Huffington Magazine Issue 3-4 | Page 39

THE WAR WITHIN now she simply couldn’t function. “I was ashamed of myself,” she says in a whisper at her home in Haverhill, Mass. Young is one of a generation of 2.4 million Americans who fought in Iraq or Afghanistan, many of whom are coming back profoundly changed by what combat veteran and author Karl Marlantes described as the “soul-battering experience” of war. The shock of war, of course, is hardly new. But now the cascade of combat veterans from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is forcing mental health practitioners to a new recognition: the effects of combat trauma extend far beyond the traditional and narrow clinical diagnoses of PTSD and traumatic brain injury (TBI). The current crop of veterans is at risk of a “downward spiral” that leads to depression, substance abuse and sometimes suicide, as Eric Shinseki, secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs, said in a recent speech. Almost a quarter million Iraq or Afghanistan vets have been diagnosed with mental health injuries from combat service. Many more are not diagnosed, yet go on with their lives while experiencing HUFFINGTON 07.01-08.12 short-term memory loss, headaches, insomnia, anger or numbness — conditions that can range from merely annoying to highly disruptive on the job and within the family. For some of them, hard work can temporarily mask these symptoms. But only temporarily. “You can work through it [with therapy], or become a workaholic,” says Tom Berger, who still suffers nightmares from his time as a medical corpsman with the 3rd Marine Division during bloody Vietnam fighting in the late 1960s. “Left untreated, you reinforce the trauma, so it makes sense to keep that loaded .357 [revolver] next to you on the car seat,” adds Berger, who is a senior advisor on veterans health at the Vietnam Veterans of America. Those who go to war, it turns out, carry the traumatic aftereffects longer and deeper than previously recognized — perhaps for a lifetime. At the Army medical center at Fort Gordon, Ga., Dr. John L. Rigg, director of the Traumatic Brain Injury Program, is treating active-duty soldiers complaining of headaches, mood swings, anger, insomnia, and memory loss