To you, Tommy Murphy is stranger. This 23-year-old active duty Army Ranger from Birmingham, Alabama and Boston, Massachusetts likely holds no connections to you, your family, or any aspect of your daily life. You, on the other hand, may have the potential to impact this soldier’s life greatly. Please take five minutes to get to know Tommy so you can decide if you are willing to help Tommy and his family to whatever degree your talents and resources allow.

Tommy and the Murphy family face immense challenges right now. A veteran of two combat tours in Afghanistan and one combat tour in Iraq, Tommy is currently charged by the Army with offenses he allegedly committed while he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). No one was physically injured and no person lost any property as a result of Tommy’s actions during any incident with which he is charged. Tommy has yet to receive proper treatment for PTSD and currently faces the threat of a 50-year-sentence in military prison and a dishonorable discharge from the Army.

Boston natives Bev Murphy, a nurse, and Joe Murphy, a private investigator, are struggling to keep Tommy out of prison and get him the help he needs. To provide Tommy with a competent defense, the Murphy’s spent their life savings and sold all they could sell for a private attorney and experts for Tommy’s trial—his first trial. However, when the presiding judge ended the first trial due to gross misconduct by the prosecutor and perjured false testimony by a military psychiatrist, Tommy and his family were placed back at square one.

Tommy now faces a second trial, but the Murphy family cannot afford a defense, much less a good one. These parents are now broke, cannot help their only child, and it is tearing them to pieces.

A group of concerned citizens wants to bring some relief to Tommy’s plight. Some of us are friends of Tommy and the Murphy’s, others are people who have never met Tommy yet feel compelled to help the Murphy family out of human compassion and civic responsibility. We are organizing a fundraising effort to help Tommy and the Murphy family.

Tommy was trained to serve as an “Army of One,” now we need to form an army to save one soldier. Please continue reading to learn more about Tommy’s story and decide how you can be a part of the SaveOneSoldier.Org campaign.

As the United States fought abroad in Afghanistan and began its operation in Iraq, Tommy Murphy answered our nation’s call to arms in the wake of “9/11.” Tommy was a spirited nineteen-year-old. When he applied for service in the Army, Tommy gave a specific answer for his preferred location in his usual style: “As close to Osama Bin Laden as you can get me.” He became an Army Ranger, one of the most elite designations a fighting soldier can receive. Tommy served two tours of active combat duty in Afghanistan and then returned to the Middle East to serve in Iraq. Tommy earned the rank of Specialist and served as both a line squad team leader and a weapon squad team leader during his combat deployments.

An unfortunate minority of people suffering from PTSD experience psychotic breaks known as “dissociative episodes.” During these episodes, soldiers living with PTSD experience flashbacks that cause them to believe they are back in combat situations. Tommy Murphy returned from battle with this invisible psychiatric wound. Mentally, Tommy was more broken than most – and like most, he was ashamed to admit it and did not fully understand what was wrong with him.

In November 2005, still untreated for his severe PTSD, Tommy participated in a lengthy combat simulation exercise at Fort Lewis, Washington—days of intense war games training. After completing the simulation, Tommy became delusional; took guns and equipment from fellow soldiers; cleaned them; and prepared for a combat patrol. When this conduct was properly brought to the attention of officials, Tommy was charged with theft by an overzealous young JAG officer who saw Tommy’s case as an opportunity for his first trial experience.

Disturbed by symptoms of psychological problems, Tommy sought help from an Army psychologist at his base in Fort Lewis, Washington. This military doctor diagnosed Tommy with “severe post-traumatic stress disorder”—a diagnosis later confirmed by a private psychologist and world-renowned leader in the PTSD treatment field.

Here, Tommy’s story takes a sharp turn for the worse. When Tommy and his family refused a plea bargain deal that would have left the three-tour-veteran dishonorably discharged and serving more than a year in prison, the Army prosecutor retaliated. The prosecutor assigned numerous agents to scrutinize all of Tommy’s conduct while in the service, searching for any infringement of Army policy. As we all know, young Army Rangers serve with valor, courage, and a certain amount of cocky bravado: like others, Tommy Murphy was not a choirboy off the battlefield.

As a result of the prosecution’s vengeful investigation, Tommy was singled out from his comrades and charged with every imaginable infraction of Army rules. For example, one charge involved returning from overseas with a small souvenir of enemy weaponry—the Army has not brought this charge against any soldier since World War I. By the beginning of his first trial, Tommy faced a prison sentence of over 116 years. The government failed to prove most of the charges and they were thrown out at the close of the prosecution’s case. However, he still faces over 50 years in prison which would make him 72 years old upon his release.

