The War Over PTSD or dealing with a soulless jerk

December 20, 2007, 7:14 PM
The War Over PTSD
Posted by Kimberly Dozier


Kimberly Dozier is a CBS News correspondent based in Washington.
There's a war inside the military over how to treat a not-so-new enemy: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

"I've never had a guy in my unit develop PTSD," one senior general from Iraq told me. 'It's nonsense."

"You're only scratching the surface," of cases from this war, another senior general told me. "Keep looking."

Simply put, PTSD is what happens when you put a combatant in the pressure cooker of Iraq or Afghanistan, and tell him or her, "No matter what you see or feel, tough it out. Lock it down. Keep it to yourself." After multiple tours living on high boil, with no relief valve, some U.S. troops are breaking. Make that thousands.

The largest military employer, the U.S. Army, has rolled out new programs to teach troops what PTSD is, to try to reduce the stigma. It can be as simple as asking a patrol that saw something traumatic to talk about it out loud. That way, the incident on the battlefield gets tamed by a jawing session with your buddies, instead of becoming a nightmare that wakes you sweating at 4 a.m. with visions of the dead and maimed that won't leave you.
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When military people claim no one in their unit developed PTSD, it's easy to understand why they say that. No one would tell someone with that kind of attitude about it. You don't share that kind of pain with a soulless jerk. Anyone left in the military dismissing PTSD as a load of crap or trying to trivialize reality, is a soulless jerk or a really stupid fool with no ability to learn anything.