Local military chaplain battles post-traumatic stress disorder

When Navy Lt. Cmdr. Stephen Dundas deployed to Iraq in 2007, there was one primary difference between his living conditions and those of the troops in his care: They had guns. He did not.

Like many of today’s military chaplains, Dundas faced all the dangers that threatened troops outside the wire. He felt rockets whistle over his head, saw helicopters and convoys he was riding in take enemy fire and witnessed carnage in the wake of the war.

“Places we went, you could see the wreckage of vehicles and destroyed towns, just see occasionally kids on crutches and people that had obviously been maimed,” he said. “We did some mass casualty stuff at (Al Taqqadum), where I was based out of.”

As a chaplain, he also kept a punishing travel schedule that allowed for very little sleep, frequently shuttling by night to far-flung outposts anywhere from Fallujah to the Syrian border.

Before Dundas returned to the United States, he already knew that something within him had changed. Once, he exploded with uncharacteristic rage at another chaplain who had disturbed the organization of his workspace. After the deployment, his internal turmoil only worsened.

“When I got back, I found that I was hyper-vigilant in traffic, very angry on the roadways,” he said. “I could sense things before I saw them. I got very paranoid in big crowds, even in church.”

Worst of all, he experienced a crushing feeling of abandonment and isolation after resuming duties at his Navy command, away from the Marines he had counseled and spent his days with in Iraq.

In the throes of post-traumatic stress disorder, he found that he had lost even his raison d’etre: He no longer believed in God. One of his soul’s darkest nights came on Christmas 2008, when he tried to join his wife in church for a Roman Catholic mass, a favorite tradition, and found the atmosphere and the crowded congregation overwhelming instead of soothing.

“I freaked,” he said. “I went up, handed her the car keys, walked to the door, said ‘I’m walking home.’ I walked home in the middle of the night, looked up at the sky and said ‘God, I don’t even know where you are.’"

But even during days of greatest uncertainty and despair, Dundas had to continue to appear strong as junior Marines and sailors came to him for answers, prayer and reassurance.

Dundas recalled that, while stationed with Navy Explosive Ordnance Disposal, an incoming commanding officer asked him who a chaplain turns to for help.

Dundas’ answer? “I don’t know.”

Even traditional recourse for mental trauma can be a loaded option for chaplains. Many fear that seeking counseling could signal unfitness for duty, Dundas said.

“At some point, just because of the institutional pressures, you don’t want to say anything, because you don’t want it reflecting on a FitRep or something, or having it prejudiced against you,” he said.

But it wasn’t until Dundas began visiting a therapist at Portsmouth and discussed his struggles with a few trusted friends and colleagues that he could start to heal.

Living with post-traumatic stress, he found, was not about suppression of traumatic memories and isolation of fragmented emotions, but instead integration of the experiences. Dundas said he came to accept the emotional scars and wounds that were a part of who he had become.

And on December 2009, a year after he had walked home alone, looking into the night sky for an answer, he found his faith returned.

One night, he was summoned by emergency page into a hospital room to administer last rites to an old man who lay dying, surrounded by friends and family. After the man had breathed his last, Dundas learned that he was a World War II veteran and a Navy doctor, who went on after the war, to become a beloved physician in his community and a pillar in his church.

Standing in the room, Dundas said he felt the presence and grace of God in a way he had not since he stood on the ground in Iraq.

He now refers to that night as his Christmas miracle.

As his faith began to return, Dundas said he knew it would never be what it had been before Iraq.

“It was a much more real faith, because I wasn’t just trying to plaster over something and just do the things to do the things,” he said. “It became much more relational, not just with God, but with other people.”

Throughout the experience of distrust and brokenness that came with Dundas’s battle with PTSD, he said he could only be honest with Marines and sailors who came to him for spiritual support and guidance, even telling them that his faith had been shaken. To his surprise, many sought him out because they knew he could identify with their experiences.

“The fact that people knew I was dealing with it, am still dealing with it, made them likely to come to me. Even if I couldn’t fix it, they were OK with that — just to know that there is life eventually,” he said. “They all talk about the feeling of abandonment, feeling like they’re broken, cut off. They describe so many of the things I’ve been through, and I’ll be there and say, ‘You’re looking at somebody who’s got the T-shirt.’”

Now command chaplain at the Camp Lejeune Naval Hospital, Dundas laughs wryly about being forced to return to the basics of belief as a senior officer in his late 40s.

“There’s so much stuff that I don’t know now. I used to know much more when I was younger,” he said.

But that candor and simplicity has become a way for him to communicate with many troops who fear they will appear weak or broken if they ask for help.

It’s a message that he now emblazons on the back of each of his business cards, in words attributed to a favorite baseball manager, Earl Weaver: “It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.”

Dundas blogs about military history, Christianity, baseball and PTSD at padresteve.wordpress.com.