HUFFINGTON
10.07.12
COMING HOME
kinda spiraled out of control.”
Among the grim repercussions
of a decade of fighting in Iraq and
Afghanistan — the dead, the battleinjured, the wreckage, the wasted
billions — is this: while most soldiers return from war and resume
a somewhat normal life, many do
not. All too frequently, the trauma
of combat leads to struggles with
drug addiction or alcohol abuse,
to outbursts of anger and violence
at home or work, to petty crime or
other reckless behavior that ends
up in a confrontation with flashing
lights and handcuffs.
No one knows the precise number of veterans already in prison.
An estimate by the Justice Department five years ago put the
number at 223,000, most of them
Vietnam-era veterans. Whatever
the number, many serve their time
without getting treated for the
conditions that helped land them
in prison in the first place.
There are more coming, in what
will amount to a river of personal
tragedies that is likely to clog the
courts and, some say, will pose dangerous risks to civilian society.
“It’s going to be an epidemic,”
says Guy Garant, an assistant district attorney in Philadelphia who
handles a rising caseload of veter-
ans. “I’m seeing Vietnam veterans
who went [to war] once, 40 years
ago. Now we have guys 18, 19 years
of age, going again and again. We’re
going to have huge issues with this.”
War veterans, of course, are responsible for their actions, like everyone else. And some doubtless
would have gotten in trouble no
matter what their wartime experiences. But research has demonstrated that the trauma of combat
makes men and women more likely
to engage in criminal behavior.
Based on interviews with men
who fought in Vietnam, the National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Study estimated that half of
all combat veterans with PTSD had
been arrested one or more times.
So far, the VA has formally diagnosed 207,161 Iraq and Afghanistan
veterans with PTSD, which suggests
at least 100,000 of them are suffering from the demons of PTSD and
have become ensnared in the criminal justice system.
But today’s generation of combat
veterans may get into more trouble
than their Vietnam counterparts. A
2009 report by the Naval Health
Research Center in San Diego of
77,881 enlisted 5