Iraq War's punishing toll on veterans
Vermillion man fought pain, suicidal despair
By Steve Young
syoung@argusleader.com
VERMILLION - In the dark, late at night in his bedroom, Tate Mallory could not bury his head deep enough beneath the pillow to escape the explosions and the death and the excruciating pain.
Three months after he was gravely wounded in Iraq, Mallory would stare into the black night and fight his own personal war against terror.
He kept thinking about dying. He questioned his faith. Mostly, he kept seeing bombs exploding and Iraqi friends being killed and wondered whether death was better than this.
"When you're all alone in a dark house at 3 in the morning, that's where it starts working on you," the 35-year-old White River native says. "So many things that happened were horrible. You just can't forget."
The exact numbers are difficult to pinpoint, but Mallory is among scores of South Dakotans who spent time in Iraq and Afghanistan - as regular military, as National Guardsmen or reservists, or as civilian workers - only to return home psychologically wounded by war.
About one in six of the 750,000 U.S. veterans who have been to the Middle East have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs. That rate is expected to climb higher since it can take months, even years, for the condition to manifest.
In fact, experts say the PTSD rate among Iraq veterans could eclipse the 30 percent lifetime rate found in a 1990 national study of Vietnam War vets. That is because soldiers still on active duty are being deployed longer and more often to Iraq. Likewise, more health care providers are aware of the disorder and will properly diagnose it.
In July 2006, Mallory took 14 years of South Dakota law enforcement experience with him to Iraq to work for a Virginia-based company called DynCorp that recruits and trains Iraqis as policemen. A civilian, he spent every day alongside U.S. military personnel, experiencing the same stresses and dangers.
Suicide bombs went off at police stations moments after they left. Mortars and rockets peppered their camps. Each approaching vehicle was scrutinized suspiciously, each building studied for the sniper who might be hiding inside.
"You're very cognizant of what the dangers are wherever you go," Mallory said. "It does wear on you psychologically; there is no real down time over there."
Working in arguably the most dangerous area of Iraq at the time - the cities of Anah and Rawah in the Anbar province of western Iraq - Mallory saw Iraqi policemen he had recruited and trained killed. And if not them, their family members.
"The level of violence was just unbelievable," he said. "You'd see it firsthand."
A person couldn't help but be affected by such exposure, said Dr. Paul Rentz, a clinical psychologist for the Veterans Administration in Sioux Falls.
"If you take a board and bend it for 12 months and then stop bending it after 12 months, the board doesn't spring back to the same condition it was," Rentz said. "Similarly, you can't live in a posture of impending attack and have it happen for a 12-month period and not have it affect you."
Searing pain, problems linger after explosion on convoy
For Mallory, the constant fear of what might happen exploded into reality Oct. 17, 2006, when a convoy in which he was riding in Anah was attacked.
It was evening. His three-Humvee group was on a narrow road, weaving through a residential area, when there was a loud explosion.
Immediately, his vehicle went dark, and Mallory felt a tingling, hot sensation in his lower back. He called out that he thought he'd been hit. Then, seeing flames under his seat, he opened his door and fell head-first to the ground.
A rocket-propelled grenade had hit him in the right side of his lower back, fragmenting but not exploding as it exited his lower abdomen and then went into and out of his right leg. As he lay on the ground, he opened his bullet-proof vest and saw the blood pouring from his body. The femoral artery and nerve in his right leg had been severed.
"I knew I was going to die right there," said Mallory, a single parent with four children who were staying with his ex-wife back in South Dakota. "I said, 'Captain Farris, Ed, I think I'm hit.' He started to pray with me. I told him, 'Make sure you tell my kids I'm sorry.' "
A young Marine, a lance corporal named Ruiz, came quickly to his side, rolled him over and, seeing the wound, poured a powdery substance on it.
"He called it 'Quick Clot,' " Mallory recalled. "It gets hot, and it bubbles and sizzles and cauterizes the artery. Pretty soon, I'm starting to think, 'Yeah, I'm going to live.' "
A fast trip to a combat outpost in Anah got him a needed shot of morphine. Then it was on to operating rooms in Al Asad and Balad in Iraq before he landed in Landstuhl, Germany, for "eight or nine surgeries to clean out the wounds and do repair work," he said.
On Oct. 28, he was flown into Omaha then driven by ambulance to Avera McKennan in Sioux Falls, where he spent the next six weeks recovering and rehabilitating.
