Sleep-starved from a repeating nightmare and weary from wondering when all that therapy would reignite his fading hope, former Army tank gunner Jeff Barillaro took aim at his stubborn target with an attack as brilliant as it was simple.

He decided to break up with PTSD.

And he would do it in his increasingly famous style — studio-recorded hip-hop, under his stage name, Soldier Hard.

“I thought: If I could write a letter to PTSD, what would I say to PTSD? Then I thought: Oh, wow, this is going to be powerful,” said Barillaro, an Iraq War veteran, out of the service since 2010, who has steadily gained fame among active-duty troops, young veterans and their families for his bare, often-bleak music about the daily demons of living with severe Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. 

Last May, “Dear PTSD,” streamed from his busy mind to his scribbling fingers and, ultimately into a microphone: “Did you listen good when I said, Leave me be? PTSD, get the hell away from me. Cuz you held me down, didn’t even let me sleep, didn’t even let me breathe, didn’t let me live in peace.”

Courtesy of Omar Diaz Photography

Jeff Barillaro, a.k.a. Soldier Hard.

Within the genre of modern military music, Barillaro has ventured a bit further from the mainstream with his growing stockpile of PTSD songs — lyrics and beats tapped from his anger, isolation, divorce, and what he calls “my dark world,” all byproducts, he believes, of extended combat tension and witnessed war horrors.

He has recorded 14 albums, laying down his first tracks on “a minimum setup” at Camp Taji, Iraq, where he discovered that “between missions I could create music as my escape.” He has launched a nonprofit record label, Redcon-1 Music Group, that already boasts a roster containing an Air Force staff sergeant, a Navy sailor, Marine Staff Sgt. Jerry Lozano, and two Army soldiers, including Fort-Hood-based Spc. Stephen Hobbs.

'Music has saved my life'
“I wanted to give other military artists and veterans a chance to tell their stories,” Barillaro said. “Because I know how much music has saved my life. Maybe it can save their life, too.

“I want them to know that same feeling I get when it comes to music, when I’m writing it, and when I’m done and I’m listening to it. I forget where I’m at, any problems I’m having, any bills I can’t pay. It keeps my mind clear. It keeps me sane. That’s why I believe music can really heal people.”

Some of the fans Barillaro has attracted say they are alive only because of the ex-gunner’s lyrical lash outs at anxieties affecting an estimated 20 percent of the men and women who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

One night in 2007, former Army Corp. and Iraq veteran Keith Briggs said he “was sitting at the computer with a bottle in one hand and a gun in the other,” contemplating shooting himself. He had been diagnosed with PTSD in 2005 just after returning from his second deployment.

Courtesy of Jeff Barillaro

Jeff Barillaro looks at old records of former Iraqi prisoners at Camp Taji, Iraq, after U.S. forces took control of the base.

“For some reason I decided to get on Youtube and I found his song ‘Support Us.’ It changed my outlook on PTSD,” said Briggs, 30, who lives in Shelbyville, Ky. “I knew I was not alone. Soldier Hard's music has saved my life. It has stopped me from suicide. PTSD is a real threat to veterans. Soldier Hard’s music is the tool to fight this."

PTSD expert Dr. Sydney Savion, a retired military officer who has heard Barillaro’s songs, said many of the artist’s themes — particularly when he confronts PTSD — could evoke positive emotions in listeners with post-combat stress. They feel, she said, that he is speaking directly to them, forging a vital bond across the Internet and reinforcing the notion that they are not alone as they all strive to recover.

“Research does suggest that certain music can regulate negative emotions,” said Savion, a Texas-based applied behavior scientist. “But conversely, some therapists have found some music with spoken words or lyrics could cause and has caused agitation when its played for those diagnosed with PTSD. So there is a duality between whether the music will evoke a positive feeling or whether it will conjure up those memories that can cause negative feelings. Not everyone’s going to respond to the music in the same way.

“But there is no definitive line that a rapper should or shouldn’t cross,” she added, “because each individual will respond to it differently.”

'Telling horror stories'
Of course, the quiet irony underscoring Barillaro’s art: PTSD has typically — and purposely — remained a private struggle for many young war veterans. Within the military, the unofficial mantra has been: “Take care of your own business,” or worse: “Getting help is for the weak.” That has affixed PTSD with a social stain common to other mental health issues.

Barillaro, however, has literally shouted out almost every step of his path away from PTSD, stigma and all.

At first, he admits, he was tentative about revealing too much.

“I didn’t want to be looked at as a weak person, and I didn’t want people to be scared (of me). But I was just going to say it because it’s how I feel,” Barillaro said. “And I know there’s a lot of people out there who feel the same way I did. So I decided: I’m going to write it and I’m going to start telling horror stories.

