Part 9

by James Glaser
March 23, 2007

Yes, Post Traumatic Stress is scary stuff. It is scary for the veteran who has it, and it is scary stuff for the veteran's loved ones. On top of that, it is also embarrassing.

The reason I say that Post Traumatic Stress is embarrassing is because it is. A man or woman gets home from the war, and they want to forget about what they saw and what they did, but they can't. Many veterans want to avoid being around those close to them, because they don't want their loved ones to know that they are having problems.

The whole reason that I wrote this series is because there are tens of thousands of veterans returning from George Bush's wars, who are having psychological problems now, and there will be many thousands more who will develop traumatic stress later on. Dr Michael G. Rayel, writing for About Mental Health.com at (http://mentalhealth.about.com/od/traumaptsd/a/ptsdrayel.htm) says,

PTSD is a psychiatric disorder characterized by avoidance, hyper vigilance, emotional difficulties, and recall behavior such as flashbacks and nightmares after a traumatic event such as rape, war, vehicular accident, or natural disasters. Recent researches have shown that after a trauma, biochemical changes develop in the brain that can result in psychological signs as shown above.

If untreated, some individuals develop emotional difficulties such as depression associated with inability to concentrate, sleep, and eat. Occasionally, they also become hopeless to the point that they want to die.

There have already been reports of returning veterans committing suicide, and I expect that will continue because it can now take many months to start getting help through an already overwhelmed VA system.

I can still remember thinking that I had better "suck it up' and blow off the thoughts I was having. I was thinking, Marines don't do things like I was doing. I kept telling myself that I was one of the "few, one of the proud." As we said in the Nam, "Yea thou I walk through the valley of death, I am the badest mother #%@*$% in the valley." When I finally did go for help, it was an incredible relief to find many other Marines going through the same things I was.

I have to tell you that just because I went through the VA's program at the Tomah, the stress didn't magically go away, nor did the intrusive thoughts of Vietnam. They don't have a special stress pill to give you. I did get some tools to use to make the whole thing a bit more bearable. I know some of the guys in my group have done well, but others, from my point of view, are in worse shape after going through the program.

The program opens up a whole new can of worms by getting you to confront everything that happened to you in a combat zone. For some guys that was a relief, but for others it was too much for them to handle.

Now with these new veterans coming into the system, everything at the VA will be a little bit slower for those veterans already in the system. There are still WW II vets, Korean War vets, Vietnam Vets, and Desert Storm vets making their initial visit to the VA asking for help with the problems they are still having with their time in combat,

I have met veterans who have thought that post traumatic stress was just a bunch of hooey. That is, they thought that until one day everything about their war experience came crashing down on them, and they didn't know what to do.

I was always told, if you are at a VFW or Legion bar and there is some guy bragging to everyone how he won the war at one end, and there is another guy sitting at the other end not talking to any one, put your money on the quiet guy as really having been in the thick of things.

I believe that to be true, and we are going to have a lot of Soldiers and Marines coming home now, who are not going to talk about their time in combat, and they are going to try and work things out on their own as long as they can. The help these returning Americans will need is a cost of going to war. Congress has a duty to provide all the help these returning troops need, but so far they have done very little. That is scary, too. You know, it's more than just scary. It's horrible, it's criminal, it's indicative of a cruel, heartless mentality—now that's scary.

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