LEWISTON - After nine years of fighting his memories - of a terrifying nighttime crash in a Marine Corps helicopter - Jim Chaousis wants peace.

"People throw out the word 'suicidal' a lot," the 31-year-old Livermore man said. "I don't know how to embrace that word. I don't want to die."

Holding his hands together to fight the shaking in his brawny 6-foot-2-inch frame, Chaousis looks at once intimidating and frightened.

"I know I can't grind out like this forever," he said. "I'm tired. Every day is scratch and claw and get to the next day. I've been doing this for nine years, and I don't have nine more to do. I can't stomach nine years."

Chaousis (pronounced chay-O-sis) wants a cure for his post-traumatic stress disorder. He wants restful dreams at night and clear thoughts in the day. He wants to go to a ballgame and walk in his town without anxiety. He wants a cure for himself, his family and for the growing number of wartime veterans who are returning home with the emotional scars of battle.

"I don't want somebody else to have to walk in the same footsteps," he said.

But it's a peace many may never find.

Despite all the advances in understanding and treating post-traumatic stress - a kind of scarring of the soul that sometimes accompanies trauma - there are few cures, say doctors and researchers.

In the end, the best many veterans may do is find a way to endure, said Jerold Hambright, a psychologist at the VA Hospital in Togus.

"I tell folks, 'Look at our most effective treatments for PTSD,'" Hambright said. "The average range of reduction in symptoms is anywhere from 54 to 82 percent.

"So, what that means is even with our best treatments - and the psychotherapies tend to be more effective than the medications - people will often have residual symptoms," he said.

"Cure probably won't happen," he said.

The number of PTSD cases is growing.

An April analysis released by the Rand Corporation found that one in five of all veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan - about 300,000 in all - suffer from symptoms of post-traumatic stress or depression.

The nonprofit think tank predicted the cost of treatment could range from $6,000 to $25,000 per veteran, depending on the severity of problems. The nationwide impact could top $6.2 billion, said Rand researchers.

In Maine, the numbers are climbing, though Vietnam era vets still account for about 65 percent of Togus' cases, said Chantal Mihm, who leads the hospital's PTSD Clinical Team.

Slowly, veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan are finding their way into Mihm's office, often a year or two after they return, she said.

The majority of the 2,000-plus soldiers in the Maine Army National Guard have served in Iraq or Afghanistan and more are headed back. Maine's biggest unit, the 500-soldier 133rd Engineer Battalion, is tentatively slated to return for a second tour in early 2010.

And more exposure to combat increases the likelihood that PTSD will plague somebody, Hambright said.

It takes only a single trauma. Jim Chaousis knows.

He joined the Marines for the college money and the challenge. Even the Corps' notorious boot camp at Parris Island, S.C., failed to humble him.

"It was easier for me than a lot of people," said Chaousis. At Parris Island in October 1995, four months after graduating from Livermore Falls High School, the Marines made him a squad leader.

He went in as an aircraft mechanic. By 1999, he was stationed at Kane'ohe Bay, Hawaii, and serving as a crew chief aboard the massive CH-53 "Sea Stallion," a helicopter made for dropping Marines into any terrain.

On the night of June 23, he and his crew were practicing troop inserts. Traveling at about 120 mph, they followed three helicopters toward a hilltop clearing when the wind changed and their world fell apart.

"We got caught up in our own vortex," Chaousis said. "We kind of free-falled from about 250 feet.

"We came down so fast the tail broke off," he said. "Not only did we bounce in the air but we spun."

As the broken aircraft began to spin, it flipped and rolled. Rifles, helmets and assorted gear pinballed through the interior.

"It was like a bowling ball," he said. "Luckily, everybody was strapped in, except me and the aerial observer, who were wearing gunner's belts."

The belt was meant to keep Chaousis from falling out an open door. It didn't stop him from tumbling.

When the world finally stopped spinning, screams filled Chaousis's ears. He opened his eyes to see that the helicopter had come to rest on its roof.

"It was always a sight that haunted me: Everybody was upside down and there was hydraulic fluid all over," Chaousis said. "It's just the most chaotic, scary picture you can imagine."

No one died. Everyone was banged up, though.

Chaousis says he immediately started unbuckling everybody and helping them exit. Slowly, he began to examine himself.

Flying debris had cut up his flight suit and his boots, severing every lace. His back ached. And there was a deep gouge in his helmet.

He went home and slept one last peaceful night.

The nightmares began the second night. Chaousis told no one.

He tried to grit through it, just as he had the physical effects of the crash. The morning after the accident, he reported to duty, having missed the order to get checked out by a doctor. When he did, doctors discovered several cracked vertebrae.

Within two or three weeks, the physical injuries healed. The emotional injuries were just getting started.

Chaousis began taking over-the-counter sleeping pills in a breach of the rules. And after a three-month-long investigation, he returned to the sky.

"It just took the life right out of me," he said. "I often had flashbacks. I worried about worst possible scenarios."

Before the accident, he logged about 330 hours in aircraft. After the crash, he logged another 299.

"It scared the crap out of me every day," he said. "I just thought if I kept doing it, I'd get used to it eventually."

