Salon: 72,000 cases of vets with severe post-traumatic stress disorder

[Bush_Eats_Beef]

Sticker shock over shell shock: The U.S. government is reviewing 72,000 cases in which veterans have been diagnosed with severe post-traumatic stress disorder, claiming that misdiagnosis and fraud have inflated the numbers. Outraged vets say the plan is a callous attempt to cut the costs of an increasingly expensive war.

By Mark Benjamin



http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/08/09/vets/index.html

Aug. 9, 2005 | Matt LaBranche has memories of Iraq that he does not want to have. He was a gunner who protected convoys for a National Guard company out of Bangor, Maine. Once, during his nine-month tour in Iraq, his truck got separated from a convoy headed to Tikrit. He couldn't raise anyone on the radio. Insurgents ambushed. He remembers tumbling out of the truck just as a roadside bomb went off, slamming him against the truck, breaking his coccyx and knocking loose an eye tooth. He remembers pulling the driver out of the truck and laying down fire with his M249 SAW machine gun until he thought the barrel would melt.

There are more memories he can't shake. Some are worse. Some include children. We agree that I won't print details, but he cries when he tells them to me. LaBranche, 41, also supports the war and has little patience for those who don't.

I first met LaBranche in the summer of 2004 when he was at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. He was clearly a troubled man. He spent a month in the lockdown psychiatric unit, Ward 54, and a year receiving outpatient treatment. He is still haunted.

"I dream about it every fucking night," he tells me in a telephone conversation from his home in Maine. "I am on so many drugs for nightmares. Sometimes days go by and I don't even know what day it is." LaBranche lives in a house in the woods with a lot of guns. He never suffered from mental illness before going to Iraq. But twice since returning, he says, he has put a gun barrel in his mouth or under his chin. Since the war, he has lost his house and his wife because of where his mind is at. He is not in close contact with his two sons. Once, in a rage, he almost killed a man. "There are some days," he says, "when I get up and think, What the fuck? I lost my house, I lost my kids, everything I went over there to protect is gone."

[whatever4]

1. and it's just getting started

These mother fucking fools.

[BikeWriter]

2. Shit, I filled out their PTSD form. If I recall, I checked every item.

They ask about suicide attempts, nightmares, etcetera.

[tridim]

3. Just wait until they figure out the war was started on a lie

and prolonged on more lies. I know what I'd do if I were in their position.

[frictionlessO]

4. They are not going to get away with this!!!

Oh!!! I am LIVID!!! LIVID!!

I can't even write coherently....

:mad: :nuke: :grr:

[halobeam]

5. How many were and are deployed? Doesn't that make it about 50%?

Severe PTSD. I am sick.

[swimmernsecretsea]

6. We knew this was coming, but it's still awful.

Our nation grieves for your shattered minds and memories, and wishes for you a better life. God this is terrible. Terrible.