ANDREA SEABROOK, host:
There is a war within war that some soldiers fight long after they're home. Thousands of men and women returning from Iraq are suffering from some form post-traumatic stress disorder. We tend to think of them as soldiers who've been in firefights or bombings. What's less well-known is that the very people who are supposed to care for soldiers, including medics and chaplains, are also susceptible to PTSD.
Reporter Jane Arraf has the story of one Army chaplain she knew in Iraq who's now struggling with the war at home.
JANE ARRAF: A lot of people wonder what happened to Chaplain Douglas Faker(ph) Fenton. He's a Presbyterian minister, a former military lawyer, a Major in the Army. He went to Iraq with the best of intentions - to serve his country, to comfort the wounded, to honor the dead. People think a chaplain's faith is his armor against the horrors of war.
Major DOUGLAS FENTON (Chaplain, U.S. Army): Chaplains are not allowed to have problems. Chaplains have to focus on other people's problems. And if you get to that point, God help you. God help you.
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ARRAF: This was the homecoming Chaplain Fenton was supposed to have had.
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ARRAF: It's Fort Hood, Texas - a cold and foggy December morning. The First Cavalry Division band plays in the drizzle. Soldiers in black Stetsons stand at attention, holding sabers aloft.
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ARRAF: One of the men stepping off the plane is Colonel David Sutherland. I met him in Iraq eight months ago. For almost a year and a half, he was responsible for as many as 5,000 soldiers attached to the Third Brigade, including Chaplain Fenton. They were in one of the most dangerous parts of the country, Diyala province.
Colonel DAVID SUTHERLAND (Third Brigade): We have gone through things that you can't imagine together. And there will always be that bond between us that no one will understand, and no one could understand.
ARRAF: One hundred and eight of his soldiers didn't come home. For those who have returned whole, the homecoming is particularly sweet.
Unidentified Man: That is awesome.
Unidentified Child: Welcome home, daddy.
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Unidentified Man: Thank you.
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ARRAF: That's a homecoming Chaplain Fenton could have had if he hadn't been medically evacuated months before to a psychiatric ward.
Maj. FENTON: You had to turn over your uniform. You weren't given razor blades. You had to shave with someone watching you. And you had to wear pajamas.
ARRAF: Major Fenton was a career officer. At the Army hospital in Germany, junior soldiers were suddenly calling him by his first name instead of his rank.
Maj. FENTON: My first name is Douglas but I go by Charlie. My middle name is Charles, after my grandfather. They all started calling me Doug or Douglas. They didn't ask. So there I am, a 48-year-old man being called Doug or Douglas by E1s, E2s, E3s. They remove all your dignity. They remove all your professionalism. It's just, you know, on top of feeling like you've been castrated anyways, the shame and the guilt that you bring with it from PTSD in leaving theater, they then started heaping it on you.
ARRAF: The story of Chaplain Fenton's troubles began before he was stationed in Iraq. When he served at Arlington National Cemetery, he notifies families of soldiers who had been killed. At the cemetery, he conducted four to six funerals a day. At first, it was older veterans of other wars and then the Iraq War came home to Arlington.
Maj. FENTON: I started having friends die and I started burying friends.
ARRAF: One of them had been his driver at Arlington, Corporal William Long. Bill Long had been so close to the family that Fenton's son and daughter thought of him as their own brother. When Long was killed by a rocket-propelled grenade near Baqubah, the family was overwhelmed with grief. And Chaplain Fenton got word that he, too, was being sent to Baqubah. At Fort Hood, Texas and the months before he left, he drank to dull the pain. The drinking stopped in Iraq, he says, but not the grief.
I met Major Fenton in Baqubah last year. For an officer, he was unusually open in public. That might be why soldiers liked him. He seemed to have things under control. As brigade chaplain, a big part of his job wasn't just to council soldiers, it was to pray over the wounded and the dead.
