By Katy Savage, Standard Staff
There are pictures of Steve Robbins from high school surrounded by friends, the last time there was a smile on his face, the last time he was comfortable surrounded by a group of people.
When he was 17 and a senior student at Stevens High School, teaching an adult machine tool class at night, his parents thought he would go to college. Maybe be a teacher.
They were shocked when he said he wanted to go into the military — a path his father tried to pursue when he was 21.
Robbins was 17 and unsure of what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. He knew he wanted to see the world — Japan, the Philippines, Germany, Spain, Italy, Kuwait and Jordan — and a military recruiter who called him after dinner one night made the Marines sound exciting.
“Then I got there,” Robbins said.
Robbins, 29, was in Iraq and then Afghanistan from 2004-2009 with the Marine Corps.
A scar goes across his left eyebrow from a bullet that ricocheted off a building he was standing next to in Iraq in 2005. He had back surgery from driving a Humvee over an IED in Afghanistan. Two people he was with were also hurt. A third person died.
Robbins came back “unrecognizable” to his parents. His high school pictures show a different person from the one who wears worn, baggy clothes now, his parents said.
Robbins was an “easy-go-lucky” kid with “all kinds of friends in school, girls, boys, it didn’t matter,” said his mother, Lisa.
“He came back totally the opposite,” she said. * Robbins lived in the woods a year following his return. He didn’t talk to anybody in the small cabin on his parent’s property in Unity, New Hampshire.
He wanted to be alone, away from the questions.
“Everyone I knew wanted to talk about the war or ask sensitive questions,” he said. “That’s the last thing I wanted to talk about to people. I’m trying to forget about it. I don’t want to talk about it.”
The woods were comforting to Robbins after sleeping outside in tents or holes he dug in the ground overseas.
“He’s basically a recluse now,” Steve Robbins, Sr. said. “You really can’t have a conversation with Stevie now. I ask him a question, I get like a three-word answer out of it and that’s the end of the conversation. He just stands there that’s all he does,” he said. “It’s not the kid that we raised.”
Robbins calls it post-traumatic stress disorder. To his parents, it’s just “odd.”
Eleven to 20 percent of soldiers who served in Operation Iraqi Freedom suffer from PTSD, according to the National Center for PTSD.
Flashbacks, anger, irritability and negative feelings, are common symptoms.
Robbins tried once to commit suicide. He called his mom and told her he had slit his wrists inside his car.
“I couldn’t believe he would do that to me. That’s not my boy,” Lisa said. “He’s very moody. He’s very depressed and there’s not a thing I can do about it. He’s of age.”
Robbins laughs when asked about therapy. That’s not his thing. And his parents can’t force him to go.
“We all hit rock bottom. It literally is up to him to what he does,” Lisa said. * Alicia Tuttle says Robbins is a “broken wing” in need of repair.
And Tuttle, a stay-at-home mom, wants to repair him.
When Tuttle met Robbins he was sleeping in his 2005 Jaguar X-Type in the Wal-Mart parking lot.
“I took him in like he was my child,” Tuttle said.
Robbins has lived the past two years with Tuttle, her husband and three children in Ascutney. He sleeps in the living room.
In the four-and-a-half years Robbins has lived at her house she’s taken in 7-8 people who had addiction problems, housing problems — anybody who had lost their way. Her husband jokes about putting a sign on the lawn: “Alicia’s Halfway House.”
Her husband got Robbins a job trimming trees around power lines. Tuttle took him in despite his “awkwardly short sentences” and personality quirks, which she said took some getting used to.
“I’m incapable of seeing bad in anybody,” Tuttle said.
Tuttle, who was raised in Ascutney, drags Robbins to meet her friends. She sits him down with people and leaves him to make conversation.
Her two years of trying to get through to him has worked, she thinks.
“He’s more positive on occasion,” Tuttle said. “And he opens up more. We have regular therapy sessions.”
Tuttle makes him talk about the war and pesters him when he doesn’t. She makes him be a person again.
“She doesn’t really let me be antisocial,” Robbins said. * Robbins regrets his military experience — yet he yearns to go back.
“Working a regular job just seems so meaninglessness after you’ve been in the military,” he said. “You kind of felt like you were saving the world before and now you’re just going to work.”
He tried to be a Russian translator for the Navy. He passed the tests to get him there but then there wasn’t an opening.
When asked if serving again was a serious consideration, Tuttle, making her family dinner that night, immediately said “no” before Robbins could respond.
Tuttle has repair work still to do.
“He knows he’s not allowed to leave,” she said. “Who else am I going to take care of?”
This article first appeared in the January 14, 2016 edition of the Vermont Standard.