PTSD

FARMINGTON — Kristi Horne cried as she told jurors it was only a matter of luck that no one in her family was seriously hurt the day of the Silver Eagle explosion three years ago.

“If I had been home two minutes earlier, my babies would have been in my arms,” Horne said Friday in 2nd District Court in Farmington.

Brian and Kristi Horne are suing Silver Eagle Refining, saying they can’t sell their home because it has been stigmatized due to the damage caused by the refinery explosion on Nov. 4, 2009, in Woods Cross, and the fear that another explosion, or worse, could occur in the future.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- American soldiers in Afghanistan aren't supposed to drink booze. They're not supposed to stray "outside the wire" of their fortifications on their own.

And they aren't supposed to train their rifles on innocents.

Yet that's just what Army Staff Sgt.

SEATTLE -- The call would soon become excruciatingly familiar: A 28-year-old Army specialist from Joint Base Lewis-McChord, recently home from Afghanistan, had walked into a parking garage in Salt Lake City with a full set of body armor, ammunition clips and his AR-15 rifle.

Five weeks before the 2010 incident, Spc. Brandon Barrett had gone absent without leave after a drunken-driving arrest near the sprawling military base in Washington state and had begun sending ominous messages to friends. "About to show the world they shouldn't (mess) with soldiers back from a deployment," he said in one.

The rate of suicide throughout the U.S. military has stopped rising, but sexual assault and post-traumatic stress problems are on the rise, the Pentagon said this week as it released new data outlining the scope of both problems.

OGDEN — Weber State’s Center for Diversity & Unity on Wednesday will host “Understanding Veterans: PTSD & the Return Home.”

Combat veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder are more likely to have dementia, cardiac problems and structural changes in the brain as they get older than veterans without PTSD, according to new research.

The findings, which for the most part resulted from research at the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center, raise concerns about the overall health of aging veterans, but hold promise for the potential of helping to treat these diseases.