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Soldier’s mother fights for his proper health care

Ed Kemmick, the Billings Gazette

Young Montanan suffers war’s ’signature injury’ from 20 roadside blasts

On the wall above Dawna Lynn Wells’ office desk, a photograph of her son, Nicholas, shows him at 8 years old, wearing an oversize Army helmet and camouflage shirt and pants.

“He was a big shopper at the Army-Navy store,” his mother said. “They knew us by name.”

Nicholas was born in Billings, but he was living with his family in Dillon when he joined the Army in 2004. That explains another photo of his mother’s. It shows Nicholas in March 2006, home on leave from his duties as an Army scout in Iraq.

In that photo he is mugging but obviously proud, showing off his Army uniform and the 101st Airborne patch on his right sleeve. He served in the 4th Infantry Division, Third Brigade Combat Team, and he saw a lot of action as a scout, sniper and lead gunner. His mother said he has a Purple Heart pending and received two Army Accommodation Medals, a Combat Action Badge and an Exemplary Action Award, among other achievements.

But Army Spc. Nicholas Wells, now 21, won’t be going back to Iraq, and he doubts very much that he’ll be able to pursue the goal he once had of becoming a doctor. In addition to some serious physical problems and post-traumatic stress disorder, Nicholas was diagnosed with traumatic brain injury, which is being called the “signature injury” of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The brain injury was brought on by being near more than 20 IED explosions. Improvised explosive devices are commonly used by insurgents to attack coalition troops and convoys. One IED ruptured Nicholas’ left ear drum, resulting in 60 percent hearing loss in that ear, but each explosion played a part in damaging his brain through concussions of varying intensity.

“We call it the hand of God,” Nicholas said of IED explosions. “It’s like God slapping you to the ground.”

He is still at Fort Carson, Colo., from where he shipped out to Iraq in the fall of 2005, but he is in the Warrior Transition Unit, spending his days resting or making his appointments with an orthopedist and mental-health specialists.

“My job is just to transition back to civilian life,” he said.

He is supposed to undergo hip surgery sometime this year for his physical ailments, but the mental disorders are harder to treat. Nicholas has trouble remembering things, he is impatient, he finds it difficult to concentrate on anything. and he is quick to anger or, as he put it, he is “very short-fuse.”

“It’s something I deal with every day in one form or another,” he said.

At least he’s stateside and he’s receiving help. If not for the efforts of his mother, he said, he would have been shipped back to a combat position in Iraq, with little likelihood of receiving any treatment for his physical or mental problems.

In fact, Nicholas and his mother heard that her efforts played a large part in persuading commanding officers at Fort Carson to cancel the deployments of other soldiers in the 4th Infantry Division, and to bring home from Iraq soldiers who were found to have been deployed under inappropriate circumstances.

Dawna Lynn Wells, a physician assistant at the Hematology Oncology Centers of the Northern Rockies, said her main goal was to see that her son received the medical care he needed.

“The bonus was impacting a lot of soldiers I’ll never know,” she said.

In the Army

Nicholas was working for a contractor in Dillon, making $10 an hour with no benefits, when he decided to join the military. His mother said he called every recruiter he could find, and the first one to call back, the same day, was with the Army. The recruiter told Nicholas that if he wanted to see action as soon as possible, he should become a scout.

Nicholas enlisted the same day and told his mother about his decision that night. She had no objections, and she continues to believe her son made a decision that was right for him.

“The Army’s been good for him,” she said. “It matured him. It taught him how to work with a team.”

After training at Fort Carson, Nicholas was deployed to Iraq in November 2005 and served there until November 2006, with a leave home in March 2006. As a scout and Humvee gunner, he saw a lot of combat, and IED explosions were common occurrences.

“If you were the first convoy of the day, you were going to get hit,” he said.

He had his first serious anxiety attack toward the end of his leave, when he was returning to the post at Fort Carson. He was driving through the security checkpoint when “he had a meltdown,” his mother said. That wasn’t unusual. Dawna Lynn said soldiers suffering from PTSD often have trouble at airports, in crowded malls or at security checkpoints.

After experiencing additional anxiety and panic attacks, Nicholas was evaluated at a hospital and was told, in his mother’s words, that “he was having anxiety normal for the situation.”

He was sent back to Iraq, as planned, though he was told he would get some mental-health assistance there. His mother said he received none, and when he returned to the States in November 2006, he was still subject to severe attacks of anxiety and other symptoms of PTSD. In December 2006 he was placed on what the Army calls a “no-weapons profile,” meaning he wasn’t allowed to carry a gun because of psychiatric problems.

When he finally received mental-health care early in 2007, Dawna Lynn said, he was prescribed one medication to help him sleep, another to fight anxiety and depression and yet another drug for the panic attacks. He was told he had PTSD, a possible traumatic brain injury, post-concussive disorder and a general anxiety disorder.

Fractured femur

Then there were his physical problems. He suffered severe knee pain during his time in Iraq, and after his return to Fort Carson he began physical therapy. Last October, when he was in Billings on leave, he stepped out of the bed of a pickup truck and his knee buckled inward, fracturing his femur.

Some time after that, Nicholas was diagnosed with hip impingement syndrome. His mother said a misalignment where the femur joins the hip was the ultimate cause of Nicholas’ knee problems. Nicholas was placed on T-3 status, which meant he was temporarily unfit for deployment. A civilian orthopedist said, however, that if his hip problem was repaired, he could return to duty by Dec. 31, 2007.

The rest of Nicholas’ unit was preparing to return to Iraq for a 15-month deployment, but from everything Nicholas heard, his redeployment, if it were to take place, was months away. Things changed rapidly in late November.

