At the Front, When Veterans Come Home

When you let the fact we lose more soldiers after war than during it, it only makes sense to consider PTSD an enemy that needs to be defeated but no one really counts the numbers of lives lost to PTSD. Too many are never reported on because they go home quietly suffering in silence with families that have no clue what they brought home deep inside of them. The military has done a lousy job of facing this enemy head on.

At the Front, When Veterans Come Home
New York Times - United States
By KEVIN COYNE
Published: February 13, 2009
THE old vets and the young sit side by side in the waiting room at the veterans center here, facing the “Welcome Home” sign and the framed Purple Heart, and if you close your eyes sometimes and listen as they talk it’s hard to tell which war was whose. They fought on different sides of the world, but their battles are the same.

The center is part of a network established by the federal government in the years after an earlier war, when too many veterans came home from Vietnam to find too few places to talk about what had happened to them there. But the centers have been pressed into duty now for the veterans of a new war, more of whom are arriving home — and arriving here, too — each day from Iraq and Afghanistan.

“This is the front lines, right here,” James Gordon said as he walked through the suite of conference rooms and offices he oversees as the team leader here. Known as the Trenton Vet Center, this facility — one of four in New Jersey that offers counseling and other services outside the Department of Veterans Affairs hospital system — had 3,300 visits from veterans in 2003, the first year of the Iraq War; it had 7,300 visits last year. “It’s coming now, and it’s going to keep coming, and each of those people is going to have tentacles reaching to kids and family and other people.”

The tentacles grow slowly, as Mr. Gordon, 64, knows from his own war. He came home from Vietnam in 1966 with a Bronze Star, a habit of sleeping with the lights on, and a restless mind populated with memories of friends who had died in those patrols and battles near Pleiku.
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