Obituaries
Scars from page B39
tions to traumatic situations — called
"acute stress reaction" — and at first
suffer from symptoms such as difficulty
sleeping and moodiness.
The problem occurs when the symp-
toms do not subside and prevent one from
functioning normally.
During and immediately after the 2006
war, soldiers from the front lines were
brought to vacation areas straight from
battle to undergo physical and mental
recuperation. When the sessions had to
take place within range of Hezbollah rock-
et attacks, they were held in underground
shelters.
There are no exact figures on how many
veterans of the Second Lebanon War are
suffering from PTSD or are in treatment for
mental health problems, though the IDF
and Defense Ministry report high rates of
improvement among those they treat.
Research shows that some 10 percent
of those exposed to traumatic events
suffer from PTSD. Combat soldiers
tend to have a lower occurrence in part
because they are trained to deal with
stressful battlefield situations.
But, as Shechter attests, even soldiers
cannot fully be ready for the traumas of the
battlefield.
"You cannot fully prepare yourself' he
says. "An incident will always come as a
surprise."
As Shechter lay wounded in an Israeli hos-
pital with shrapnel injuries from a missile to
his stomach, head and hand, he dismissed
an offer of help from an army psychologist.
But two months after returning home,
Shechter knew things weren't right. He found
himself waking suddenly in the middle of
the night, unable to fall back asleep. He was
haunted by flashbacks from the day of the
attack, when a missile slammed into the
wall next to him, showering his body with
shrapnel.
After undergoing individual and group
therapy at the Defense Ministry, Shechter
says he's starting to feel improvement.
"It was good to be able to feel like I could
unburden myself, to talk;' Shechter tells JTA.
He says it was a relief to meet as a
group, where he could talk with others
who had undergone similar experiences.
"What we spoke about there, it was
hard to talk about with other friends
because they were not there and did not
go through the same things:' Schechter
says. "Here we could share and give each
other advice."
For Shechter's mother, Orna, her son's
injury and subsequent trauma have been
bewildering and painful.
"There is Tom before the war and Tom
after the war:' she says, pausing to weep.
"Before, Tom was happy; he was Tom with-
out these dark moods"
Rachel Gold, a social worker at the
Defense Ministry, tells of one young officer
she treated who was shot by a Hezbollah
fighter. He came home a changed person,
she said: frustrated and silent, withdrawn
from his wife and children, suspicious and
unable to concentrate.
"He became obsessive-compulsive
Gold says. "As if he still had blood on his
hands, he kept cleaning them."
She worked with him on his flashbacks,
his feelings of incompetence for not killing
the Hezbollah gunman who shot him and
his refusal to go to crowded public places
like malls and restaurants because he
believed it was too dangerous.
Getting the officer to recount the night
he was shot was the key to his rehabilita-
tion, Gold says. In the course of retelling
his story, the soldier realized that instead
of underperforming, he actually may have
saved Israeli lives because he had fired back
and protected his fellow soldiers.
Gold also got the officer to start going out
again, giving him homework assignments to
overcome his fears, like taking a trip to the
mall.
"The world seemed wider again',' she says.
"He could go back to living and remove the
association of the trauma."
As for Shechter, he sounds upbeat when
he describes his plans to study management
in college. But he acknowledges that he still
struggles to overcome his war trauma.
"When a door slams too loudly, my
heart leaps into the sky" he says. "I try to
calm myself down, that everything is OK
— that it's not Lebanon7
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