Gin, the Vet center team leader where I go for group is 30% PTSd; he lost an eye, partial use of his right leg, and hearing in Vietnam.
PTSD and physical wounds often go together.
I know of a number of Iraqi/ Afghan vets who suffer PTSD symptoms; anecdotally, I know of some in the Reserves/ active duty whose commanders are pressuring them to “suck it up” and return to duty. This makes me wonder, as several other things do, of what happened to the “honor” in “Duty, Honor, Country”.

I’ve had suicidal ideation myself at particularly stressful times; I think of it as the end of a PTSD continumn. Many of the reports I read of the military’s “treatment”–take this pill, see the shrink every two weeks, shit it’s been three months, you malingering fuck–make me wanna go postal. There’s also the issue of whose “problem” you are when you are being processed out: hot potato between DoD and VA, anyone?
Despite living in Hartford, I didn’t buy the Courant for this series. Those among you who are adept at reading between the lines will understand why.
Finally, though I do truly, deeply appreciate the attention this is getting here and elsewhere, there’s a tiny part of me that what’s to blurt out “welcome to my reality!” Further, I’ll risk saying that my enduring support of, and sympathy for, feminists (if I can’t be one myself) originates here; feminists get being a vet, or something very like it. To me, the parallels–not identities–are legion.
I think the PTSD levels from Iraq/ Afghanistan will be higher than from Vietnam. Much higher.
Thanks for listening; I’m afraid I may have lost coherence a time or two.

He feels that the young men who serve in Iraq are going to come home with PTSD in droves… primarily because this is a conflict where you don’t know who your enemy is.

Ironically, one of the more seriously emotionally strained men I have met was an officer that hadn’t even been to Iraq (at the time I met him). He was assigned to a unit that had just lost a lot of men. Although he had just reported for duty at this command and had not been to Iraq with them, it was his responsibility to notify the families about the death of their Marine. He had to do this something like 12 times in 2 weeks. He was a complete mess.

I read somewhere that the wounded don’t get PTSD. It’s the physically healthy ones that suffer from it, so maybe guilt is somewhere in that mix. So many people are coming back from this horribly wounded.

This, is EXACTLY why the Chickenhawk argument has so much weight. Because some qualified Chickenhawk didn’t go, these unqualified men had to.

I’m sorry if that’s too off topic, but the further down the tubes our military goes the more this pisses me off. If you don’t like the army that’s fine, but it’s pretty clear that the military has reached the point where able bodies enlisting is more important then drumming up support on the home front.

I guess that’s a digression, sorry. I haven’t had any personal experience with the military.

I’m not at all surprised by these findings. Such decisions are, indeed, up to company or battalion-level leaders, and such issues are often treated as simple malingering. Often, the single biggest reason more soldiers don’t come forward with problems is because of pressure from their fellow soldiers. Nobody wants to be seen as weak, or admit that they have a problem. So they don’t get help. Few soldiers are willing to seek out counseling, or retain the services of a military chaplain, and first-line leaders often exploit this fact, frequently doing little or nothing to make sure soldiers know where to go if they DO have problems.

I love the Army. But we as soldiers are, unfortunately, often treated more as equipment than as human beings. And I’ll admit, this fact causes me some measure of disillusionment.

I’m 23, for the reccord, in case anyone is curious.

I think one of the reasons that I’m so angry at the army is because they took something away from my friend that I have a hard time defining. We were one of those lucky idyllic childhood/tween romance things, so we always had that kind of silly goofiness about us even years after we “broke up”.

And we don’t have that anymore because he just isn’t capable of it. And that bothers me in a way I don’t feel like I explain well. I’ve seen such a total personality shift in him, and it makes me so upset for me and him, but also for all those other parents or spouses or friends who are facing this stranger who gets home and we, in our own weird way, have to mourn the loss of someone we knew even when they physically come back to us because they are not who we knew (I hope that makes sense). That one keeps me up at night :-/

He came home a year and a few months later a different person. The kind of person who didn’t smile or make bad jokes or mess up my hair just to drive me nuts. He came back the kind of person who burst into tears on my lawn while I held him because he had missed the funeral of another old old friend of ours (M) who had been depressed ever since high school ended and finally put a gun in his mouth on the day of another friends 21st birthday. That was a rough year for all of us, but when M killed himself, we had each other and we were able to come to some kind of peace about it.

He was over in Iraq helping coordinate the trucks with fuel and supplies that went accross the desert, unreachable by phone, and already pretty severely depressed. We (close friends and his parents) made the decision not to tell him about M, especially because he would have to handle it alone. He could barely handle getting up every morning alone.

So there he was, crying on my lawn one july night… crying for M, but also crying because he had just been told that he would do a year in Texas and then perhaps another year back in Iraq.

He’s luckier then most because at least the army did something about his mental health issues (wrote them down on a piece of paper and had him see a therapist for about a month) but I’ll always remember him in tears, telling me that he was praying for a discharge. And while he was trying to put his head together, his commanding officers accused him of faking Post traumatic stress syndrome to get out of the army and pressured him to pretend everything was really ok.

He’s one of the lucky ones. He should be done with his enlistment in about 3 months. He never went back to Iraq, but he did bounce around Europe and Texas a bunch. But I can guarandamntee you he is not the boy I knew and he is not the man he wants to be. He’s like a ghost who drinks too much. We’re just wishing and hoping and praying to get him home in 3 months so we can take care of him. And I’m hoping and praying that someday I can forgive the people who did this to him because I have so much anger inside me towards GWB and his games that got other people hurt, and towards a army structure that didn’t address his issues in anything more then a token way.