Lose the Label
A Student Activist Community

posted by jakethorn on July 9, 2008 - 4:43pm

I caught an article on military.com worth a read today. It's been clear for months that soldiers coming back from Iraq aren't getting the support they need. Things don't seem to be getting much better. Link:

Most nights when Anthony Klecker, a former marine, finally slept, he found himself back on the battlefields of Iraq. He would awake in a panic, and struggle futilely to return to sleep.

Days were scarcely better. Car alarms shattered his nerves. Flashbacks came unexpectedly, at the whiff of certain cleaning chemicals. Bar fights seemed unavoidable; he nearly attacked a man for not washing his hands in the bathroom.

Desperate for sleep and relief, Mr. Klecker, 30, drank heavily. One morning, his parents found him in the driveway slumped over the wheel of his car, the door wide open, wipers scraping back and forth. Another time, they found him curled in a fetal position in his closet.

Yet only after his drunken driving caused the death of a 16-year-old cheerleader did Mr. Klecker acknowledge the depth of his problem: His eight months at war had profoundly damaged his psyche.

“I was trying to be the tough marine I was trained to be — not to talk about problems, not to cry,” said Mr. Klecker, who has since been diagnosed with severe post-traumatic stress disorder. “I imprisoned myself in my own mind.”

The article moves on from his individual example to examine the big picture.

Increasingly, these troubled veterans are spilling into the criminal justice system. A small fraction wind up in prison for homicides or other major crimes. Far more, though, are involved in drunken bar fights, reckless driving and alcohol-fueled domestic violence. Whatever the particulars, their stories often spool out in unwitting victims, ruptured families, lost jobs and crushing debt.

With the rising awareness of the problem has come mounting concern about the access to treatment and whether enough combat veterans are receiving the help that is available to them.

Having cut way back in the 1990s as the population of veterans declined, the Veterans Health Administration says it is expanding its alcohol- and drug-abuse services. But advocacy groups and independent experts — including members of a Pentagon mental-health task force that issued its report last year — are concerned that much more needs to be done. In May, the House and Senate passed bills that would require the veterans agency to expand substance-abuse screening and treatment for all veterans.

“The war is now and the problems are now,” said Richard A. McCormick, a senior scholar for public health at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland who served on the Pentagon task force. “Every day there is a cohort of men and women being discharged who need services not one or two or five years from now. They need them now.”

The problem is worsened by shoddy medical coverage veterans are receiving, which makes it hard for soldiers to get psychological treatment. The system seems set up to deny rather than embrace the sick.

It's amazing... these folks are asked to go over into a warzone on our behalf, make them stay there much longer than they agreed to, and then when they finally do get home, we deprive them of the support they need. Is this what all those "SUPPORT THE TROOPS" stickers are for? Is this what Dick Cheney and Sean Hannity mean by patriotism?

Said it before, say it again... we never should have been there in the first place. There's no telling how much pain and suffering could have been prevented.