“And then it became not about myself anymore. Because I started seeing how much the music would help other people. Then I was like: Alright, I’m just going to let loose now and let everything out because these people out there are going through same thing I was going through and this gives them some hope.”

The music has helped him. It hasn’t cured him completely. The old nightmare still haunts his sleep: He’s with his buddies in a “Middle Eastern setting,” he said. They begin to take fire from the enemy. His friends are shooting back. But in the dream, Barillaro tosses away his weapon, hides his head and begins sobbing.

“That same dream always, always. But that’s not how I reacted while I was in combat. I was on it," he said. "I don’t even sleep anymore when I wake up from one.”

Courtesy of Jeff Barillaro

Jeff Barillaro, a.k.a. Soldier Hard, crouches in an abandoned building at Camp Taji, Iraq, in 2005

Which — to no one’s surprise — inspired a song released last July: “Intro-Therapy Session.” He takes listeners inside a conversation with a psychologist during which he is asked about any nightmares he’s been experiencing.

“I’m scared, crying and I’m frightened. Then I wake up hella sweaty," he raps. "Tell me why this be. I just wanna die, please tell me: Why me?”

The song’s final verse — accompanied by an ominous, sharp pop and a woman's scream — is not pretty. But, as Barillaro has been preaching all these years, neither is living each day with PTSD. 

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It began with an Army veteran’s exasperated affirmation and a purposely casual question, just 22 keystrokes.

Then, a gush of feelings, dammed up for years by the attached stigma, cascaded from Rob Ulrey’s mind through his fingers to his computer screen; 770 words, a personal purge, a plea for understanding: “I am tormented in my dreams ... I am functional in society ... I am medicated ... I am always on the lookout for danger ... I have no regrets ... I am just as normal as you."

His opening line: “I have PTSD ... So what?”

Last February, that post on Ulrey’s military website — penned partly to set “the media” straight, partly as an online life buoy for men and women like him — resonated with hundreds of current and former service members who posted comments to echo and empathize with the former Army gunner’s frustrations and fears. The reactions haven’t stopped coming: “I am living this with you,” wrote Mike R. on Aug. 27, and “Thanks for these words,” typed Greg H., also on Aug. 27. Talk of the column has spread far and wide among American military ranks. 

"The comments it got, and that it's getting, are really kind of inspiring. It seemed like it touched a lot of people. A lot of it was guys and girls who just seemed real lonely out there, real isolated," Ulrey told NBC News. "And they just seemed real relieved there was somebody out there like them."

Ulrey now looks at his essay as — if not the first embers of a true movement — maybe the early moments of a fundamental shift in the public discourse on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, a series of anxiety-based symptoms afflicting up to an estimated 500,000 U.S. troops who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. He wrote the article, he said, at roughly the same time he finally sought treatment, 15 years after an IED in Bosnia shattered his wrist, blew out his eardrums and began chronically haunting his slumber.

“It just came out of me, just kind of flowed from the heart,” Ulrey told NBC News. “I guess my higher calling is to make sure other veterans get this message, get the help they need. But If I can make people understand we’re not the big, evil demons that some people make us out to be, so much the better.”

Indeed, the piece was meant to be aimed largely at "mainstream" media outlets, Ulrey said. Amid a litany of news reports in recent years about young veterans committing violence or suicide, he winced at how often journalists swiftly linked the acts to PTSD. 

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"I, along with my cohorts, have been classified as a potential powder keg just waiting on that spark to set us off into a murderous explosion of ire. This is not the case," Ulrey wrote in his post. 

That sort of breathless PTSD coverage has painted the diagnosis, and perhaps all combat veterans, with a social stain, Ulrey said. PTSD evokes concerned whispers from family members, worried glances from co-workers, and dead-ends at job interviews. 

"The stigma is so negative. I’ve heard time and time again from veterans: 'I’m not getting the looks (from companies) that I should be getting. I’m not getting that second interview.' I know some guys who are leaving stuff off their resumes or downplaying what they did during their time in the service so that it doesn’t trigger those kinds of questions (about mental health). 

"You’re automatically tainted just because of your service, even if you don’t have PTSD at all," Ulrey said. 

But it's not just corporate America that, in Ulrey's view, misunderstands PTSD. Even inside the military, the disorder, and certainlythe act of service members seeking help for it, is often viewed as a personal flaw, or as a lack of mental muscle, he added. 

"They’ve been suffering with it and they’ve been afraid to say anything about it, because they were afraid of the ramifications," Ulrey said. "In the military, if you need to go to mental health, then you’re weak. And we don’t have weak in the military. We’re warriors, we’re not supposed to feel this way. But it will take out the baddest dude or the littlest, wimpiest dude. It doesn’t discriminate."

At the top of the U.S. military pyramid, however, leaders say they are toiling to change that old thinking. 

