BAGRAM: Kemp’s wife has left him, a month after the miscarriage of their child, and he feels ready to explode with frustration and anger.

Rather than let his rage boil up inside, the staff sergeant is venting his woes to Lt. John Fellion, a psychiatric nurse at the field hospital on the Bagram base, the US military’s main staging area in the country. It’s his fourth visit in the past week.

“It’s helped. If I hadn’t come in and talked, it would have turned into an ugly situation. I might have said some mean and spiteful things,” said Kemp, visibly tense and on the verge of tears.

Kemp is one of hundreds of soldiers here at Bagram receiving care and attention they might not have gotten three months ago, before a string of domestic murders at North Carolina’s Fort Bragg army base led to sweeping changes in the armed forces’ psychological screening and treatment procedures.

Of the five murder cases that rocked the giant base this summer, three involved troops returning home from Afghanistan.

Shaken by the killings, the army brass sent a special team to Fort Bragg to conduct an inquiry of “physical, behavioural and any possible pharmaceutical aspects” that might have been factors in the violence. The team completed its inquiry last week but has not released its findings.

One reported focus of the probe is the anti-malarial drug the soldiers are required to take as a precaution for Afghanistan duty. The medication on rare occasion has caused psychosis and violent side effects.

Without ruling out the effects of anti-malarial or other drugs, medical staff members here say that stress disorders are more likely being caused by the unusually uncertain and open-ended nature of the US-declared ‘war on terrorism’ than by pharmaceuticals.

The harsh conditions at isolated, dust-blown and tightly secured base at Bagram are also factors in stress levels here. Soldiers work long hours but generally are not allowed off base for security reasons. Extreme heat that often exceeded 100 degrees over the summer didn’t help.

In any case, the military has instituted psychological screening and treatment procedures designed to catch soldiers’ stress disorders before they erupt in violence.

The new procedures include mandatory testing of all home-bound soldiers for anger, depression, drug and alcohol abuse or suicidal tendencies. Soldiers who finish high on the tests then undergo lengthy debriefing and counselling at Bagram and, when warranted, compulsory follow-up treatment at home.

Soldiers deemed to be in especially precarious mental health are met when they return to the United States by military police and escorted to a mental health facility to start treatment before meeting their families.

“If any soldier shows obvious signs of anger or depression, we bring then in,” said Lt. Col. Thomas Hicklin, who is leading the testing here.

Hicklin, a member of the Army Reserve’s 113th Medical Company who is an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine in civilian life, added that soldiers specifically are asked about how they feel about their reunions with their wives or significant others.

The murders have caused widespread concern not just among the army leadership but among families back home. Hicklin said he had been told that many army wives at Fort Bragg with husbands in Afghanistan are concerned for their own safety.

And soldiers at Bagram are worried have about the possibility of their behaviour turning violent.

Hicklin and others on the medical staff at Bagram say the incidence of stress disorders such as extreme anger and depression is running high.

Even as there has been less action than many soldiers expected in confronting remnants of the former Taliban regime and Al Qaeda network, soldiers are being told their duty here could stretch out for months and in some cases years.

“The soldiers are proud to be here, but the operations have gone slowly and that’s frustrating not being able to do more to eliminate Al Qaeda and the Taliban. It’s partly a waiting game here,” Hicklin said.

Lt. Col. Haroun, a reservist who in civilian life is a forensic psychiatrist for the San Diego County Superior Court system, said the lack of a concrete “end point” for the war has put many in uniform on edge.

Also a source of frustration is the clampdown on information. Noncombat personnel — the vast majority of the 8,000 US troops here — have little or no idea how the war is going, said army reserve Maj. Valvincent Reyes, a clinical social worker and probation officer from Torrance in civilian life.

“The chances of a soldier being a psychiatric casualty here,” Hicklin said, “is much higher than becoming a physical casualty.”—Dawn/The LAT-WP News Service (c) Washington Post.