LIFE AFTER WAR

The Inevitable Toll of Combat

by Marcus Robertson

Kevin Bakker doesn’t know why he’s still alive.

The 35 year old Army veteran racked up two traumatic brain injuries, extensive nerve damage in his back, and shrapnel in his leg over the course of two combat tours in the early days of the Iraq war. The worst injury he suffered wasn’t to his body, however, but rather to his psyche.

Bakker went through hell, made it out alive, and returned home — but a piece of hell came with him: he lives with severe post-traumatic stress disorder.

It wasn’t just the horrors he saw and endured; Bakker is also haunted by the violence he committed himself, beginning when he was still a minor. Bakker celebrated his 18th birthday while on deployment in Baghdad.

“I’ve killed more people, shot more people in the face with an M-72 LAW than most people do in video games,” Bakker said, referring to a rocket launcher built to destroy tanks.
Death was everywhere, all the time, whether he was the one doling it out or not. He and his fellow soldiers became so desensitized, death eventually seemed to lose its meaning. More than once, Bakker watched his friends gamble with their lives for no reason. On one occasion, his convoy stopped when spotters noticed a roadside bomb ahead of them.
“One guy towards the front got out of his truck, and this motherfucker took his helmet off, leaned his rifle against the Humvee, strolled up to [the bomb], and WHAM,” Bakker said, miming a kick. “He yelled back, ‘It’s fine, that thing ain’t gonna go off,’ and walked back like nothing happened. That’s how little this dude cared about his life.”

Today, Bakker lives with paranoia so intense that he’ll pull a gun if someone shows up to his house without calling or texting first — even if they’re family.

I know, because I watched it happen while I interviewed him for this article.

Bakker’s PTSD manifests itself in a host of different ways. One of the worst: nightmares so bad, he will do just about anything to avoid sleeping. The nightmares take him back to the worst moments of combat, times he never wants to relive. But PTSD doesn’t give him a choice.

In a 2005 combat tour, his second deployment, Baker had already served for a few years. For the first time he found himself in charge of dozens of soldiers.

One of his deployment buddies, a higher ranking soldier, took Bakker under his wing. He taught Bakker how to be a good leader, and the two became “closer than brothers.” The two were traveling with the rest of their company in a convoy of Humvees and other armored vehicles, when Bakker heard an explosion towards the front of the line.

His friend’s truck had been hit, but the blast hadn’t killed anyone inside. It had, however, started a fire and jammed the hatches closed, trapping everyone inside, Bakker’s friend included.

“We were ordered to stay 40 yards away because of munitions that could’ve blown,” Bakker said. “I had to watch and listen to one of my best friends in the world burn alive. And then I come home and meet his wife and the son he never met, and I get a heroes’ salute? Every single day it crosses my mind — why did I come home and he didn’t?”

Bakker is plagued by many of the same things affecting combat veterans of every armed conflict of the 20th and 21st centuries.

“I got guys that are coming back at 65, 70 years old saying, ‘Hey, what the hell's going on? I'm breaking down at stores, I'm having all these emotions,” said Jorge Grango, an Army veteran who’s trained to become a mental health counselor.

Grango said his own experiences have begun to wreak havoc on his mental health, underscoring how important his work is to him.

The call to face death day-in and day-out isn’t one our minds are built to endure for very long without dire consequences. A 2020 study published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research found that “US combat veterans who have witnessed others be killed or wounded in combat are at substantially higher risk” for suicide.

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Treating these mental health issues has become a top priority for the Department of Veterans Affairs in the last decade. Dr. Holly Passi is a licenced clinical psychologist at Chicago’s Jesse Brown VA Medical Center, and in her 12 years treating veterans, she’s seen veterans’ mental health become a central focus.

“I’m not sure what I would add that I think could make it better, partly because it’s a lot more extensive than anything you would probably see in the civilian sector,” Passi said.

In recent years, the VA has worked to become proactive in figuring out which veterans might need mental health treatment, using an algorithm to check electronic health records and identify at-risk veterans as soon as possible.

“For example, we know certain age groups are at higher risk, and people with terminal or chronic illnesses are at higher risk,” Passi said. “[The algorithm] will flag their chart, and they will get outreach from a mental health provider.”

And yet, even with proactive technology and programs more comprehensive than those offered nearly anywhere else, the VA has not been able to stem the tide of suicidal combat veterans, or those with PTSD.

“We’re conditioned to not feel what we’re supposed to,” Bakker said. “And when we get home it’s like, ‘Why can’t you just tell me what you’re feeling?’ and you have no idea how to tell somebody you’ve known for 15 years that this is what’s going on. And even if you were able to, there’s no way they could fathom it. They can’t comprehend.”

The psychological fallout from combat isn’t something that can simply be fixed, Bakker said. It’s a fundamental change, and the best one can hope for is learning to cope and live with it.

“It’s not what we did,” Bakker said. “It’s who we are.”

Treatment helps, and so can medication, but this trauma isn’t something that can be cured any more than the past can be changed.

“It’s not just pop a pill and you feel great,” Grango said. “Guess what, all that exposure you had? It didn’t go anywhere.”

Just like losing a hand, the fallout from combat trauma can’t be undone. The wound can be sterilized and the bleeding stopped, but that hand will always be gone.