Maj. FENTON: Invariably, when I would be with one of our fallen, I would think of a whole picture. I would think, obviously, about the soldiers that were left. I think about the soldiers that were wounded with him. I would think about him and then I would know his whole - from his record before I got there what his denomination was, whether he was married or not, whether his parents were married or divorced or not, how many kids he had. I would know that whole picture. So I could imagine and I could not keep myself from imagining that knock on the door. The next day, there's going to be a chaplain or an officer knocking on that family's door, telling them, and it just - it was always a picture for me. It was always a package.
ARRAF: And then he came to dread the knock on his own door in his tiny trailer on the base in Iraq.
Maj. FENTON: And they were so many times you got awaken to the middle of the night and told someone is either waiting for you in the helicopter or you got 10 minutes to get ready, that whenever I would hear noise like that, I was - at the beginning, I would start praying. At the end of my time there, I was saying, you know, no God.
ARRAF: No matter what you think the Iraq war, there is an indisputable truth - people die in horrible ways. One day, not long after Chaplain Fenton had been deployed, soldiers he was visiting handed him a cardboard box. It contained the severed foot of one of their buddies who have been killed. Fenton took the box on a helicopter and flew with it on his lap back to his base.
Maj. FENTON: You know I used to think that people will die and be peaceful. One gentleman drowned and he looked peaceful. It's hard to find a peaceful face there in the deceased just because the deaths there are so hard, so brutal.
ARRAF: And that's - is that why you'd have nightmares about seeing the bodies after they've been…
Maj. FENTON: Right.
ARRAF: …particularly in improvised explosives device attacks, I imagine?
Maj. FENTON: Yeah, yeah. Really hard to pray with.
ARRAF: As the death toll mounted, Chaplain Fenton did something he'd never done before. One night, he stopped in front of a concrete memorial wall at the base. Soldiers had inscribed it with the names of the fallen. It was pitched dark. Fenton took out a bicycle light and started reading the names on the wall. He could see only three or four at a time. And there, on that wall, was the name of his driver, Bill Long, the one he'd buried at Arlington.
Maj. FENTON: I sit in front of that wall and I couldn't breathe and I was crying. And I remember, at least in my head, I don't know if I was saying it out loud, it would have been three or four in the morning, but I think I was saying why God.
ARRAF: Why send them to Iraq after a tour at Arlington Cemetery? Why post them here in Baqubah of all places? He didn't get an answer that night. For the chaplain, that was the beginning of his descent.
Psychiatrist say PTSD sufferers behave in ways that are logical when someone's trying to kill you. But then that behavior persists after the danger is gone, behavior like hyper-vigilance to threat or emotional isolation.
Colonel John Bradley is the chief psychiatrist at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He says care providers including medics and chaplains seem to suffer from PTSD at about the same rate as deployed soldiers, between 10 and 17 percent.
Colonel JOHN BRADLEY (Chief Psychiatrist, Walter Reed Army Medical Center): One person's trauma may not be another person's trauma. So it could be something from being engaged in a firefight, which I think we would all agree is a potentially traumatic event, to witnessing death and destruction, death bodies, injuries, and things along those lines.
Chaplain Fenton saw a lot of that people, dead soldiers.
ARRAF: Battalion Chaplain Jesus Perez served under Fenton.
Captain JESUS PEREZ: When he left, he saw about 80 soldiers killed. That's a lot. And I think that was too much for him, not because he was weak, it's because he loved too much. He loved his soldiers. He loved his soldier, his driver. And he was seen in each of every soldier that got killed, his own soldier.
ARRAF: Chaplain Fenton lost his ability to concentrate. It took him hours to write sermons. He'd cry uncontrollably. He was depressed and angry. His heart raced. Some days, he couldn't get out of bed to preach. He started withdrawing from the very soldiers he was supposed to council. And then it got worse.
Maj. FENTON: At the end, I would go to a memorial ceremony and I wouldn't remember anything until I got the volleys or taps. And I have my eyes up in the whole time but it was like you're asleep. And I'd wake up for volleys and taps and realize it was over. The chaplains would say, how did I do, and I'd say, oh, you did great. But I don't remember a single thing they had to say. It's just way too painful.
