Military faces after effects of combat

Chattanooga: Military faces after effects of combat
Chattanooga Times Free Press - Chattanooga,TN,USA
By: Lauren Gregory (Contact)

After a year of defending himself against ambushes in Vietnam, Roger Rahor couldn’t get out of high-alert mode.

He was physically and mentally edgy — so much so that he had trouble sitting through a meal.

“I brought a girl home for dinner when I had first come home, and I was real jumpy and nervous at the table,” recalled Mr. Rahor, a Signal Mountain resident who turns 60 today and was 23 when he returned from a yearlong tour with a U.S. Army transportation company in 1972.

He was in denial about his condition, and his family downplayed it, too, he said.

“My mom said to my date, ‘Don’t pay any attention to Roger. He’s just nervous from the service,’ which was how they related to it in World War II,” Mr. Rahor said. “ ‘Nervous from the service’ was acceptable.”

Since the term post-traumatic stress disorder was coined in the wake of Vietnam, public and military acceptance of the disorder has grown, even to the extent that debate about whether sufferers should be awarded the Purple Heart has emerged.

However, stigmas surrounding the disorder persist, said Dr. John Fortunato, a Vietnam veteran and clinical psychologist who runs the U.S. Army’s new Restoration and Resilience Center for PTSD sufferers at Ft. Bliss, Texas.
click above for more