Tommy was forced to wear a different color shirt after his problems came to light. Shunning and ridicule of Tommy and others like him discourage soldiers from asking for help. Peer pressure encourages many like Tommy to wait too late to ask for help.  Many soldiers afflicted with PTSD have already engaged in irrational or risky self-destructive behavior before asking for help. Indeed, it is usually the aberrant behavior that forces the illness into the open for the first time.

The judge temporarily suspended the first trial after Tommy’s attorney presented his defense to allow the Army to find and call a military doctor as a rebuttal witness. When the trial resumed, the government prosecutor offered the testimony of an army doctor who had never examined Tommy Murphy. Despite the fact that the base Army psychologist had diagnosed Tommy with PTSD, the prosecution’s psychiatrist testified that Tommy was not suffering from PTSD. (This doctor is now answering charges pending with the Washington State Medical Board.) The judge determined that the doctor presented perjured testimony in collusion with the Army’s prosecutor. After the Murphy family incurred legal bills of over $100,000 for Tommy’s defense, the judge declared a mistrial.

Undeterred, the same JAG office that mishandled the first trial is about to recharge Tommy. The Murphy family cannot afford another defense, much less the vigorous and thorough defense needed for Tommy to have a fighting chance. We expect that defense to cost as much as the first one if not more.

With alarming frequency, reputable news agencies report about the grossly inadequate manner in which the armed forces are dealing with troops returning from the current wars with PTSD. Veterans are returning home from Afghanistan and Iraq with PTSD in unprecedented numbers. Congressional committees and special news reports continue to investigate the psychological costs of war and ways to better address the needs of soldiers upon their return from the battlefield. Unfortunately, psychological injuries like PTSD are a tragic fact of war.

Tommy Murphy does not have PTSD because someone or some agency failed him. With courage and conviction, Tommy enlisted in the Army to serve our country knowing the challenges he might tackle. What has happened since Tommy returned from his last tour, however, has been a systematic failure—one that you have the power and opportunity to help correct.

After fighting with honor, Tommy faces a prison sentence and the loss of all the benefits he earned as a soldier – including the right to receive treatment at the VA for PTSD. Bev and Joe Murphy’s lives have been shattered as they confront financial ruin in an effort to help their only son. We can do what the Murphy’s can no longer afford to do and come together to save one soldier, by helping Tommy Murphy win his second trial and restoring his family’s economic security.

While various activist and advocacy groups might like to stake a claim to Tommy’s situation and story, we must stress that SaveOneSoldier.org is not an anti-war campaign or an anti-military movement. SaveOneSoldier.Org will not be descending on Capitol Hill to stand on any kind of soap box. We simply want to provide help because we can and because we should. We intend to be a service group and not an advocacy or political group. Tommy Murphy and his family deserve our help—in whatever form it may take—because it is the compassionate, patriotic and moral thing to do. If SaveOneSoldier.Org’s efforts prove very successful, we hope to have the opportunity to help other soldiers like Tommy Murphy, one soldier at a time.

Please visit other portions of this site to learn how you can help the Murphys.

Many Vietnam veterans returned home to a troubled period of readjustment from their wartime experiences. Their emotional problems were characterized initially as post-Vietnam syndrome. It took mainstream psychiatry till the mid-1980’s to finally codify symptoms that have been associated with returning combat veterans since time immemorial. What had been dubbed "homesickness" after the Civil War, shell shock in WWI, and combat neurosis during WWII, was finally recognized by the American Psychiatric Association as an anxiety disorder in its own right, and termed post traumatic stress disorder — or PTSD.

Among veterans of Vietnam, PTSD can express itself in a variety of ways, as depression, in episodes of rage or violence — often accompanied by substance abuse problems, and/or as an inability to relate appropriately to friends, co-workers, and family. These and other symptoms of PTSD develop following exposure to traumatic events and actions in combat that shatter one's basic sense of meaning and security.

PTSD can also be brought on by non-combat acts of brutality or violence toward enemy combatants or civilians. There are many PTSD vets that have never been aggressive towards others, but who may suffer feelings of profound guilt by mere association with such acts of violence. In any case, PTSD is clearly triggered by violence in warfare, and is therefore an outcome of the reality of war, a reality that is far different and more horrible than the portrayal of war by politicians and entertainment media.

All Things Considered, December 28, 2006 · Earlier this month, NPR reported on problems soldiers face at Ft. Carson, Colo., when they come back from Iraq with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and other emotional problems. Now, the base command has taken steps to court-martial one of the soldiers profiled in the story.

Soldiers Say Army Ignores, Punishes Mental Anguish