Baghdad in Middle America

Baghdad in Middle America
Posted November 15, 2007 02:49 PM (EST)
Breaking News
Honoring vets means nothing at all unless it means honoring the deeply gouged personal truths each experienced during deployment. But the dismissal of such truths is as much a part of war, and its aftermath, as the propaganda and geopolitical whoppers necessary to launch it.

The problem with these individual truths is that they seldom smack of glory. More often, they're simply mundane and hellish, and slowly eat the vet's soul. The clinical name for this is post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, and it's the phrase I heard most frequently and most distinctly this past weekend, during the grim, pained acknowledgement -- I can hardly call it celebration -- of Veterans Day.

Ray Parrish, a vets' counselor and Vietnam vet, was adamantly pessimistic as he spoke to 100 or so people gathered on a bitter, gray Sunday morning at the river in downtown Chicago, about the psychic toll our current wars are exacting on the ones who are fighting them.

Noting that the standard tour of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan is 15 months (three months more than Nam), that two or three tours of duty are common, and that maybe eight or nine months of continuous battle conditions -- little sleep, ever-present terror, the necessity to kill -- is about all a normal human being can take, Parrish said: "It is inevitable that every soldier is coming back with PTSD -- without exception."
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You've heard the numbers but what you don't hear are the veterans who are still silent. They suffer without saying a single word, without going to the VA, without a hand to help them heal.

Last year, after 24 years of trying to reach them, I started to do videos. There have been very few comments but a lot of downloads. I get a ton of email everyday because of this. If you wonder how bad PTSD is for them, look at these numbers. Keep in mind I am not well known. I spend too much time working on this and not enough time advertising it.


Coming Out of The Dark of PTSD
986 views
37 download
Death Because They Served PTSD Suicides
1571 views
16 download
Heal the wounds of PTSD
389 views
5 download
Hero After War Combat Vets and PTSD
4952 views
50 download
PTSD After Trauma
1914 views
96 download
PTSD Soldiers Wounded And Waiting
337 views
4 download
When War Comes Home PTSD
3014 views
53 download
Wounded Minds PTSD and Veterans
8031 views
186 download
Wounded Minds Veterans and PTSD
1579 views
39 download

The first one I did and was not the best one because I was just finding out how to do them.
Veterans and PTSD All time views:14,648

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-541446594865961835&q=kathie+costos&total=30&start=0&num=10&
so=0&type=search&plindex=4

Women At War Views: 2,523
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGTjB1ls3-k

Hero After War Views: 1,984
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Zt4FTRLxGk

End The Silence of PTSD Views: 3,481
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9H2zPMYd5Gs

These are just about PTSD. Do you think we have a huge problem? Most of these downloads represent groups of people watching them. They are being shown in colleges, VFW posts, American Legion Posts and other veterans groups among other places across the world. I've mailed out at least a hundred DVD's. It's time we did a hell of a lot more than saying we support the troops and start taking care of them. If everyone of the veterans with PTSD were able to go to their local senator's offices, this wound would be addressed overnight.