The Other Costs of War

We'll start off with an excerpt from the late, great George Carlin:

I don't like words that hide the truth. I don't words that conceal reality. I don't like euphemisms, or euphemistic language. And American English is loaded with euphemisms. Cause Americans have a lot of trouble dealing with reality. Americans have trouble facing the truth, so they invent the kind of a soft language to protest themselves from it, and it gets worse with every generation. For some reason, it just keeps getting worse. I'll give you an example of that. There's a condition in combat. Most people know about it. It's when a fighting person's nervous system has been stressed to it's absolute peak and maximum. Can't take anymore input. The nervous system has either (click) snapped or is about to snap. In the first world war, that condition was called shell shock. Simple, honest, direct language. Two syllables, shell shock. Almost sounds like the guns themselves. That was seventy years ago. Then a whole generation went by and the second world war came along and very same combat condition was called battle fatigue. Four syllables now. Takes a little longer to say. Doesn't seem to hurt as much. Fatigue is a nicer word than shock. Shell shock! Battle fatigue. Then we had the war in Korea, 1950. Madison avenue was riding high by that time, and the very same combat condition was called operational exhaustion. Hey, were up to eight syllables now! And the humanity has been squeezed completely out of the phrase. It's totally sterile now. Operational exhaustion. Sounds like something that might happen to your car. Then of course, came the war in Viet Nam, which has only been over for about sixteen or seventeen years, and thanks to the lies and deceits surrounding that war, I guess it's no surprise that the very same condition was called post-traumatic stress disorder. Still eight syllables, but we've added a hyphen! And the pain is completely buried under jargon. Post-traumatic stress disorder. I'll bet you if we'd of still been calling it shell shock, some of those Viet Nam veterans might have gotten the attention they needed at the time. I'll betcha. I'll betcha.

And that's how the term PTSD was born. The New York Times Week In Review covers the issue with respect to the Fort Hood killer, Major Nidal Hasan, as well as veterans returning from our two current wars. Below I have included some statistics on shell-shock from an article in the Philadephia Mental Health Examiner:

1. The U.S Department of Veterans Affairs reports that 6-11% of Afghanistan war veterans and 12-20% of Iraq war veterans suffer from shell-shock.

2. These numbers increase upon redeployment. As we have seen in DailyKos tribute posts, many soldiers today serve anywhere from three to five tours of duty. For those serving three deployments, the rate of shell-shock is 12-27%.

3. Veterans suffering from shell-shock are four times more likely to report suicidal thoughts than veterans not suffering from the condition.

4. Since the War on Terror began, there have been almost 700 suicides among active military personnel, double the rate of previous decades.

5. Fort Hood, the site of the ghastly shooting spree, has lost over 75 soldiers to suicide since the War on Terror began, including ten this year (second to Fort Campbell, which has lost 16 soldiers to suicide in 2009).