(Tribune News Service) — Pam Hunter knew what was going to happen to Ray King.

She told him so about three years before he got fired. Hunter is an advocate with the Army’s Wounded Warrior program. Based at Fort Leonard Wood, she works with veterans who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. A few years back, she was working with King to help him get a service dog.

King had come back from Afghanistan with PTSD, after doing a tour with the Illinois National Guard. It was his second time in uniform, having served in the Missouri National Guard previously. King had been working for Missouri American Water since 2010, but when he came back from his tour he struggled to stay on task. When he was medically retired from the Army, he probably could have quit his job and lived on disability. But work was important to him.

“I just wanted to do my job,” King says. Hunter helped him get Hoss, an English chocolate lab trained as a service dog for veterans. His employers moved him to a new job delivering mail and doing other small tasks at one of the Missouri American Water plants in St. Louis.

But he kept having trouble with a supervisor. Hunter predicted it would happen.

“Once soldiers return home, people expect them to be normal,” Hunter says. “Well, their brains have been altered by that period of being on high alert. There’s a lot of misunderstanding about PTSD. We find that still.”

Hunter had counseled plenty of veterans who worked for employers who talked a good game about hiring veterans but struggled to adapt to their disabilities.

So it was for King. He got Hoss in 2016. His supervisor kept making life difficult for him, he says. He was fired in 2018, when his supervisor accused him of following her on the highway on the way into work and scaring her. He says he was just trying to buy her a cup of coffee at the gas station.

King sued in 2019. His first judge granted summary judgment in Missouri American Water’s favor. King’s attorney, Jerry Dobson, appealed. The Missouri Appeals Court sent the case back to St. Louis Circuit Court to be heard. On Friday, a jury awarded King $700,000 in damages related to the hostile work environment he experienced.

It’s been a long, 7-year battle for King, and it might not be over, if Missouri American Water appeals. The company didn’t respond to requests for comment. King, 57, mostly stays to himself at home in Murrayville, Illinois, these days. Hoss is still by his side but getting up in years.

Getting fired “crushed me,” he says. “I worked at that company for almost 20 years. For the most part I never had any issues. I’m used to working every day.”

Hunter says King’s story is far too common in the workplace these days. Many veterans don’t realize they have PTSD until years after they return from their service. And because it’s an unseen disability — as compared to a severed limb, for instance — it is difficult for both the veterans, and their employers, to manage.

Hunter’s job is often to work first to change attitudes in the Army about PTSD, and then to work to change it in the workplace, as well.

“There’s a lot of misunderstanding about PTSD,” she says. “We find that still.”

The irony of King’s case, his attorney points out, is that at least one supervisor at Missouri American Water understood the nature of King’s struggles.

“Yes, he has a condition,” the supervisor wrote to other managers in 2017. “No, it is not apparent. A missing limb is apparent, but what happened to Ray is not. Yes, his condition is still as real as a missing limb, and we must accommodate it accordingly.”

The supervisor went on to ask his employees what it would be like to explain their actions to a jury of King’s peers, with King and Hoss sitting in front of the jury and them explaining that “it just wasn’t fair for the disabled war veteran to be given a break.”

That prediction, like Hunter’s before it, came true. The jury sided with King.

“I’m shocked that Missouri American Water was so callous to Ray after all the sacrifices he had made for his country and his family,” Dobson says. “Why would they treat a veteran in this manner? They seemed to have no sympathy or empathy for him whatsoever.”

During this ordeal, King has connected to other disabled veterans, and realized he is not alone in his challenges and battles. He hopes his case helps other employers do a better job of recognizing and accommodating PTSD, but the entire experience still leaves him asking a vexing question with no clear answer:

“How do we get help to remove the monsters in our head?”

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