One in four soldiers suffer from..

per a WaPo writeup..signs of anxiety, depression or acute stress, according to an official Army survey. Of course these are soldiers that are sent to Iraq for the third or fourth time..which is the bulk of them. As I noted in another post on the topic this weekend on troop strength, Bushie has promised to shorten deployment times from 15 to 12 months.

Somehow, I do not see that doing a lot to help the soldiers cope with the PTSD..does anyone else with two fucking brain cells to rub together? From the WaPo writeup:

Among the 513,000 active-duty soldiers who have served in Iraq since the invasion of 2003, more than 197,000 have deployed more than once, and more than 53,000 have deployed three or more times, according to a separate set of statistics provided this week by Army personnel officers. The percentage of troops sent back to Iraq for repeat deployments would have to increase in the months ahead.

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Lives and Families Destroyed-Part 1

Continuing from yesterday, another installment in Lives and Families Destroyed from those wonderful folks at the Coalition for a Democratic America, including Uncle Abe, Siren’s resident historian~Dusty

BY Abe, Donatra, PraetorOne, and Kyle

PART I: GETTING BACK IN THE SADDLE AGAIN WHEN YOU SHOULDN’T

In the early 1800s they called it “exhaustion.” In World War I they called it “Soldiers Heart,” “the Effort Syndrome,” and finally “Shell Shock.” In World War II it was called “Combat Fatigue,” only to undergo yet another transformation in 1952, when the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) referred to it as “Stress Response Syndrome” caused by “gross stress reaction.” During the Vietnam conflict, in 1968, it was melded into a section about situational disorders. And, as an interesting side note, it should be stated that those Vietnam Veterans who suffered from “Stress Response Syndrome” actually suffered from a preexisting condition if that condition lasted longer than six months–a slick way to avoid paying Veterans benefits. It wasn’t until the 1980s that the third edition of the DSM (DSM III) used the current term of identification, and in 1994 the DSM IV categorized it as new type of stress disorder, still listed under the heading of Anxiety Disorders.

We are of course talking about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, a condition which the overstretched military currently and conveniently believes can be cured by taking traumatized Iraq veterans and pushing them back into combat situations. Translated into modern English, Military psychiatrists seem to have confused PTSD with phobic reactions and are foolishly encouraging young veterans to get back in the proverbial saddle again.

Imagine if you will, that you have eaten a bad hotdog and have become violently ill. Imagine further, that you go to your doctor and that your doctor has told you to eat another hot dog. Well, that’s what is happening in Iraq as Military Doctors are using traumatized soldiers as psychological guinea pigs in a thinly disguised effort to maintain troop levels, and quite possibly to prevent Iraq War Veterans from cashing in on deserved benefits here at home. In either event this so called treatment flies in the face of morality and rational thinking and it certainly makes a mockery out of the Hippocratic Oath.

To understand how foolish this controversial treatment really is we might want to take a look at the highly varied symptoms of the beast that we refer to as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder:

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