"Seeking help is a sign of strength not weakness," said Cynthia O. Smith, a spokeswoman for the Defense Department. "No, military careers aren't at risk for seeking help." 

As proof, Smith e-mailed NBC News a memo, signed May 10 by Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, that read: "Leaders throughout the chain of command must actively promote a constructive command climate that ... encourages individuals to reach out for help when needed."

And on the topic of Ulrey's matter-of-fact pitch for America to stop demonizing PTSD and those diagnosed with it, Smith said: "Mental health disorders, like most medical conditions, are treatable. Many service members with symptoms of PTSD recover with appropriate medication and/or psychotherapy within a few months."

Ulrey's medication includes prescribed blood-pressure drugs that prevent the flashback nightmares he once suffered. Those dreams used to wake him with a jolt four to five times a night and caused him to sweat so profusely that his sheets often were drenched by dawn. 

"I have never physically assaulted anyone out of anger or rage," he typed last February. "I have never committed violence in the workplace, just like the vast majority of those who suffer with me. My co-workers know I spent time in the military but they do not know of my daily struggles, and they won’t."

But like any good writer, Ulrey has picked up on the irony in his larger quest to convince the world to simply see soldiers and veterans as regular folks who are dealing with battlefield stress on their own terms. In his current job as a law enforcement officer — he asked to keep his city of residence out of this article to protect his family — Ulrey earlier this month faced a pointed question from his boss. 

"He saw the article and asked me: 'Do I need to know anything about this? Do I need to be worried?’ I said, ‘No not at all.' 

"It had been bugging him and, I guess, bugging the other supervisors I work with for a couple of months. That was the whole purpose of the article. So that people don’t get that question from co-workers or supervisors," Ulrey said. "Even if we have PTSD, we’re OK. I am not going to freak out on you."

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Lucas Velasquez

Lucas Velasquez takes part in a medical training drill performed outside Fallujah. Velasquez, a Navy corpsman, is carrying the stretcher in the front.

During a pair of six-month stints in and around Fallujah, Iraq –- then a fiercely volatile city –- Navy corpsman Lucas Velasquez came to know about life.

And death.

From late 2005 through early 2007, not long after nearly 100 U.S. troops and more than 1,350 insurgents were killed in Fallujah during Operation Phantom Fury, Velasquez routinely rendered emergency aid to wounded Marines while ducking bullets, rocket-propelled grenades and IED blasts. In uniform, Velasquez was smart and quick, adept at practicing field medicine literally while under the gun.

In 2007, after retiring from the Navy, Velasquez, then 23, enrolled at Columbus State University in western Georgia. He promptly failed four of his first six classes.

Lucas Velasquez

Lucas Velasquez enrolled at Columbus State University in Georgia after retiring from the Navy. He is pictured on the bottom, second from the right, with his Kappa Sigma fraternity brothers.

"It was a struggle," he said.

Velasquez hadn’t been in a classroom for more than five years. Instead of taking strategic lecture notes or studying highlights in the syllabus when prepping for exams, he scribbled nearly every word his professors uttered and tried to absorb every fact in his textbooks. Deeper, there was a vast cultural chasm between other freshmen and the survivor of multiple firefights and risky missions.

“At 19, I was in combat as opposed to trying to go find a party,” said Velasquez, injured before he came home. “They really don’t realize how precious life can be, how it can go away in the drop of a dime. They’re more worried about what they’re going to be wearing to school tomorrow, or the spring break that’s coming up. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just two different people.”

Among the approximately 800,000 military veterans now attending U.S. colleges, an estimated 88 percent drop out of school during their first year and only 3 percent graduate, according a report forwarded by the University of Colorado Denver, citing a March 22, 2012 study by the Colorado Workforce Development Council.

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Scores of former servicemen and servicewomen who are among the best in the world at defusing bombs, tracking the enemy, patching bloody limbs, or negotiating with wary Afghans become futilely lost when trying to author an English paper.

Indeed, the vast, life-experience divide between war veterans and teens fresh out of high school – all now sharing the same classrooms – can make the scholastic transition awkward and arduous for ex-soldiers, said Michael Dakduk, executive director of Student Veterans of America, a support network for ex-military college students. SVA now has chapters on more than 500 campuses

Mix in the fat gap of time between the vets’ high school days and their attempts to blend into college life and the reasons for the dropout rate become even more obvious.

“They are (taking) academically rigorous courses after being removed from the academic setting for so long,” Dakduk said.

“I didn’t know how to study,” Velasquez said of his first months at Columbus State. “In the military classes (we had taken), they spoon fed you everything because they didn’t want you to fail. It was a struggle going from a structured lifestyle to one where everything is on you.”

