Bush Admin. Gives Vets the Shaft

By Conn Hallinan, Foreign Policy in Focus. Posted November 14, 2006.

"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 percent 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 percent 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 percent 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.

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Conn Hallinan is a Foreign Policy In Focus columnist.

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