"PTSD is going to color everything you write," came the warning from a stepmother of a Marine, a woman who keeps track of such things.  That was in 2005, when post-traumatic stress disorder, a.k.a. PTSD, wasn't getting much attention, but soon it was pretty much all anyone wrote about.  Story upon story about the damage done to our guys in uniform -- drinking, divorce, depression, destitution -- a laundry list of miseries and victimhood.  When it comes to veterans, it seems like the only response we can imagine is to feel sorry for them.

Victim is one of the two roles we allow our soldiers and veterans (the other is, of course, hero), but most don't have PTSD, and this isn't one of those stories.

Civilian to the core, I've escaped any firsthand experience of war, but I've spent the past seven years talking with current GIs and recent veterans, and among the many things they've taught me is that nobody gets out of war unmarked.  That’s especially true when your war turns out to be a shadowy, relentless occupation of a distant land, which requires you to do things that you regret and that continue to haunt you.

Theoretically, whole countries go to war, not just their soldiers, but not this time.  Civilian sympathy for “the troops” may be just one more way for us to avoid a real reckoning with our last decade-plus of war, when the hostilities in Iraq and Afghanistan have shown up on the average American’s radar only if somebody screws up or noticeable numbers of Americans get killed.  The veterans at the heart of this story -- victims, heroes, it doesn’t matter -- struggle to reconcile what they did in those countries with the "service" we keep thanking them for.  We can see them as sick, with all the stigma, neediness, and expense that entails, or we can ...

About 45 percent of the 1.6 million veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are seeking compensation for service-related injuries — more than double the 21 percent of veterans who filed such claims after the first Gulf War, according to an AP investigation. And new veterans are claiming an average of eight or nine ailments, and in the last year, the average has jumped from 11 to 14. By comparison, Vietnam veterans are receiving compensation for fewer than four injuries on average.

Officials tell the AP that the number of disability claims is increasing because of better treatment for battlefield wounds and more outreach from the Department of Veterans Affairs. And doctors are seeing different types of ailments, including traumatic ...

One in 10 veterans under the age of 65 is currently living without health insurance and reports not using Veterans Affairs (VA) health care, according to a new study examining health care access for retired service members. 

The report, which also found a high number of veterans’ family members living without insurance, notes such rates are highest in states that have made little progress in implementing provisions of the Affordable Care Act. These states account for 40 percent of uninsured veterans.

Despite having higher rates of health insurance than the general population, “an estimated 1.3 million veterans lack health insurance coverage and do not use VA health care,” noted the study’s co-author, Genevieve Kenney, who points out a majority of uninsured veterans tend to be younger and less well educated. 

The study, released Thursday by the non-partisan Urban Institute, comes as the nation awaits a Supreme Court decision on the fate of the ACA. A ruling is expected in June.

If upheld, about 630,000 uninsured veterans under the age of 65 would likely qualify for Medicaid, the state and federal health insurance program for the poor, which would be expanded under the law. Under current law, just one in 10 qualifies for the program. 

Another 520,000 uninsured vets would be eligible for subsidized health coverage in new marketplaces, or insurance exchanges, mandated under the ACA. This would also benefit close to 80 percent of the nearly one million family members of uninsured vets. 

There are currently around 13 million veterans between the ages of 19 and 64 living in the United States. Some 17 percent of those without insurance report suffering from service-related disabilities or functional limitations, while 41 percent say they have unmet medical needs. Another 34 ...

Every morning at the start of the school day when I was a boy, we would stand next to our desks facing the flag with our hands over our hearts and say these words:
 

"I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands; one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all."   

Of course, I never questioned whether the republic to which I was pledging allegiance did provide "liberty and justice for all".  As an adult with the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, I can clearly see now that it did not – certainly not then.  Not before the passage of the Civil Rights Acts in the 1960s, at a time when so-called Jim Crow laws in the South still deprived blacks of the right to vote.  When "working women" were teachers, nurses, or secretaries, full stop.

Then for one shining moment the ideal of "liberty and justice for all" appeared to take wing.  From voting rights to equal employment opportunity, the scent of social progress was in the air.  That was from mid-1960s to the late '70s and it was the stepchild of the Vietnam War, which traumatized and galvanized millions of hitherto apathetic Americans.  Think of it as a collective case of PTSD, a nation at once dazed, depressed, and outraged by the stupidity of fighting a war we couldn't win in a faraway place against a people who posed no threat to us.
 

Unfortunately, it was a fleeting moment.  The 1970s gave way to the Reagan era and ushered in the "greed is good" ethic that dominates our political culture, drives the supercharged K Street lobby machine, and stalks the halls of Congress. 

In his new book entitled Fairness and Freedom, David Hackett Fischer compares the history and political culture of New Zealand and the United States ...

The war in Iraq is over and I have heard very little reaction from those around me, certainly no ticker tape parade. But among the interested and informed, I have heard much speculation on the reasons why its end isn’t the topic of conversation.

