PTSD and the Discharge Status of Vietnam Veterans

We Bleed Too: Tony Bush, PTSD and the Discharge Status of Vietnam Veterans
Huffington Post
K. J. Wetherholt
Posted: 11/03/2013

They were shooting machine gun fire at us, tracers coming at us at nighttime just like a war zone. We had some Vietnam vets with us, and they said, "Man, this is just like Vietnam."

- Jim Robideau, American Indian Movement (AIM), about the Wounded Knee Incident (1973) on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in The American Experience: We Shall Remain (PBS)

The Oglala Lakota of the Pine Ridge Reservation, one of six recognized Lakota reservations, has, as a nation, been one of the more historically powerful avatars of the Native American experience in the United States, both in terms of the long-term struggle for cultural survival, and because of a warrior tradition that remains deeply ingrained in the tribe's culture.

Despite the U.S. government having traditionally subjugated, marginalized, and even committed genocide against the Lakota, members of the Oglala nation have served in every branch of the service both before and since the Snyder Act (1924) and the Nationality Act of 1940 made Native Americans legal U.S. Citizens.

However, members of the Lakota who have served in the U.S. armed forces have been veterans of not just one kind of conflict, but two.

One has been the longer, more sustained siege historically against the Lakota, from the armed conquest of land originally belonging to the Sioux nations, to the usurping of mineral and other natural resource rights, to continued resistance regarding the right to maintain Lakota language, traditions, and cultural identity, epitomized by the American Indian Movement (AIM) in the 1970's, including during the Wounded Knee Incident in 1973 (recently commemorated this year on its 40th anniversary), and the face-off between members of AIM and U.S. Marshalls in 1975.
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We Bleed Too from Warriors from the Reservation on Vimeo.