A number of colleges – Dakduk mentioned the University of Arizona, Syracuse University, Rutgers University, Purdue University, Columbia University and Dartmouth College – offer well-crafted services that truly help retired military folks thrive in the college classroom.

But some schools falsely sell themselves as “military friendly” simply to attract veterans on the G.I. Bill when, in reality, they don’t have the adequate infrastructure or counselors to help former soldiers succeed, Velasquez said. After his initial failures, Velasquez had to independently seek external tutoring. He eventually boosted his grade point average to 3.8.

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Under the post-9/11 G.I. Bill, the federal government covers up to 100 percent of veterans’ tuition and fees. That money goes directly to the colleges, making the ex-servicemen and servicewomen financially attractive enrollees.

Earlier this year, SVA revoked chapters at 26 for-profit colleges that failed to meet the organization's requirements, mainly having a student-veteran – not an administrator – run the chapter. Those booted schools included the Art Institute of New York City, Brown Mackie College in Akron, Ohio, DeVry University in Orlando, Fla., ECPI College of Technology in Raleigh, N.C., and ITT Technical Institute in South Bend, Ind.

The misleading, so-called military-friendly sales pitch made by some colleges to attract vets, Velasquez said, is a big reason for the dropout rate.

“There was a concern around certain predatory, for-profit schools using our brand to legitimize their programs,” Dakduk said. (He added that better statistics are needed to precisely calculate the veteran dropout rate; the post-9/11 G.I. Bill was enacted three years ago, which means, Dakduk said, not enough time has passed to gauge its impact on today’s enrolled ex-soldiers.)

In August 2011, Velasquez transferred to the University of Colorado Denver after getting married. (He had been to Colorado earlier in his life and purposely picked the state for a new start). UCD, he learned, had a three-tiered system to help vets transition from military to college, stay in school and then move from graduation to the workforce. As part of that program, the school assigns an upperclassman to incoming ex-military students to mentor them socially and academically. It’s based on a similar program used at U.S. military bases.

“What we try to facilitate with that is the camaraderie -- the community -- because that’s one of the biggest things (ex-military) people miss,” said Cameron Cook, head of UCD’s veteran student services. “It’s one of the hardest things: missing your team, your friends in the military. That’s really hard to let go.”

A retired Marine, Cook soon e-mailed Velasquez and invited him to participate in the program.

“This is perfect, just what veterans need, something that helps them take that veteran experience and use it in college,” Velasquez said.

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Cook and his team also try to help vets who carry to campus “the invisible injuries” of war –- post-traumatic stress disorder.

“When they get out of the military, the average student veteran is so focused on transition into college, finding a place to live, getting on the G.I. Bill. They’re very busy reintegrating,” Cook said. “But then, after that first year, everything kind of slows down and that’s when the shadows come in.”

The “shadows” of PTSD, including rampant anxiety and sleeplessness, often are triggered by daily stress – for example, by exams.

“We see a big increase [in students presenting with PTSD symptoms] right at midterms and it grows exponentially until finals,” Cook said.

“One student told me that at the beginning of every semester he feels like he’s getting ready to go on a deployment,” Cook said. “And you can parallel finals to being like miniature battles.” 

“And I’ve had other students say: ‘I don’t know why I’m stressed about a biology test when I was in Fallujah. Why am I stressed about this when I’ve been through so much previously?’ The reason is: the Fallujah experience gets linked to the stress of midterms. They already have stress and then academic stresses just build on that.”

Or, as one retired non-commissioned officer who attends UCD summed up the challenges of the veteran-college experience and high dropout rate: "I was the man in the military. We had so much responsibility [overseas], people's lives were on the line. Now I'm sitting next to an 18-year-old and I'm struggling to keep up with him in this class."

Bill Briggs is a frequent contributor to msnbc.com and author of “The Third Miracle.” 

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Police have called off the search for a California woman believed to have been killed by her son, an Iraq War veteran who last week killed his 11-year-old sister and then himself, officials said.

The man, Abel Gutierrez, 27, had recently returned from a second tour. His body and that of his 11-year-old sister were found last week in his mother's apartment in Gilroy, Calif., the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

His mother, Martha Gutierrez, has not been seen since her children’s deaths, police told the Los Angeles Times. Their bodies were found in the family’s apartment.

Police were called to the Gutierrez home last month after receiving neighbor complaints that Abel Gutierrez was angrily raging against the Taliban at night, the Chronicle reported. Relatives said that after his second tour, he would wake screaming and that he swore at people in public.

On Saturday, crews searched 30 miles of Santa Clara County, to no avail, the Chronicle reported.

But Abel Gutierrez’s Ford Mustang had evidence indicating there had been a violent confrontation, police said.

Family members had said Abel Gutierrez had suffered post-traumatic stress disorder.

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