Vietnam Remains Our Biggest Military Health Issue

Vietnam Remains Our Biggest Military Health Issue
As we shift our focus of this blog to the emotional side of the synergistic neuropsychiatric disability that faces combat vets, I want to put the context of current soldier suicides and PTSD into perspective.

This series of blogs began with my reaction to this news:
“The Associated Press announced that active duty military suicides hit its highest level on record in 2007, 119 soldiers dead. See the AP story at: http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/M/MILITARY_SUICIDES?SITE=CADIU&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT “

My first reaction to that number when I read it was that there was something wrong with the record books, because I had remembered reading a number of references over the years about suicide in Vietnam veterans with numbers as high as 250,000 people. Well, the reason 119 is a “record” is the Pentagon didn’t start recording soldier suicides until around 1980 and that number is for active duty soldiers and doesn’t include vets.Still, the overwhelming question that seems to being missed in the political debate and news coverage of 2008 is what about the Vietnam vets? As tragic as the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars have been, their footprint of death, disability and psychosis has yet to reach 10% of the magnitude of that of Vietnam.

While Vietnam is now more than 30 years in our rear view mirrors, the primary group of soldiers it affected are from 55 to 70 years old. That is a serious public and military health issue for at least another generation.$500 million dollars for TBI research for blast injuries in the so-called War on Terror is great – but what about Vietnam? The discovery of brain injury and brain damage in Iraq by the politicos and news media is truly wonderful. But Iraq is not the first war with blast injuries, not the first war where our soldiers suffered brain injury, not the first war where the soldier who returned home is a brittle, vulnerable shadow of the vibrant young man who left.
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