By Bill Petzold
Editor
CASS CITY — Deb Robinson has a story to tell. It’s the story of a military family that answered a call to serve in both Vietnam and Operation Enduring Freedom.
In both instances, Robinson’s husband Newton “Newt” Robinson and her son Brian David Robinson became casualties of war, struck down not by bullets but by the after-effects of their service.
Robinson hopes that by telling her family’s story, she can help other people coping with the effects of post traumatic stress disorder that they are not alone. She also is an advocate for improving services available to vets with PTSD.
Deb’s husband graduated from Caro in 1964, and served as a truck driver in Vietnam War from 1967-68.
“He died 11 years ago … September 19, 2003,” Deb said. “He was 57 years old. He developed multiple myeloma — a cancer of the blood plasma. It’s more of a leukemia type disease. He had chemo, he had radiation, and he lived 14 months from diagnosis. Many years went between when he got out of the service and he developed the disease. He died in between our son’s deployments between Afghanistan and Iraq.”
Deb said multiple myeloma is one of 13 or 14 diseases linked to Agent Orange, a defoliant used by the U.S. military during the war in Vietnam.
The Robinson’s son, Brian, was a blessing to his family from the moment he was born. His older siblings were teenagers when their baby brother came into the world.
“Brian has a half-brother and sister from their dad’s first marriage, Lynda Robinson of Caro and Michael Robinson
See PTSD A9
of Edmond, Oklahoma,” Deb Robinson said. “It’s like Brian made our family complete when he was born, because they lived with us, and I married this family. (She laughs) About seven years later we had this baby that just brought everybody together — and he was spoiled and indulged and just really a beautiful person. They were 12 and 15 when their baby brother was born.”
Brian, the spoiled baby brother, was a bit of a trouble-maker as a kid, and as he grew to high school age his family felt that a stint in the military would be good for him to teach him discipline and structure.
“He was signed up for delayed entry, and then (September 11, 2001) happened, and he left even before he graduated,” Deb said. “He had his credits and he got his diploma, but my husband and I exempted him because he was so gung ho. He left 10 days before he turned 18 and before commencement. … There went my little boy.
“They honored him and us as we accepted his diploma, which was very nice — except it was pretty disappointing because that’s my only child (and I wanted to see him walk at commencement).
“As an afterthought you think, ‘Was that so wise (to sign his age exemption for enlistment)? But 9-11 hadn’t happened (yet), and the discipline was going to be good for him. It was different. We didn’t know what this war was going to be like. It didn’t seem like a bad idea because Brian needed some direction.”
Fortunately, Brian returned home to Caro in 2003, but Deb said she began to notice that her son was acting differently. Between the end of Brian’s service and his death on February 21, 2012 at the age of 27, Deb would go through a roller coaster of emotions trying to help her son cope with the horrors that woke him up at night.
“He began showing signs of the struggle probably even before he got out — the psychological anxiety,” Deb said. “He was 100 percent disabled with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. He started showing signs, but it just kind of declined through the next six years that he lived after that, but it was very, very difficult, and it got worse and worse because of the drug addiction from the prescription drugs from the (Veterans Affairs Hospital) — that’s what he died from, that’s what was in his body when he died. It was his stuff he had scrips for. It was called an accidental self-administered drug overdose. You can tell I am not ashamed of that, because there’s so much of that and people just don’t know.
“Brian was very outgoing and loved people, loved to be around people, and because of that it was hard, and he was a fixture here on the Caro streets. He lived in different apartments here; he was married for a very short time. He was very charming, but every once in a while you’d also see him shuffling down the sidewalks here in Caro in withdrawal, or he had just had a flashback, and then maybe in another day or two you would see him and he was all clean-cut and clean-shaven and just looking good. So it was a rollercoaster type of ride.”
Soon after Brian became a civilian, it was apparent his battle scars weren’t visible ones.
“His first big incident that we knew something was wrong, he’d been recently married, and he and his wife had bought a new home in Wilmot,” Deb said. “He fell asleep one night, and he woke up and he was in a flashback — he’d probably been drinking. He loaded all of his guns, and he secured the perimeter of his neighborhood. Then he came back to reality and knew what was going on and he was arrested — which he needed to be to keep people safe. He was arrested, and that was his first stint at Battle Creek at the PTSD clinic. That’s the only PTSD clinic in Michigan that is in-patient … Brian spent months there, he was there many times and he did well with the structure — the doling out of meds, the careful watch — but then they can’t keep them there, and it’s a voluntary program.”
Space was limited at the Battle Creek center, so when Brian was returned to Caro, it would take time for a bed to open up for more additional treatment.
“I had to keep him in jail a few times because there was no bed. The police here and in Sanilac County and in Lapeer County where he had had incidents knew he did not belong with them,” Deb said. “They felt for him, but there was not a bed available in a PTSD clinic or in a psych ward. He could also go to a psych ward. However, you get a 23, 24 year old young man with these psychological issues that’s trying to feel honorable, and they are in a facility with a 90-year-old dimentia patient. Not the best fit, but we had to sometimes or he would have been locked up in the jail, and the police did not want him in the jail — they knew he did not belong there — but we couldn’t find a place. We went through that many times.”
Brian struggled with feelings of anxiety and horrible nightmares triggered by PTSD, but Deb said her son also felt ashamed and embarrassed because he could see what was happening to him.
“I would not wish him back, because he was ashamed of himself sometimes,” she said. “He knew he had substance abuse issues; he tried to trick people and once people weren’t tricked anymore he felt like a loser. … He was absolutely wonderful, a wonderful person. He was very popular in this town, and then he became a bit feared in this town because they didn’t know what he would do. I would come at least once a week to see him and pick him up and we would go out to eat, and there were people that would salute him, and there were people who would look at him like, ‘I saw the way you behaved in here one time.’ ”
Deb found herself fighting a battle for her son, the soldier, trying to get him into the programs that could help him, trying to get him into the hospitals and clinics that knew how to care for his challenges, dealing with the politics and personality conflicts that come along with. Recognizing that she could not care for him because she loved him too much to be blunt with him, she sought a public guardian for him to let “someone who didn’t love him make the rules for him.”
It took Deb two years to come to terms with Brian’s death, and now she hopes to speak about the debilitating effects of PTSD. She said she was invited to speak on the subject at Michigan’s Own Military and Space Museum in Frankenmuth. She has found ways to cope with the loss of her son after struggling to get him the help he need. She is a trumpeter who plays taps at military funerals, and also has found relief in writing about her experiences.
“It’s good for me because I have suffered great anxiety through my battle too, and right now I don’t have that feeling of impending doom because it happened,” Deb said. “I would lay awake night after night, (worrying about Brian).
“I have a bunch of short stories that I’ve sent in to magazines and I’ve won a few contests, and that’s a good outlet for me, the journaling and things, but I’ve found that when I play my trumpet, your anxiety gets relieved because you’re breathing. I found that out. It’s an unconscious thing, it just does it. It makes me feel really good.”