On Nov. 27, a military orthopedist told Nicholas his knee injury could be treated in Iraq and the hip impingement could be dealt with on his return to the States. The next day, a lieutenant colonel issued a memorandum saying that although Nicholas was restricted from running because of his knee problems and femur fracture, “he is being deployed in the understanding that these limitations may affect and/or restrict his duty performance.”

Also on Nov. 28, Nicholas, who was still on a no-weapons profile, met with an Army psychiatrist who gave him five tablets of an anti-anxiety drug and asked him to go back to the waiting room while he made some phone calls. When Nicholas returned to the office, he said the psychiatrist acknowledged that he had been “leaned on” and was recommending that Nicholas was deployable and would leave with his unit in four days.

Nicholas said post scuttlebutt was that his unit, which had to be at 95 percent of its strength to be deployed, was down to 85 percent, and it badly needed soldiers. He and numerous other soldiers on T-3 status were swept up, he said.

“All the doctors pretty much caved and gave the guys deployable status,” he said.

On Nov. 29, Dawna Lynn and Nicholas’ girlfriend, Brittany Bealer of Billings, flew to Fort Carson. Their intention was to help Nicholas get ready for his deployment and then to drive his truck back to Billings, carrying everything he wasn’t taking with him. Dawna Lynn knew there were problems when Nicholas met them at the airport in Colorado Springs.

He found his mother at an Alamo car rental stand, and Nicholas happened to ask the woman behind the counter if they could get a military discount. Dawna Lynn said the woman asked Nicholas if he’d been in Iraq, and when he said yes, she asked, “Did you kill anyone?”

Dawna Lynn was stunned that anyone in a military town could be so insensitive, but she wasn’t prepared for Nicholas’ reaction. He went outside the terminal and threw up. After that, he was having one anxiety attack after another, and he was feeling overwhelmed by the sudden deployment order. His mother called a suicide crisis line, and the person there suggested he be taken to a hospital emergency room.

Time for help

Nicholas was reluctant to seek help, Dawna Lynn said, because he didn’t want to let his unit down and because one sergeant had already accused him of faking the knee injury. But after suffering more panic attacks, Nicholas asked to be taken to the hospital on the night of Nov. 30-Dec. 1.

He was diagnosed as suicidal and transferred to Cedar Springs Behavioral Health System. His mother, meanwhile, swung into action. Going through Nicholas’ papers, Dawna Lynn discovered that the Army psychiatrist had overridden Nicholas’ no-weapons profile and his status as unfit for deployment, and that Nicholas’ inability to run had also been brushed aside.

She contacted Andrew Pogany, an Iraq veteran who was working in Colorado Springs as an investigator and soldiers’ advocate for a group called Veterans for America. Pogany had been featured in a series of reports aired by National Public Radio in 2006 and 2007, looking into allegations that officers at Fort Carson were punishing soldiers who returned from combat with serious mental-health problems.

The NPR series led to investigations of the post, including one conducted by the Pentagon and another by a bipartisan group of U.S. senators.

After Pogany gave Dawna Lynn advice on how to help her son, she wrote letters to all three members of Montana’s congressional delegation, to all presidential candidates in both parties and to members of a congressional subcommittee on military affairs. She also filed a formal complaint with the office of the inspector general for Fort Carson and the commanding general of the post.

Perhaps because Fort Carson had been under such heavy scrutiny, Dawna Lynn got quick results.

“The Army treated me with respect and they listened to my concerns,” she said.

Early in December, Nicholas’ deployment was canceled and he was placed in the Warrior Transition Unit to prepare for a return to civilian life. Early this month, he was officially diagnosed with traumatic brain injury.

Dawna Lynn said a major at the post subsequently told her that the deployment of numerous other soldiers whose nondeployment status had been overridden was halted on Dec. 3, and on Dec. 18 soldiers who were already in Kuwait awaiting deployment to Iraq were returned home. She said she didn’t know how many soldiers were affected by the orders, but that they numbered in the hundreds.

Numbers hard to come by

That could not be confirmed by officials at Fort Carson.

Dee McNutt, the public-affairs officer at the post, said it would be virtually impossible to determine why individual soldiers had their deployments canceled because there are so many possible reasons. All she would say is that the Fort Carson “chain of command is exemplary” at responding to the concerns of soldiers at the post.

The officers carefully examine all information brought to their attention, she said, “and they err on the side of the soldier” in making their decisions.

Pogany, who has been working for the National Veterans Legal Services organization since Jan. 1, said he didn’t know how many soldiers were affected by the review that was sparked by Dawna Lynn’s efforts on behalf of her son.

However, he said, “I received confirmation that that had happened and that commanders at Fort Carson were working very hard to determine who was sent and who shouldn’t have been.”

He also said he personally knew of six soldiers whose deployments were canceled, because he was helping them make the case that that they had been ordered overseas despite medical problems that should have prevented their deployment.

Dawna Lynn said she is still a big supporter of the Army and understands its desire to deploy soldiers who may not be fit for combat. The Army’s duty is to fight, she said, and the Army’s tendency is to do everything it needs to do to prepare for battle. But to the Army’s credit, she said, commanders appeared to do everything they could when she brought her concerns forward.

“I don’t want to bash the Army because I think they’re really trying,” she said.

And despite Nicholas’ troubles, she is also grateful.

“I know he has both hands and legs, which a lot of soldiers don’t have,” she said. “And he is alive.”

On the other hand, Dawna Lynn doesn’t like what she learned about how the military sometimes fails to acknowledge, much less reward, the sacrifices made by American soldiers. She doesn’t understand how anyone could ignore a wounded soldier.

“They got hurt defending us,” she said. “They got hurt fighting a battle we sent them to.”

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