I’ve heard that our involvement in Iraq has been a long and ugly part of recent American History and we just don’t want to hear about it anymore, we would like to forget. Some want to forget for political reasons and others just want to forget because the last eight years were so painful. Some say that we avoid reflection to avoid offending our troops, many of them just now returning home after numerous tours; that seeking truth and consequence of our actions may make them feel as though their sacrifices weren’t worthwhile.

There are those like my twenty seven year old daughter who remind me that little attention was paid all of the way through the war so why would we expect it now, “Wasn’t it the Bush plan that we not be connected to the war, that it not affect our day to day life?”  She noted that it was policy under the Bush administration not to allow photos of soldier’s caskets returning home—effectively shielding the public from the cost of our actions.

But not seeing and understanding our history accurately is what causes us to repeat mistakes of the past. We must look at the war in Iraq and cite clearly it’s many consequences so that they may never happen again. 

Many from my generation lived through Vietnam and were sure that such a mistake could never possibly be repeated. But those who designed the war in Iraq had never served in Vietnam. They chose not to, they never had the experiences that would have made them aware of the consequences of invasion and occupation.  They chose to hide their motives and rationale for the invasion from the public who was paying for it, and most importantly with the ...

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may be winding down, but the long-term costs of caring for those wounded in battle is on path to rival the costs of the Vietnam War.

While Vietnam extracted a far higher death toll — 58,000 compared with 6,300 so far in the war on terror — the number of documented disabilities from recent veterans is approaching the size of that earlier conflict, according to a McClatchy analysis of Department of Veterans Affairs data.

The data, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and detailing all disability payments to veterans of all wars, show that veterans leaving the military in recent years are filing for and receiving compensation for more injuries than did their fathers and grandfathers.

At the same time, McClatchy found, the VA is losing ground in efforts to provide fast, efficient and accurate disability decisions. And the agency has yet to get control of a problem that has vexed it for years: The wide variation in disability payments by state and region, even for veterans with the same ailments.

For soldiers now coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan, this ongoing variation in an already-clogged disability system means the size of monthly compensation checks might be a quirk of geography.

Given the nature of today's disabilities, it's ...

The .45 caliber single-action, semi-automatic Colt pistol known as the M1911 in military parlance is an extremely destructive handgun at close range. On June 26, 2011, U.S. Army Ranger Jared August Hagemann removed his M1911 from its holster. The 25-year-old already had carried the sidearm with him on eight deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, so he knew how much damage even a single round could do against flesh and bone. It was late Sunday evening at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, and Hagemann stood in a training area, stalked by a terrorist more relentless than any Taliban suicide bomber. His opponent’s name: post-traumatic stress disorder, the clinical term for a severe form of anxiety usually known by its acronym, PTSD.

Staff Sgt. Hagemann placed the muzzle against his right temple and pulled the trigger. His obituary, published by his hometown paper in California’s San Joaquin Valley, said only he had “died unexpectedly,” words his widow would dispute.

U.S. veterans of post-9/11 combat are taking their lives in alarming numbers, and PTSD seems to be the primary cause. If the military’s response is inadequate, is anyone else ready to help GIs heal their psychic damage? And what are combat vets to do when PTSD shreds their souls, yet their commanders order them back to fight in Helmand Province? For the third time?

Ask Ashley Joppa-Hagemann, Jared’s widow and the mother of their two children. She’s sitting in a coffeehouse not far from Joint Base Lewis-McChord (JBLM), a military reservation in western Washington that is home to 100,000 soldiers, Marines, Air Force personnel, their families, and civilian contractors. Sprawling across 91,000 acres set against the majesty of Mt. Rainier, JBLM was recently called “the most troubled base in the military” by Stars and Stripes, the officially sanctioned newspaper of the Department of Defense.

Though JBLM is nominally in Starbucks country, ...

On Veterans Day, 11-11-11, the nation pauses to honor the 24 million living American veterans who served in wars dating back to World War II. Of those, more than 2 million veterans did tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The federal government doesn’t always adequately protect the military veterans who protected their nation. The Center for Public Integrity has held the government accountable over the years for treatment of veterans.

For Veterans Day, the Center has compiled some of its coverage of soldiers and veterans:

• Military retirees in need of quick cash can fall victim to a form of payday loans called “pension buyouts” that cost them mightily over time.
• Children who attend Pentagon-run schools are left behind even as their parents fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. The military says 39 percent of its schools are “failing,” and another 37 percent are in “poor” physical shape.
• ANALYSIS: A new kind of house call pioneered by the Veterans Affairs Department may save billions in medical costs and be a model for health care reform.
• The Pentagon’s traumatic brain injury and psychological health center for veterans has been hindered by unfocused leadership, slow hiring, and poor accounting, the GAO says.
• About 20 percent of veterans serving in Iraq and Afghanistan have

  READ FULL POST

  2 COMMENTS