Senior commanders have reached a turning point. After nine years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, they are beginning to recognize age-old legacies of the battlefield - once known as shellshock or battle fatigue - as combat wounds, not signs of weakness. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, Amos's Army counterpart, has been especially outspoken. "PTSD is not a figment of someone's imagination," Chiarelli lectured an auditorium of skeptical sergeants last fall. "It is a cruel physiological thing."
The challenge facing Amos and Chiarelli has been convincing an undermanned force that PTSD and traumatic brain injury are real injuries that demand immediate care. The generals also have run up against an overburdened military medical system that is short on doctors and reluctant to take risks with new types of treatment.
"I have been asked . . . should you have figured this out sooner?" said Amos, who was recently tapped to be Marine Corps commandant. "Yeah, we should have. But we didn't. It has been evolutionary."
Only a few weeks before the blast that injured him, Ownbey had reenlisted for another four years.
His engineer company's job was to find and destroy roadside bombs, a dangerous mission that had claimed the lives of eight Marines over two tours. The toll weighed heavily on Maj. Jeff Hackett, Ownbey's commander, who had begun to blame himself for the deaths. "I can't stand to look at myself," he confided in an e-mail to his wife.