Walking casualty

The invisible cost of war hits home for a Tulsa veteran

I knew Cody Young in a peripheral way. He and my son were classmates and skateboard buds; he would come over for a homemade Orange Julius. Thus with great sadness we learned of his death Wednesday, May 21, in what Tulsa Police called a standoff.

How did a young man, 22 years old, once entertaining being the next Tony Hawk, die of a police kill shot? What happened?

War. That’s the answer, but only part.

At about 1 a.m. Tulsa Police responded to someone shooting from an apartment near 11th Street and Rockford Ave. Nothing indicates he fired specifically at officers or anyone, only that he had a long gun at the window.

Cody’s life began to unravel just before graduating Edison High School. A Preparatory School; there was no way to have prepared Cody for his future.

Young men often perceive themselves immortal, impervious to injury and death, desiring adventure. Cody joined the Oklahoma National Guard. The Afghanistan and Iraq Wars were in full bloom.

Cody was nine when Al Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center in 2001. A decade later, Cody traded his skateboard for weapons of war.

The Oklahoma Guard has fought many engagements in many wars. Afghanistan would be different.

Phillip O’Connor chronicled the guard’s “Deadliest Day,” September 9, 2011, writing, “The firefight lasts maybe 15 seconds. When it is over, Oklahoma and its 7,500-member Army National Guard are left to face the state’s bloodiest day in combat since Korea. Three soldiers are dead and two seriously wounded.”

Fourteen men died and scores were injured during deployment. Cody returned changed, distant. He told his mother “something was wrong.”

That something was Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). PTSD is a war disease.

The symptoms vary; disassociation, depression sometimes self-soothed with drugs or alcohol, nightmares, and flashbacks are just some.

The flashback: You’re living the present and past simultaneously, unsure which is real. Anything can be a trigger—a song, an aroma, a sound, a conversation, a movie. You have very little control. It continues until you wear out or pass out.

Nightmares arrive unannounced. You’re screaming, you wake up shaken and confused. Then the long night, fighting sleep, fearing the nightmare’s return.

According to Cody’s mother he had sought help, but nothing was working.

Cody, according to reports, spent his last night watching a war movie. The police say he was “mumbling,” they couldn’t understand what he was saying. Cody had been trying to say something since returning from Afghanistan.

According to TPD, he raised his weapon. Only Cody knows where he was or what he was seeing. We do know there were a lot of police with an armored vehicle.

Seventeen-year officer Gene Hogan ended Cody’s life with a single shot. Nine days earlier Hogan led the 5th annual Jared Shoemaker Memorial Walk. Corporal Jared Shoemaker was a U.S. Marine and Tulsa police officer killed during deployment to Iraq in 2006.

The TPD action was standard procedure. But, surrounded and confronted, did that procedure have any meaning to Cody? Cody can’t tell us.

TPD leaves the shoot-to-kill decision to individual officers, according to spokesman Officer Leland Ashley.     

“Any time an officer feels his life or the lives of others are in danger the officer can take deadly force action,” he said. Deadly events often develop in a “matter of seconds, and there is limited time to make a decision.”     

According to Stacy Bannerman, author of  “When the War Came Home: The Inside Story of Reservists and the Families They Leave Behind,” “National Guardsmen have been found to have rates of PTSD as much as three times higher than active duty troops after combat.”

“The vast differentials in mental health outcomes between reserve and active duty are primarily due to the lack of post-deployment unit support; markedly poorer post-deployment mental health services and follow-up; and the rapidity with which citizen soldiers return to civilian life after combat,” she wrote. Cody’s death, she told me, was “not isolated.”

Locally, H. Caldwell “Callie” O’Keefe, VFW Post 577 Chaplain, U.S. Marine Vietnam veteran, said, “The needs of these veterans is not being addressed by the VA, there needs to be a lot more therapy.”

Caldwell’s remarks echo concerns that military and veterans’ affairs doctors have been encouraged to downgrade PTSD findings to “personality disorder.” Caldwell said, “If they call it personality disorder they (the U.S. Dept. of Defense and VA) don’t have to pay as much.”

In 2013 the Army completed a study of PTSD diagnoses at Madigan Army Medical Center prompted by the discovery of a memo by the Seattle Times quoting a Center psychiatrist telling colleagues a soldier retiring with a post-traumatic-stress-disorder could eventually receive $1.5 million in payments.

The memo claims, “He (the psychiatrist) stated that we have to be good stewards of the taxpayers’ dollars, and we have to ensure that we are just not ‘rubber stamping’ a soldier with the diagnosis of PTSD.” Such findings, it claimed, could cause the Army and VA to go broke.

The Army has resisted media efforts to release the complete study.

“People who have seen combat are getting f***ed up,” Caldwell said. “The public has no idea how prevalent PTSD is. If they did it would scare them to death, as if they’d had to go there themselves.”

Cody served with honor. He came home a walking casualty.

He will be missed.

We must ask what Cody taught us about sending our young into the meat grinder of war, and about understanding their needs and care when they return. The Cody’s are not data, not things of parades to make society feel good.   

It never occurred to me the skateboard kid would become my brother in arms. He and I became veterans at about the same point in our lives. I would have tried to have known him better.

Cody’s name will not be on a marble wall. Hopefully he will be remembered by those with whom he served.

I like to think somewhere in the cosmos, Cody is skating half-pipes with no memory of what brought him to that place.

In war we all become casualties. The Cody’s are among us, and there will be more.

Richard L. Fricker is a career freelance journalist living in Tulsa. He has covered the courts and politics for a number of national publications. His latest book is “The Last Day of the War.”