ARRAF: By the end of his tour, he felt he was losing his mind. Everything fell apart one day last August. Chaplain Perez remembers Fenton saying he wished sometimes that he had died instead of the soldiers.
Capt. PEREZ: He was in the chapel, and I came to the office and he was sitting down. And suddenly, he burst, crying. So I asked him what was going on. And he says I can do this no more. And we had a conversation where I realized that it was time for him to get help outside Iraq. Iraq was not going to be the place where he's going to get better.
ARRAF: They evacuated Chaplain Fenton to Germany, diagnosed with depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, and then onto Walter Reed.
Maj. FENTON: My first day out of in-patient, I walked into the Malone House to get my room assignment to live at Walter Reed and pushing out the doors with an amputee who I didn't recognize but he recognized me. You know, he's, hey, Chaplain, do you remember me? And he goes, you prayed with me. But there were too many, there were too many.
ARRAF: Major Fenton is still on active duty. He's been transferred to what the Army has begun calling the Warrior Transition Brigade. His job now is to get well. Several times a week, he attends therapy at Walter Reed. His wife, Christine, took unpaid leave from her job in mortuary affairs at Fort Hood. The whole time Charlie was in Iraq, she'd been on the other end helping to receive the bodies he's prayed over. In some ways, they share those loses. But later, she realized there were a lot of things she couldn't share with her husband.
Ms. CHRISTINE FENTON: Things that happened, I pretty much don't tell him. I mean, I remember the day my daughter called to tell me she was being deployed. And I talked to her on the phone. I was at work. I was at Fort Hood still, and I talked to her. And I was very calm on the phone and I hung up the phone. I started sobbing hysterically. My supervisor came out and took me to one of the grief rooms in our office, sat me down and, you know, asked me what was wrong. And I said I can't do this anymore. She says you don't have a choice. You have to do it and you will do it. And I remember thinking that was mean, but she was right. Someone has to be strong for everyone else.
ARRAF: And right now that someone is Christine Fenton. At their home in Virginia, Major Fenton's 13-year-old son, Connor, slouches against his dad on the couch.
Mr. CONNOR FENTON: Even though he's having a hard time with it, I'm glad that he's able to stay emotional because, even though it's hard when he cries a lot or when he (unintelligible) because he's sad, at least you know he's feeling it and at least you know he's starting his path to recovery, hopefully, because, yeah, like some of those guys who never recover or because they can't feel anything, nothing changes for them.
ARRAF: On the day we visited, Chaplain Fenton was preparing an invocation he'd been asked to give at the Pentagon. He was nervous. He hadn't offered a public prayer since before he was evacuated.
Maj. FENTON: It's hard for me to pray out loud. I mean, tomorrow I'm going to write my prayer out so I can control myself, but I cannot pray out loud without it taking me places right now. And I don't want to do that in public.
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ARRAF: We waited for Chaplain Fenton the next day at the Pentagon, but he never came. Christine Fenton arrived alone. Her husband had panicked. She left him at home crying, apologetic, ashamed. Dressed in red, she sat ramrod straight in the front row next to an empty seat with her husband's name on it. Her determined smile didn't waver.
Charlie Fenton says his faith in God hasn't been shaken. He and his family believe he has a new calling, one that will lead him to use his faith and his suffering to help others with PTSD. When I asked him if there was a peace of Scripture he turn to for comfort, he recalled this passage.
Maj. FENTON: It says when there's no buds on the trees, there's no fruit in the vines, when the sheep are not in the stalls and the cattle are not in the fields, yet I will worship you. Oh God, you are my strength. You will lift me up to the high places like the feet of a deer. And you know I think of that image of a family, you know, starving to death and not making it and in great suffering and still worshipping God. That's the one I think of.
ARRAF: For NPR News, I'm Jane Arraf.
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SEABROOK: Our parting words tonight came from Chaplain Charlie Fenton.