The Washington Post has a story up about an upsurge in the number of Vietnam vets seeking help for PTSD.
More than 30 years after their war ended, thousands of Vietnam veterans are seeking help for post-traumatic stress disorder, and experts say one reason appears to be harrowing images of combat in Iraq.
Figures from the Department of Veterans Affairs show that PTSD disability-compensation cases have nearly doubled since 2000, to an all-time high of more than 260,000. The biggest bulge has come since 2003, when war started in Iraq.
Experts say that, although several factors may be at work in the burgeoning caseload, many veterans of past wars reexperience their own trauma as they watch televised images of U.S. troops in combat and read each new accounting of the dead.
"It so directly parallels what happened to Vietnam veterans," said Raymond M. Scurfield of the University of Southern Mississippi's Gulf Coast campus, who worked with the disorder at VA for more than 20 years and has written two books on the subject. "The war has to be triggering their issues. They're almost the same issues."
At VA, officials said the Iraq war is probably a contributing factor in the rise in cases, although they said they have conducted no formal studies.
Or maybe it's not the images of the war, but the way the coverage is being presented. Maybe the veterans are watching the media trying to do the same thing that was done to them 30 years ago. Maybe they are sickened by watching the media and the left trying their best to lose this war like they lost Vietnam. Maybe they are afraid of what will happen to a new generation of soldiers who are being demonized by the media and the lefties.
Just guessing.
Interesting idea, that the lefties lost the war in Viet nam.
It was a slaughterhouse, and as the soviets and germans learned in serbia and in afghanistan, it’s hard to beat a nation on difficult homeland.
And Viet nam has a difficult homeland.
Rest assured, the war could have been prolonged, but never won.
Or, you can keep believing that the “evil, traitorous lefties who are just sucking the blood of the nation driving it toward hell and the Righteous Lord will smite them for it” or whatever – exactly the same style you despise on this column if it is done by the lefties.
But that won’t make it true.
Roland, there are a lot of people who say that. That does not make it true, either.
The Viet Cong were destroyed in the Tet offensive. There are a lot of ways to look at that war. I’ve seen effective arguments for a number of scenarios.
Also, you were not here in this country when the whole thing was going on, right? I lived through it and watched the way it unfilded.
Dunno, we have some people who lived that through – on the other side.
One was a sergeant of mine in the army.
He said: “Bloody, pointless, no winner conflict.”
And he was not passing “communist speech”. He just said it was a useless, dumb war, fought by two uninvited superpowers over a hapless third.
I would take his words, as he was an honest man.
And you always forget, that you were not a liberator like the soviets were not liberators in Afghanistan.
You were invading a country only to keep it out of the hands of an other power – who moved in to keep it out of your hands.
Even if the “move ins” of the two powers were made at the same moment.
No, it was another one of the two superegoist countries’ wars.
Oh, it was a proxy war no doubt. But which side was more legitimate than they other? The answer probably is neither, but that doesn’t change the fact that the left and the media in this country turned on the war and cost us a chance at a different outcome.
Pingback: Outside The Beltway | OTB
Yes, neither party was right, I do agree.
But what I know for sure – and don’t forget, there was a lot of vietnamese students in my country, studying at the universities -, that to won over the Viet Cong, the US would have to kill almost every single person in Viet Nam.
There were a lot of communists among them, right. But most of them were joining simply to defend their country.
So, maybe – I say maybe – you could have won the part of battle in Viet Nam. Killing every men, women and children in the country. And the ones in the surrounding ones, as soon as they came to aid their families. And then the chinese, who no doubt would have interfered not wanting a really strong american presence. And then maybe we would be sitting in mud now, grasping our weapons, listening to the bombing and the serenade of WW3.
At that time, that place, with such an environment, that war was not one that could have been won. Not even if you washed Viet Nam in DDT and napalm.
That’s my take on it.
On the positive side, with that scenario, 9/11 would have never happened, as the CIA would had no need for Osama Bin Laden.
And no war in Iraq.