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