Coming Home: A Field Guide (Part 1)

(This is the first blog from my weeks-long series I will be posting as a sort of how to guide for the challenges of coming home. The series is divided up into three sections: governmental care for the veteran, how the community (friends, family and others) can help veterans, and suggestions for how veterans can focus their spirit and mind for overcoming their specific personal struggles)

To create a list of issues that veterans might face after returning from war would be impossible. Understanding even just a basic human psychology would be a difficult proposition, so one could imagine just how trivial of exercise it would be in elucidating the mind in reaction to the many traumas of war.

The Veteran’s Affairs’ own website, www.va.gov, tries to do this in their healthcare index, with what I would call a comical effect if it wasn’t such a serious issue. They only list three things under their index of health care under letter “C: Common Conditions for OEF and OIF Veterans.” And those are PTSD, depression and Military Sexual Trauma (MST). Despite my sardonic tone here, it is not my intention to excoriate the Veteran’s Affairs Administration here or anywhere else. I don’t think that their bureaucracy is intentionally evil -- I just don’t think that anyone was really prepared to deal with the numbers of injuries and issues that have resulted from these protracted wars. It’s a new situation that everyone has to try to adapt to – America has not been in two wars at once for this long, ever – and bureaucracies simply are not conducive to change. (Think here, for example, your state’s MVA, or dealing with the IRS or applying for social security benefits.)

Three main issues? Can that possibly be the case? Another organization, The Coalition for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans – “a national non-partisan partnership of organizations committed to working with and on behalf of all military, veterans, families, survivors and providers to strengthen the existing system of care and support for all those affected by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan” – address their thoughts on this issue on their website. “Invisible wounds” are what they consider to be some of the biggest challenges facing the current generation of war veterans: Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI); chronic pain; and again, depression and PTSD. According to their documentation, “because of improvements in evacuation techniques, body armor, and battlefield medicine, many who would have died can now be saved …many of these wounds are often accompanied by relentless physical pain, and may often be complicated by Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Depression.”

Indeed, the government and the non-partisan organization seem to agree: in addition to the physical wounds, the unseen injuries of battle among the combat population group are multiplying as well.

According to www.icasualties.org , a website that catalogues the human toll of the Global War on Terror, 37,277 U.S. service members have been wounded so far (a number that will rise tomorrow) and it is likely that many of them will have negative psychological reactions to their injuries. And to mix those numbers with the data maintained by The Department of Veteran’s Affairs, National Center for PTSD , which state a probable PTSD prevalence of 14% among the 1.8 million veterans of the contemporary wars, or 252,000 veterans, you can imagine the scope of these psychological problems.

Because of the realities and challenges in even just interpreting the basic plight of our nations war veterans, I will focus much of my reporting on PTSD and the other mental conditions of combat stress; but I will also highlight, the lesser known “invisible wounds” of war, like Military Sexual Trauma, which affects veterans too.

I must admit, now that I’ve begun my research for this undertaking, I can see how the general malaise and confusion about how to approach the desire and intent of helping veterans keeps getting exacerbated by everyone it seems. Everyone wants to help. No one, it appears, quite knows how. I hope to be accurate-yet-brief in the following sections of my field guide. I hope to be compassionate and wise in helping lead other veterans (and those that care about them) in a positive direction with what I uncover.

As always feel free to offer up your own unique experiences. Help my research become much better with your true stories too.

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