He began sleeping less and less, sometimes going two or three days without rest.

"I didn't say anything," he said. "I just kept going. I just kept stomaching it out when I was in the Marine Corps."

He was honorably discharged two years after the crash, in the summer of 2001, but he waited a full year more before he sought help from a VA worker.

"I just needed somebody to tell. I emotionally broke down," he said of his first meeting with a counselor. "I wasn't sure where it would go from there."

Chaousis was diagnosed with PTSD and awarded partial disability, but given no help in relieving his problem.

"I thought I was pulling something over on the VA," he said. "Nobody ever said, 'Sign up with a doctor.' There was no game plan for treatment and no pills. I went back to work."

The symptoms dug in deeper.

As the nightmares persisted, so did Chaousis' own self-medication with sleeping pills. The sleepless nights heightened his anxiety. And when sleep came, it was unsettled.

"Most of PTSD is wearing you down," he said.

He began talking to psychiatrists, who started looking for the right combination of drugs to ease his symptoms.

Results came slowly. One night his wife woke him while he was trying to jump from the second story apartment they'd rented.

"It's a pretty scary situation to figure out where you are and you're hanging out a window with your wife holding on to you," he said. "A train went by in the middle of the night. I guess I almost dove out the window."

In 2005, his problems spread to his marriage. He'd been drinking too much - something common for people with PTSD - and he'd been letting out his frustrations on his wife. The couple also have two daughters.

"I look back and I was very irritable and mean," Chaousis said.

Their separation led Chaousis to ask for more help.

"Everything kind of felt like it was falling apart: friends, work."

The VA led him to a counselor. They failed to connect in a way that helped him.

"I'm sure they're great and all, but it didn't work for me," he said.

He tried talking with private counselors, but those didn't work out either.

He managed however to reunite with his wife.

"She's one of the few people who really understands me," Chaousis said. "I am lucky to have a family that loves me and backs me 100 percent."

He received some help from the American Legion, guiding him through the VA bureaucracy and helping him to increase his disability checks.

It's a journey he continues as he meets with doctors about his drugs. Each mixture of medications is a compromise of side effects.

"Do you want to be so sedated you're depressed or do you want to be so clear-minded and anxious?" he said. "They're not very good options."

He spends days at home, cleaning, taking care of his dog and mowing the lawn. His evenings are spent with his family, watching ball games on TV and avoiding bedtime.

"I have minimalized my life," he said. "It's soothing to be here. I watch a lot - a lot - of sports. Keep busy so that I'm not thinking about things."

Sometimes even a minimalized life is too much.

Last year, while sedated with a drug, he severed his fingertips in a lawn-mowing accident.

"I'm too smart to believe I even did this, but the lawnmower clogged and I just reached down and unplugged it with my hand," he said.

"I wasn't thinking of what I was doing," he said. "You get very choppy thoughts. You get lost."

The serious struggles continue.

In August, he checked himself into the psychiatric ward at the Togus VA Hospital. He stayed for two weeks as doctors weaned him from old drugs and prescribed him new ones.

"I was a disruption in that ward," he said. Most of the patients were Vietnam vets battling with alcoholism. "They didn't know how to deal with someone who was young with extreme anxiety."

The episode led him to write several long letters to U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe while he sat in his room.

"Togus isn't prepared for young veterans with post-traumatic stress syndrome," he said. "There is nothing worse for a guy with PTSD than to sit in a room," he said. "All you do is sit there and stew over your own feelings."

Doctors at the hospital believe they are getting better at their jobs.

In the last two years, teams of new psychologists, counselors and social workers have been hired at Togus to help treat PTSD. They offer individual therapy, medication management, group therapy and even classes on what PTSD means.

"We're still bringing on new people," Togus spokesman James Doherty said.

All of it is aimed at preventing someone from feeling that they must deal with PTSD alone. And in-patient treatment is a rarity. Virtually all the treatment - at the hospital in Togus and at vet centers and VA clinics around Maine - is aimed at helping vets while they live at home. About 65 people are referred to the Togus PTSD program each month.

It's all voluntary.

"We don't push medications or group or anything," Chantal Mihm, who leads the hospital's PTSD Clinical Team. "They need to have the freedom to choose what they feel the most comfortable with."

Many opt out and then return.

Some people see their symptoms get better. Some find a way to live with their bad dreams and anxiety.

"You're not going to erase memory," Mihm said. "You're not going to prevent uncontrollable nightmares."

Psychologist Jerold Hambright, who has treated vets at Togus since 1986, tries to keep expectations in check.

"There are some symptoms that will just never go away," he said. "Some nightmares will ebb and flow, but they are going to be there."

It's cold comfort to Chaousis.

The disorder's fatigue weighs on him every day, even as the images of Hawaii and the crash haunt him.

Yet he remains proud of his service. And perhaps paradoxically, decorates a home office with mementos of his work. They include certificates, framed photos of the helicopters he served aboard and even the scarred helmet from the crash.

There are times when he feels a little embarrassed that his injury didn't come from combat. He feels it at Togus and at a VA clinic.

"A lot of times, you feel you shouldn't be there," he said. "But getting hurt is getting hurt."