their neighbors for millennia, but today warhorses and soldiers are joined in a new mission: healing the invisible wounds of war.

The Saratoga Warhorse Project was the inspiration of Bob Nevins, a former chopper pilot in Vietnam who personally found his own peace when he bonded with a retired race horse, accepted its unconditional trust, and began to believe in himself again.

Nevins had flown more than 500 missions in an unarmed medevac helicopter for the 101^st Airborne before the day in 1971 when his chopper was blown out of the air by a rocket-propelled grenade that killed two of his four crewmates instantly and sent the craft spinning 150 feet to the ground in a fireball.

“We set the jungle on fire,” he says. “I opened my eyes and was kind of wondering why I was not dead.”

Nevins managed to get the two remaining crewmen out of the wreckage and half-carried, half-dragged them to safety. Then with the help of soldiers on patrol in the area, they managed to hold off the Viet Cong until new medevac choppers could fly in and extricate them.

After weeks recovering in a burn unit, he went back to action, but the emotional scars never left him.

“I lived for years with my near-death experience, with what I thought was going to be my last desperate moment,” says Nevins. “And the next closest experience I had was with the horse. I got unconditional acceptance from that horse, and that triggered a change in my brain. The root cause of everything we do is fear, but the fear and anxiety and human emotions dissolve. You have control over those feelings now.”

In fact, it changed his life. In 2011, Nevins retired after 24 years as an airline captain so that he could begin sharing his horse-bonding experience with other vets on his farm near Saratoga Springs, N.Y., home of the famed Saratoga Race Track.

So far, he has recruited eight retired race horses with uncertain futures, and he has brought in more than 100 vets for three-day sessions to work with the horses. The average travel and lodging cost for a visit is about $2,500, but Nevins and the Saratoga Warhorse Foundation pay the entire tab.

“We won’t take money from them,” says Nevins. “All I have to do is qualify them. And I do that by talking with them, then asking how they’re sleeping at night. When the response is, ‘Are you frigging kidding me? I haven’t slept in five years!’ I know I’ve got my guy.”

One of the key symptoms of PTSD is the hyper-tension and the hyper-anxiety that make it difficult to sleep at night. Another is the emotional numbness that results from being awash in adrenaline during unrelenting combat, an experience Nevins describes as “being like a firefighter going into the World Trade Center every day.”

Bonding with a horse helps blocked emotions to flow, Nevins is finding.

But it’s a difficult task because horses are flight animals, programmed to flee from any perceived threat, while man is a predator. That means the vet has to win the horse’s trust.

Sessions start on a Monday morning with an expert in horse behavior telling the vets how to interpret a horse’s non-verbal language, things like a horse cocking an ear toward the vet or staring directly at him or trotting around a pen while demonstrating licking or chewing behavior.

New research is also finding that horses understand humans better than almost any other animal, picking up on the subtlest of body or eye movements.

In a case study published this year in the peer-reviewed journal “Advances in Mind-Body Medicine,” Nevins described how the vet and the horse interact in a 50-foot round pen, connected only with a long rope.

The vet first let the horse run in circles around the pen, then learned to change its direction by blocking the horse’s path with his body and tossing the line out in front of the horse. As they continued to work together, he also acknowledged the horse as it conveyed its body signals of negotiation: licking and chewing, lowering its head and staring at him with both eyes.

Finally, the vet invited the horse to come in to him by taking his eyes off the horse, stepping ahead and turning his shoulder in a passive manner. As the horse came in and dropped its head, the vet rubbed the space between its eyes, a blind spot and a vulnerable area for a horse.

With that trust established, the vet was able to walk in semicircles and figures of eight, and the horse followed submissively behind him.

That moment can be life-changing, according to Nathan Fahlin of Duluth, Minn., who deployed to Iraq for 15 months in 2006-07 with the Minnesota National Guard. “When you inherently distrust everyone, you don’t know what to think when that horse trusts you,” he says. “It’s a unique moment, and it kind of gave me my life back again.”

Constant combat left Fahlin feeling numb after he returned home, and it made him withdraw from people. “Callousness is best way to describe it,” he told me. “All your nerve endings have been exposed for so long that you shut down in a lot of ways.”

But after gaining the trust of a warhorse a year ago, he’s been allowing himself to return to some of the hobbies and activities that he had enjoyed before he deployed. In particular, he’s been trekking down to the Duluth YMCA for some pick-up basketball games with his friends.

“And I’ve been sleeping through the night, unless there’s a sudden noise like a garbage truck picking up trash,” he says. “It’s a work in progress, but I’m a lot better than I was three years ago.”

For more information about the Saratoga Warhorse project, visit its web site: http://saratogawarhorse.com/