SwiftVets.com

[Al_Hawaii]

I found this in the Early Bird today.

New York Post
December 19, 2004

Return Of The 'Wacko-Vet' Myth


Is a new generation of crazed, suicidal and otherwise dysfunctional veter ans about to be unleashed on an unsuspecting homefront population? The answer is yes — but only if you believe a recent front-page New York Times story.

According to the paper, tens of thousands of vets are returning from Iraq "with serious mental-health problems brought on by the stress and carnage of war."

The number of soldiers eventually requiring treatment for "post-traumatic stress disorder" or the like, says The Times, could top 100,000.

If that conjures up the image of the Vietnam vet — unable to cope with life and threatening either to kill himself or to "go postal" on innocent folks — well, it's probably meant to.

But that stereotype was also a news-media lie to begin with.

Sure, even the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine bought into the canard, publishing a 1986 study claiming that Vietnam vets were 86 percent more likely to commit suicide than non-veterans.

But as former Navy Secretary James Webb has written, that study was deeply flawed — and politically skewed — "junk science" that was nevertheless lapped up by the network news broadcasts.

So it's no real comfort that the same publication has come up with a new study assessing the mental health of infantry troops both before and after service in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Another report on the psychological toll of the war was prepared by the Center for American Progress, a left-wing think tank.

Don't get us wrong here: Wars — all wars — take a psychological toll on those who fight them. That's been true throughout history.

And some factors in the current fighting are indeed different from previous conflicts, though even this has been exaggerated: Troops in World War II, for example, also ended up serving for years without knowing when they'd be sent home.

We don't mean to belittle the psychological trauma that war can — and, sadly, does — produce. But the myth of the dysfunctional vet that began with Vietnam has been created and spread, in large measure, by groups bitterly opposed to all U.S. military action.

The idea is to discredit the war by citing what they claim is the terrible, lasting toll it produces — and the subsequent demands on an already strapped health-care system.

Using American soldiers who are risking their lives daily as pawns to score political points is despicable.

This latest attempt at myth-making needs to be challenged and discredited before it becomes, once again, received wisdom.
_________________
Aloha,
Al

Viet Nam 71/72
Persian Gulf 90/91

[Al_Hawaii]

Sorry, this is a duplicate of an earlier post.

http://www.swiftvets.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=17902
_________________
Aloha,
Al

Viet Nam 71/72
Persian Gulf 90/91