In all wars, soldiers who lost limbs were welcomed home as heroes. Their mentally scarred buddies were shunned and pitied. That cruel stigma continues to burden veterans suffering from post traumatic stress disorder.
A wounded infantryman, captured by the Germans in World War II, could not erase the experience from his mind after he came home to work in his father’s automobile agency. He committed suicide two months later.
A veteran fighter pilot in Korea taxied to the end of a runway for his 30th sortie, but could not bring himself to open the throttle and takeoff. He was sent home. “Had I been shot down I’d have been a hero,” he said. “But I had the shakes and went home in shame.”
A Marine who served two combat tours in Vietnam came home a mental wreck, and for 20 years rampaged through dozens of menial jobs and three brief, unfortunate marriages before he was diagnosed with PTSD and put in a Veteran’s Hospital in Denver. He still receives weekly VA counseling with a dozen other Vietnam veterans in Cambridge.
“After combat, a soldier wants to go home, not to some hospital,” he said. “And if he admits he has screaming nightmares and tremors during the day, he knows he’ll be a marked man, whether he stays in service or tries to get a civilian job. One of my pals said we’re ‘lepers without lesions’. I agree.”
Only in recent days have military commanders sent condolence letters to families of veterans who took their own lives, whether in a combat zone or after returning to the United States. That negative attitude toward mental distress has delayed evaluation of brain-damaged veterans and contributed directly to an increase in suicides, family violence, broken homes and homelessness.
Since 2005 the Veterans Administration, Walter Reed Hospital Center and the Pentagon have promised to speed diagnostic and rehabilitative services for veterans with PTSD. It hasn’t happened. The unconscionable waiting time, even to receive evaluation, much less rehabilitation, affirms stigma’s power.
“Frankly, I’m dismayed that a whole new generation of veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan fare little better than we did when we came home from Vietnam 40 years ago,” said the Marine combat veteran. “It’s inexcusable.”
William Schoenhard, the VA’s deputy undersecretary for health operations and management, agrees the VA has not been as quick as it should have been, and that simply tracking only the time it takes for new patients to get their first appointment is unacceptable.
George Arana, VA’s acting assistant deputy undersecretary for clinical operations, apologized for delays that spawned hundreds of horror stories across the country when he testified last week before the Senate Veteran’s Affairs Committee, chaired by Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.).
Stigma has placed a heavy burden on brain-damaged veterans in every conflict and motivated soldiers to deny their illness, knowing admission would diminish any chance of promotion should they stay in the military, and be detrimental to civilian employment should they leave.
Apologies from VA’s mid-level administrators don’t solve the long-festering problem. Only a mandate from the president, the VA administrator and Murray can break through the logjam of pending cases and give top priority to treating the signature wound of the Iraqi and Afghan wars: brain damage.
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Carlton E. Spitzer
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