Unknown to him during his second
deployment to Afghanistan, Howard received several mild concussions while
serving as a Senior Mentor on an Embedded Training Team advising and operating
with an Afghan National Army Infantry Battalion. When he returned home in 2007 he
progressively declined physically and mentally, culminating in a Post Traumatic
Stress revision of a combat action from 2006.
He believes that his PTS revision occurred as the result of a prescription
medication that had been prescribed to treat his headaches and designed to impact the corpus callosum (the pathway between the two
hemispheres of the brain) trapping him in his right hemisphere.
After eighteen months of therapy he has
embarked on a mission to help others afflicted with Post Traumatic Stress and
Brain Injury, as well as to change the culture within the military and society
as a whole when it comes to mental health issues. He is an advocate of reclassifying Post
Traumatic Stress as an injury and believes that trauma whether physical or
emotional causes an electro-chemical response in the brain designed to protect
itself. He also advocates the use of
alternative treatment methodologies in order to reduce the reliance on drugs.
Howard has a Masters Degree in Organizational Dynamics from the University of Pennsylvania and a Bachleor of Science Degree from Charter
Oak State College.