There’s a lot in the weekend’s papers and around the blogs that should not be missed.
*The LA Times has an important editorial about the necessity to define and standardize just what we mean when we say “drop out,” so that school districts (LAUSD a notable example) can no longer play Hide the Dropout. The Times rightly gives credit to US Education Secretary Margaret Spelling for calling for the standardization.
*On Saturday, Glenn Greenwald at Salon notes the frequency with which the media mentions Barack Obama’s bowling score and the fact that the Clintons are rich, but how comparatively rarely our media managed to comment on the declassification of John Woo’s torture memo that makes clear that the Bush administration “…declared the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights to be inapplicable to ‘domestic military operations’ within the U.S.
*The LA Times also has a smart and thoughtful Op Ed by novelist Rabih Alameddine about the dangerous and prejudicial way we use the words “God” and “Allah” in this country.
*But for me the weekend’s most upsetting and essential read is the report in the New York Times that Army leaders are worried about the mental health of our troops when they are subjected to repeat tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.
On Tuesday night, CBS News announced the devastating results of a five-month investigation into the incidence of suicide among American war veterans. Until the CBS folks did their own count using existing state death records (that no one had bothered to gather together and analyze), little information existed about how many suicides among veterans there were nationwide.
The numbers CBS found are extremely disturbing. In 2005, 6256 veterans killed themselves—an average of 120 suicides each week. Furthermore, the CBS researchers found that veterans age 20-24 had the highest suicide rate of any age group. These, of course, are the Iraq and Afghani war kids. Whereas other veterans were twice as likely to commit suicide than the non-veteran populace. The new, young vets were three or four times more likely.
The examples CBS used to illustrate the problem, for me as a mother, were nearly unbearable to watch.
Twenty-three-year-old Marine Reservist Jeff Lucey hanged himself with a garden hose in the cellar of this parents’ home – where his father, Kevin, found him.
“There’s a crisis going on and people are just turning the other way,” Kevin Lucey said.
Kim and Mike Bowman’s son Tim was an Army reservist who patrolled one of the most dangerous places in Baghdad, known as Airport Road.
“His eyes when he came back were just dead. The light wasn’t there anymore,” Kim Bowman said.
Eight months later, on Thanksgiving Day, Tim shot himself. He was 23.
Diana Henderson’s son, Derek, served three tours of duty in Iraq. He died jumping off a bridge at 27.
Meanwhile, in related story reported in this morning’s LA Times, a new study was released on Wednesday showing that post-war emotional stress and depression caused by combat in Iraq often don’t appear until months after a soldier has returned home.
Overall, about 20 percent of active-duty soldiers and more than 40 percent of National Guardsmen and reservists were referred for care or had sought care on their own, a military team reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Psychologists hope that catching incipient problems early and getting soldiers into treatment will prevent the type of long-term mental health problems that afflicted many soldiers who fought in Vietnam, said Dr. Charles S. Milliken of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, who led the study.
Yes, but are we really catching things early—or at all?
The story excerpted below ran in the Texas Observer this summer. It’s a portrait of three different service people who have come back from Iraq, and it It suggests we aren’t doing quite so swimmingly at the Walter Reed guy would have us believe.
[NOTE: Sorry about the disappearing post today. When I corrected something this morning, I must have hit some wrong key because this post automatically marked itself "private," and vanished. Thanks to commenters Woody and rlc who let me know, as I've been away from my laptop all day. In any case, I called Mr. Kid (that would be my 21-year-old son) and he restored it in my absence. Okay, now back to our regularly scheduled programming.]
Over the last few days, I’ve talked to a number of people who are expert in veterans affairs, PTSD and homelessness, and they tell me they are growing increasingly worried because the percentage of soldiers returning home from Iraq with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is far higher than seen in past wars, and the nature of the PTSD appears to be more severe. To make matters worse, according to veterans support and advocacy groups, due to the government’s outmoded, unresponsive, and overloaded system for dealing with PTSD cases, only a fraction of the PTSD vets are getting the help they need.
After reading reportafter report of how we are already failing our veterans in the area of PTSD treatment, one wonders what’s going to happen when the real bulk of the soldiers come home from Iraq and Afghanistan?
“At least 30 percent of Iraq or Afghanistan [veterans] are diagnosed with PTSD, up from 16 percent to 18 percent in 2004,” said Charlie Kennedy, PTSD program director and lead psychologist at the Stratton VA Medical Center. The most conservative estimates project that, when the rest of the troops come home, roughly 250,000 Iraq war veterans will come back to their communities dealing with major depression and/or debilitating anxiety brought on by the trauma and carnage of war.
“One of the things we’re noticing, says Tony Reinis, the executive director for New Directions, a West Los Angeles shelter and rehab program focused on veterans., ”is that the kind of PTSD they display is different from what we’ve seen in the past. In Vietnam, the personal threat was intermittent, not constant. But in Iraq, because of the IEDs, these kids are on constant alert, 24 hours a day. No matter what their jobs in the military, they are all combat soldiers because of the nature of this conflict. And that 24/7 sense of threat produces a different kind of trauma”
April 6th, 2008 by 
Celeste Fremon
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