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Alexander, Jeffrey, Becky and Deva
Weekend
Edition
November 11 / 12, 2006
The Ills of War
Shafting
the Vets
By CONN HALLINAN
"War is hell," Union General William
Tecumseh Sherman famously said 14 years after the end of the
bloodiest conflict in U.S. history. "It is only those who
have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of
the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation."
Clearly the U.S. Civil War
is not on the reading list of psychiatrist Sally Satel, a scholar
at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Indeed,
Satel sees war less as hell than as a golden opportunity for
veteran lay-abouts to milk the government by " overpathologizing
the psychic pain of war."
Satel, whom the AEI trots out
anytime the Bush administration needs cover for cutting veteran
services and benefits, says the problem for former soldiers is
not Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). "The real trouble
for vets," she writes, is that "once a patient receives
a monthly check based on his psychiatric diagnosis, his motivation
to hold a job wanes." Her solution? "Don't offer disability
benefits too quickly."
The commentary makes an interesting
contrast to a powerful piece in the October 2006 issue of the
California Nurses Association's magazine Registered Nurse
titled "The Battle at Home" by Caitlin Fischer and
Diana Reiss. They found that "in veterans' hospitals across
the country-and in a growing number of ill-prepared, under-funded
psych and primary care clinics as well-Registered Nurses are
treating soldiers and picking up the pieces of a tattered army."
According to the authors, RNs
across the country "have witnessed the guilt, rage, emotional
numbness, and tormented flashbacks of GIs just back from Iraq
and Afghanistan," as well as older vets from previous wars,
"whose half-century-old trauma have been 'triggered' by
the images of Iraq."
How many soldiers returning
from Iraq and Afghanistan will eventually fall victim to PTSD
is not clear, although a U.S. Defense Department study in 2006
found that one in six returnees suffer from depression or stress
disorders, and 35% have sought counseling for emotional difficulties.
The Veterans Administration (VA) treated 20,638 Iraq vets for
PTSD in just the first quarter of 2006 and is currently processing
a backlog of 400,000 cases.
Out of 700,000 soldiers who
served in the 1991 Gulf War, 118,000 are suffering from chronic
fatigue, headaches, muscle spasms, joint pains, anxiety, memory
loss, and balance problems, and 40% receive disability pay. Gulf
vets are also twice as likely to develop amyotrophic lateral
sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's Disease) and between two and three times
more likely to have children with birth defects.
The
Ills of War
Modern battlefields are toxic
nightmares, filled with depleted uranium ammunition, exotic explosives,
and deadly cluster bomblets. The soldiers are shot up with experimental
vaccines that can have dangerous side effects from additives
like squalene. In short, soldiers are not only under fire, they
are assaulted by their own weapons systems and medical procedures.
Satel need have no worries
about the VA rushing to hand out cash to veteran couch potatoes.
According to Fischer and Reiss, "A returning vet must wait
an average of 165 days for a VA decision on initial disability
benefits. An appeal can take up to three years."
Reserve and National Guard
troops-who make up between 40 and 50% of the frontline troops
in Iraq and Afghanistan-have a particular problem, because their
military medical insurance benefits only cover conditions diagnosed
in the first 100 days. PTSD sometimes takes years, even decades
to kick in.
When they do complain, vets
can expect that their ailments will be dismissed or their cause
stonewalled.
When Gulf War vets complained
about the symptoms which have come to be called "Gulf War
Syndrome," the Pentagon told them it was in their heads,
in spite of studies by the British Medical Journal and
the U.S. Center for Disease Control that showed the returnees
were suffering illnesses at 12 times the rate of non-Gulf vets.
For five years after the Gulf
War the Pentagon denied that any troops had been exposed to chemical
weapons. It took pressure from veterans' organizations and Sen.
Donald Riegle (D-MI) to get the Pentagon to admit finally that
as many as 130,000 troops (the vets say the number is higher)
were exposed to chemical weapons from the destruction of the
Iraqi arms depot at Khamisiyah.
Veteran organizations are currently
fighting the Pentagon over its refusal to screen returning soldiers
for mild brain injuries. Figures indicate that up to 10% of the
troops suffer from concussions during their tours, a figure that
rises to 20% for those in the front lines. Research shows that
concussions can cause memory loss, headaches, sleep disturbances,
and behavior problems. The Pentagon, arguing that the long-term
effect of brain injuries needs more research, is unwilling to
fund a screening program.
Given the wide use of roadside
bombs, "Traumatic brain injury is the signature injury of
the war on terrorism," George Zitnay, co-founder of the
Brain Injury Center, toldUSA Today. And according to researchers
at Harvard and Colombia, the cost of treating those brain injuries
will be $14 billion over the next 20 years.
In Iraq
Upwards of 20,000 Americans
have been wounded in Iraq, some of those so grotesquely that
medicine has invented a new term to describe them-polytrauma.
An estimated 7,000 vets have severe brain and spinal injuries,
and have required amputations. For the blind, brain damaged,
and paralyzed, war is indeed hell.
Calculating the cost of war
is tricky, but Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz
recently calculated that the price tag for the long-term health
care for Iraq War vets will exceed $2 trillion.
But the hell we bring home
is only a pale reflection of the hell we leave behind.
According to a recent estimate
by the British medical journal, The Lancet, upwards of
650,000 Iraqis have been killed since the invasion. Most of the
country's infrastructure-already damaged in the first Gulf War
or degraded by a decade of sanctions-has essentially collapsed.
Iraq's experience is not unique.
The Vietnam War ended more
than 30 years ago, but according to the recent book, Vietnam:
A Natural History, Laotians, Vietnamese, and Cambodians are
still dying from it.
From 1964 to 1973, the United
States dropped over 14 million tons of bombs on those three countries,
including 90 million cluster munitions on tiny Laos alone. Somewhere
between 30 to 40% of those fiendish devices never exploded, and,
according to the British Mines Advisory Group, they have killed
or maimed 12,000 Laotians since the end of the war. They continue
to extract a yearly toll of 100 to 200 people, many of them children.
Traces of the 20 million gallons
of Agent White, Agent Blue, and Agent Orange herbicides that
the United States sprayed over Vietnam still poison the water,
soil, vegetation, animals, and people of Southeast Asia, producing
cancer and birth defect rates among the highest in the world.
So war is indeed hell-for those
who fight it, those caught in the middle of it, and those who
eventually pick up the pieces.
Conn Hallinan is a foreign policy analyst for Foreign Policy In Focus and a
lecturer in journalism at the University of California, Santa
Cruz.
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