For Iraq veteran with post-traumatic stress, help never came

It’s the middle of the night when the phone rings in Virginia Beach. Half awake, Ozawa Skipper-Coleman rolls over and reaches to pick it up. On the other end, a woman is crying, trying to catch her breath.

Ozawa knows the voice, but she’s never heard it like this before.

“Yessenia?” she says to her daughter-in-law, who is calling from an Alaska Army base where Ozawa’s son Daryl is stationed. “What’s happening?”

Gulping and sobbing, Yessenia tells her they’d just finished putting the kids to bed when Daryl’s face suddenly changed. First he pushed her to the floor. Then he shoved a sock in her mouth and tried to tie her ankles with a length of rope. Soon he was splashing lighter fluid across the kitchen floor and all around the living room. He had the lighter in his fist when he seemed to snap back to reality.

Ozawa asks where her son is now. Yessenia answers that he left – just walked out the front door.

“I don’t know who he was tonight,” she says. “But I know he wasn’t Daryl.”

Hang up the phone, Ozawa tells her, and call the police.

The truth was, Daryl Beamer hadn’t been himself for a long time, and his violent trance that night, a little more than a year ago, came as no  surprise. It had been nine months since Daryl returned from more than a year  in Iraq. The signs that he wasn’t all right were immediately apparent to his family. The night of his homecoming, at a Ruby Tuesday  where they’d gone to celebrate, Daryl screamed obscenities at the waiter when their food took too long. A few weeks later, he called his mother to confess that he couldn’t stop thinking about suffocating Yessenia with a pillow.

With all the attention that has been paid in recent years to the psychological effects of war, Daryl’s story might seem predictable: A previously happy guy is sent into battle. He sees terrible things. He comes home a different person – forgetful, angry, violent. His buddies and his chain of command see that he is not OK. By now they all know what PTSD stands for. They’ve all heard the cautionary tales, drilled in by the military over and over, about what can happen when even the most subtle  warning signs go ignored.

So they intervene.

But that is where Daryl’s story diverges. The warning signs were not subtle:   He tried to set his house on fire while his two small children slept down the hall. Yet for months afterward, and despite vehement pleas from his mother, intervention never came. Instead he was left to fall apart the rest of the way . Then one night last  November,  he wandered into town with a small black pistol, shoved it in the faces of a few strangers and demanded money.

“It took the police all of 10 minutes to find him,” his mother says, shrugging . “He didn’t even try to get away.”

Ozawa blames the Army for the fact that Daryl, now 26, will probably spend the better portion of a decade in prison. To anyone who will listen, she explains that her son’s story goes more like this: Yes, he was a good boy before Iraq. Yes, he came home someone else. And yes, she recognized the seriousness of his troubles. But when she begged the military to treat him,  her son’s superiors  dismissed her, leaving Daryl to languish until he became so ill that he was getting drunk every day just to cope, starting fights and failing to show up for formation.

Then they deemed his behavior a discipline problem, called him a bad soldier and kicked him out for misconduct. A few weeks after  Daryl was told  that he would be “other than honorably” discharged, possibly leaving him ineligible for veterans benefits,  he committed a crime that he now struggles to remember.

Before he went to war, Daryl had never been in any serious trouble – not with the military or with the law. He says armed robbery isn’t something he would do, and yet he admits he did it. He can’t explain the contradiction.

“I don’t know what to tell you, ma’am,” he says, speaking by phone from the jail in Anchorage, Alaska,  where he is confined. “It just sort of happened. It wasn’t that I needed the money or anything.” Daryl’s words begin to trail off into mumbling. “I just, it … I don’t …”

His mother takes the phone and tries her best to bring him back. “Baby, can you talk to the lady just a little more?” she coos. “You can trust her. The newspaper might be able to help us.”  But Daryl is already gone. Ozawa covers the mouthpiece with her hand and whispers, “He’s not good today. It’s not a good day.”

No Army officials would discuss Daryl’s case, but his military and medical records, along with other documents his mother shared with The Pilot, support many of her claims. Sitting on her sofa after hanging up with her son, Ozawa shuffles through the towering pile of papers she has amassed. She hands over a report from Daryl’s last Army medical evaluation, completed as a mandatory part of his discharge a few weeks before he was arrested.

Date: Oct. 23, 2009
Diagnoses: hearing loss, anxiety disorder, depression, PTSD
Recommendations: continue to process for separation as appropriate

Ozawa rubs her thumb over the four capital letters – PTSD – jotted in black ink. “They admit right here that he was sick,” she says. “And then they kicked him out anyway.”

She pauses, shakes her head and stares blankly at the page in her hands.

“The Army broke my son. They broke him, and then they threw him away.”

>> CONTINUE TO PART 2: For sick soldier, help never came

Corinne Reilly, (757) 446-2949, corinne.reilly@pilotonline.com