Shane Stadtmiller wears many hats. Father, husband and U.S. Army veteran to name a few.

But these days the veteran, who still bears the physical and emotional scars from two deployments to Iraq, is looking to add another: Advocate.

“I want to bring awareness and also help,” said Stadtmiller of Penn Township. “I just want people out there to know, there’s plenty of soldiers that come back and need help.”

To do that, Stadtmiller, who is suffering from a traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder, needs help himself. It’s a need that friends and a foundation have decided can be filled with a service dog — a $10,000 expense that has prompted fundraisers to start a crowdfunding campaign for Stadtmiller on the website Red Basket.

“I see what he is going through, and I know there are many people like him,” said Robbie Sciulli, a part-time clinical research nurse at VA Butler Healthcare who is running the campaign.

She said she met Stadtmiller through the foundation called It’s About The Warrior Foundation.

“Many veterans are in a bad situation and don’t see a light at the end of the tunnel,” Sciulli said.

For Stadtmiller, a panic attack in a restaurant prompted the search for a service dog, but the true root of his struggles and the injuries that caused them dates back more than a decade.

Stadtmiller’s military career started unusually in early 2000, when he applied and received a direct commission with the U.S. Army Reserves after attending West Virginia University.

By 2001 Stadtmiller was attending basic officer training courses, and was on active duty training when the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, occurred.

He would be deployed to Korea in 2002, and then serve for more than a year at the United States Military Academy at West Point, as an Honor Guard Platoon leader.

In late 2004 Stadtmiller, now a captain, was deployed to active duty in Iraq, where an increasingly violent and unpredictable insurgency had been testing the military’s control.

“It was like being thrown into — you just didn’t know what was going on,” Stadtmiller said.

A staff officer with Joint Task Force 134, the command in charge of overseeing prisons like Abu Ghraib, Stadtmiller was constantly traveling — something he kept from his wife, April.

It didn’t take long for the insurgency, fond of bombing military bases and civilian targets alike, to touch Stadtmiller directly.

It was April 19, 2005, and Stadtmiller’s unit was leaving Victory Base, the military installations around Baghdad International Airport, via Route Irish — a seven-mile stretch of highway that had become commonly known, amid the insurgency’s bombings, as the deadliest road in the world.

Stadtmiller remembers the explosion — an IED hidden in a vehicle — rupturing his eardrums and lodging shrapnel in his body. He also suffered a traumatic brain injury and was eventually diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Asked if he wanted to be sent home, Stadtmiller refused and served out his deployment, which ended in 2007.

Stadtmiller’s military career would continue despite his injuries. He would return to Iraq a second time as a company commander in the Army’s 1st Infantry Division, where he oversaw the deployment of bomb-sniffing dogs and other working dogs, and go on to teach officer candidate school at Fort Benning, Ga. — a posting Stadtmiller recalls as his favorite in a military career that is now 15 years long.

Stadtmiller, who became a major in 2012, still drills in the Army Reserves today, but says things are undeniably different — and sometimes difficult — for him.

Stadtmiller’s injuries, exacerbated in 2010 when he was struck by a Navy van, mean he deals with migraine and ice-pick headaches that can bring him to his knees with stabbing pains. Like other veterans diagnosed with PTSD, Stadtmiller also struggles with anxiety, and because of his brain injury, memory and vocalization issues that lead to him avoiding some social situations.

“Some days it’s like I’m translating myself,” he said.

Tammy Rogers, the president of New Hope Assistance Dogs, which also is working with Stadtmiller, said she sees more and more veterans like Stadtmiller seeking out help through service animals.

The majority, like Stadtmiller, suffer from PTSD, Rogers said. In his case, the animal would help brace him when he suffers painful headaches, and could help calm him during an anxiety attack.

Stadtmiller said he doesn’t harbor any illusions about what the dog can do for him, but added that many veterans are conditioned not to ask for assistance. He believes that more ranking officers publicly seeking help can motivate rank-and-file veterans who might choose to self-medicate instead.

“It’s not a cure-all,” he said. “But I’m hoping that I can show some of these guys who come home and are drinking a six-pack a night that they can trade that six-pack for a service dog.”