The rocket left the top of his right leg "dead, with no feeling," Mallory said. He'll always have a limp. And for now, he always seems to have the pain.
"It's like lightning strikes down my leg," he said. "It hurts so bad, I'll get nauseated. That's been one of the biggest problems."
Haunted by memories, lashing out at family
When he finally left the hospital, Mallory went to stay with his older brother, Brad, in Belle Fourche. The pain continued to torment him as 2006 turned into 2007. And, although his family saw hints at Avera McKennan that Mallory seemed different after his return from Iraq, they didn't realize how wounded he was psychologically until he left the constant care and attention he was receiving at the hospital.
"When he got away from that and had more time to think about it, what he had been through, mentally that's when it started kicking in," Brad Mallory, 46, said. "He had more time to dwell on it. ... the mistakes made, the things that had happened, the things that he had seen."
Mallory couldn't sleep because of the pain. And he couldn't get Iraq out of his mind. It was on television. It was in the newspapers. At times, he would slip out of his brother's house and check into motels to get away from the daily reminders.
Adjusting Tate's medications to find the right combination for the pain was a struggle, Brad Mallory said. If he ran out of pills for any amount of time, "it was a bad day or two just to get him back where he needed to be," his brother said.
Mood swings became increasingly exaggerated, too. He lashed out at family.
"The littlest things didn't anger me, they infuriated me," Mallory said. "My reaction was so disproportional to what it should have been. I basically turned on most of my family and said I wanted nothing to do with them."
Drugs helped take edge off, counseling has brought relief
A year ago, on a day that his pain medications had run out, Mallory decided he had had enough. As his brother tried to coax him into the car to go to the hospital in Spearfish, Tate Mallory begged instead for his life to be ended.
"I said, 'Brad, this isn't living. If you love me as a brother, you'll find a way, basically, to end this,' " Tate Mallory said.
Brad Mallory looked into his brother's eyes and knew that he wasn't kidding.
"That dead look in his eyes that said, 'I've had enough' ... it was like looking at a wounded deer. You look in their eyes, and they're kind of dark and glassed over. They know it's over," Brad said.
His weakness was humiliating, Tate Mallory said. He'd been in law enforcement 14 years - as a sheriff in Mellette County and as a policeman in Murdo, Brookings and Beresford. He'd been to car accidents. He had seen humanity at its worst and never flinched.
Now that fear of looking weak - and believing the stigma of mental illness would cost him a future in law enforcement - kept him from seeking help.
"I'm so scared that I will not be able to find work," he said. "The second you go to get help, you're pretty much blackballed for a lot of careers. As soon as anyone in criminal justice found out about it, I wouldn't be able to find a job."
So he suffered instead until he could not bear the suffering anymore.
Mallory finally sought out a doctor who had treated him at Avera McKennan. The physician put Mallory in touch with a doctor at Avera Behavioral Health, who quickly determined that they had to try to control his pain. With medications he received, "it took the edge off," Mallory said. "It brought me to where I was not attacking my family and friends as much as I was."
He started feeling well enough to begin thinking ahead. The state Department of Labor referred him to a vocational rehabilitation program. He enrolled at the University of South Dakota and began studying criminal justice.
Though he felt better, he continued to struggle with sleepless nights. He missed classes - a reality that led concerned professors to question him. Once he explained it, they pushed him to seek help through university counseling services.
It was there, Mallory said, that counselors gave his struggles a name - PTSD. He started going to weekly counseling sessions and continues to do so. During the past two months, he said he has seen steady improvement.
DynCorp covers his medical care and medications and provides a disability check that pays the bills and helps to feed his four children - Shania, 10; Cheyenne, 9; Tristin, 7; and Tate Jr., 6 - who all now live with him and his fiancee, Kari Swartos, in Vermillion.
By telling his story now, Mallory hopes he can inspire those struggling with PTSD to seek help.
"I was scared for my career, and I was humiliated for being weak," he said. "I'm not now. I know everyone has a breaking point. And I realize PTSD is not permanent; it's treatable.
"So I know I can get back to the old Tate. If no one wants to hire me because I had a rough spot in life, it's OK. I'll have a better relationship with my kids. I'll have a better relationship with my sister and family."
At the very least, he'll be at peace with himself, Mallory said. He's already sleeping better at night, spending far less time staring into the darkness and reliving the nightmare.
"I'm not just existing," he said. "I'm living again. I finally see the difference."
