US veterans' invisible wounds

[Barrett808]

US veterans' invisible wounds
By Richard Allen Greene
BBC News

Nearly 2,000 US troops have been killed in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, and tens of thousands wounded. But many have found themselves dealing with psychological - as well as physical - trauma. In the second of a five-part series, BBC News talks to soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and related symptoms.

Steve MacMaster can't sleep without medication: "If people knew what I was thinking, they would not want to associate with me," he says.

Aaron Jones does not feel comfortable without a gun around: "I lived in Iraq for almost a year with a gun on me all the time or right next to my bed."

Kathy's boyfriend - who did not want to be named - had to stop watching the news: "When he sees people going to Iraq, or coming home, he can get really upset.

"Whatever you say, he'll find something in it to disagree with. So we don't watch the news."

All three veterans of the US occupation of Iraq are having nightmares about what they saw and did there - and they are among tens of thousands of US troops suffering from psychological trauma after coming home.

(more)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4122602.stm

[Swede]

1. Viet Nam vets had ONE tour,THREE tours are the norm now.

There are going to be four and five tours because the military has run out of troops. A lot of these people are gonna be fucked up.

[TexasLawyer]

2. Be sure to check out the Rolling Stone article

this month on the same topic. This is an incredibly sad and fascinating story.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/_/id/7504249?pageid=rs.Politics&pageregion=single1&rnd=1124211386070&has-player=true&version=6.0.11.847

Marine Gone Mad

Andy Raya didn't kill anyone while stationed in Iraq. He waited until he returned home

By JEFF TIETZ


Raya fashioned a sign in his barracks to express his growing hatred of the war

On Sunday, January 9th of this year, Marine Lance Cpl. Andy Raya left Camp Pendleton, took a one-way flight from San Diego to Sacramento, grabbed an SKS semiautomatic assault rifle he had obtained illegally, and made his way home to Ceres, a farming town in the Central Valley. Three months earlier he had returned from Iraq, where he had spent seven months driving supply trucks in the Sunni Triangle. Other than Marine Corps barracks, Ceres was the only place Raya had ever lived. He was nineteen.

<big snip>

When he came home again for Christmas, he said he didn't want to return to Iraq. With no elaboration, he said the war was not right. "The only thing I think about is dying out there," he told his cousin Rebeca. "That's the worst thing that could happen to me is that my mom sees me die in Iraq." In public, he often said, unprompted, "These are all civilians." Many times he declared to family members, "You guys are considered civilians." He called men "males" and women "females" and sometimes spoke in Marine slang: zero-dark-thirty, gungy, deuce gear. His family kept saying, "We don't understand you," and he kept saying, "Oh, yeah, you guys are civilians," but he never really stopped. Sometimes he just sat and stared at nothing for four or five minutes.

One day, Andy pulled a metal ball out of his pocket and threw it hard at his cousin Alex. Before Alex had a chance to respond, Andy said, "How you felt it is how I felt it." It was a piece of shrapnel that he said had shattered the body armor covering his chest. Andy often carried it, holding it in his palm and metronomically tossing it up and down.

Andy was most like his old self when he was with his friends, hanging out smoking and drinking. One night they broke into the high school gym, tore up an American flag and used the strips to spell "Fuck Bush" on the floor. Andy said things to his friends he didn't say to anyone else. He said, "Bush is a fucking devil. People just don't realize how much power he's got and how much he's using it." He said, "You can't picture hell any worse than Iraq -- that is hell." He had known very little of the world before he went to Iraq, but the world, he said, wasn't right: There was no point in it; it was full of sin; it was going to end.

<snip>

[meganmonkey]

3. That's a really intense article

i read it last week.

[Megahurtz]

4. This is really bad,

and they absolutely refuse to acknowledge that PTSD is an epidemic with War Vets.
They're even trying to cut benefits for those Vets already recieving disability for PTSD!
They just use them and discard them.
As long as their citizens can be milked, that's all they care about,
but they don't want to give anything in return.
:hurts: