St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Missouri)
Copyright 2007 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
ST. LOUIS — Eight years ago, Daniel Carpenter said, he thought the most important thing that he could do was to serve his country. So, at age 33, he joined the Army.
During 12 months in Iraq beginning in March 2003, Carpenter, a sergeant and medic from Copperas Cove, Texas, would patch up a lot of Americans and Iraqis, combatants and civilians.
He also would mourn the loss of three men from his battalion.
When Carpenter, who is married with three small children, returned to the U.S. in March 2004, it was he who was being treated. He was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and assigned to the psychiatric ward at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington.
He was prescribed an array of drugs - Depakote for convulsions, citalopram and trazodone for depression, Seroquel for his psychotic disorder and Ambien to sleep.
Consequently, Carpenter was medically retired from the military five months later.
But when the Department of Veterans Affairs finally adjudicated his case four months later, it declared Carpenter only 60 percent impaired, for which he gets $1,125 per month, said Rene Chase, a military contractor familiar with the case. It is a dramatic decrease from the $2,900 he earned in the Army or the $2,700 per month he would get if he were declared permanently disabled.
The disability income wasn’t enough to make ends meet, Carpenter said. So, he said he took a job as a health technician job in Boise, Idaho. He went to Idaho in part because he needed to give his family some relief.
“I was driving my family crazy,” he said. “I was going to get a divorce, or I was going to kill my wife.”
But the job didn’t last.
He frequently came to work late because the medicines kept him asleep. And a couple of times on the job, the stress disorder got the better of him, he said. He was fired.
So, he went back to the VA to have them look at his case again and boost his pay. Carpenter said officials told him a re-examination would take nine months.
“So, we’re struggling,” he said. “I’ve got my mortgage company breathing down my neck. I tried to talk to them but they said, ‘Thank you for your service, but we can’t help you.’”