In Memory of my Dad... - Democratic Underground

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Sun May-25-08 04:20 PM
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In Memory of my Dad...

and all who have suffered. The Legacy of War.

Reevaluating Society's Perception of Shell Shock:
By Annessa Cathleen Stagner West Texas State University

The combination of traditional fighting techniques and new technology in World War I forced both soldiers and officers to face devastating situations that tested not only their courage, but also their mental strength as well. While society had taught men to be tough and brave at all times, many broke upon enduring the horrifying environment of the trenches. It is obvious that men's ability to hold on to such an extreme ideal of manhood was unrealistic; however, many men tried. Jessica Meyers quoted Private Miles, who explained his emotional conflict saying, "I was frightened out of my life at nighttime. I was jellified, but I was more afraid of people knowing that I was afraid-- just a sort of bravado-- I mustn't show them I was afraid." <1> Like private Miles, many men tried to suppress their emotions, stay in control, and live up society's standard of masculinity. The devastating impact of war on soldiers, however, quickly forced society to confront the inability of soldiers to maintain society's idealistic courage. Some returning soldiers suffered through nightmares, while others suffered physically, exhibiting nervous twitches, blindness, or limb dysfunction. <2> In 1915, physician C. S. Myers unknowingly acknowledged the result of soldier's mental conflict between idealistic courage and survival leading to a form of nervous disorder, which he termed shell shock. <3>

While the government did not intend to allow shell shock to hold any legitimacy among its troops, experienced soldiers' and officers' traumatic experiences convinced to advocate for proper treatment of the shell-shocked soldiers. Virtually ignoring the existence of shell shock within common soldiers initially, Peter Leese suggested the government proceeded to improve treatment only as a result of strong public opinion.
http://www.wfa-usa.org/new/shellshock.htm

●-Michael C.C. Adams, The Best War Ever: America and World War II About 25-30 percent of WWII casualties were psychological cases; under very sever conditions that number could reach as high as 70-80 percent. In Italy, mental problems accounted for 56 percent of total casualties. On Okinawa, where fighting conditions were particularly horrific, 7,613 Americans died, 31,807 sustained physical wounds, and 26, 221 were mental casualties.-Adams, 95
Trying to repress feelings, they drank, gambled suffered paralyzing depression, and became inarticulately violent. A paratrooper’s wife would “sit for hours and just hold him when he shook.”
Afterward, he started beating her and the children: “He became a brute.” And they divorced —-Adams, 150

Haunted
by Mark D. Van Ells
Did the soldiers of the Good War really come home psychologically unscathed by the horror and stress they experienced? Or did they simply suffer in silence?
by Mark D. Van Ells

For many, continued exposure to combat conditions wore them down. "It was not going into battle the one time, but the going back again and again, that finally got to you," " a sailor from the USS Yorktown told Jones in a Honolulu bar in May 1942. A navy veteran from Texas compared his service on a destroyer off the Tokyo mainland during the Okinawa campaign to a death sentence:

They strap him in the electric chair, he can see the warden's hand on the switch, he knows he is going to die, and he waits all day. Then at the end of the day they come and get him, take him back to his cell, and all night the other prisoners try to kill him. The next day they come get him and strap him in the chair and he expects to die again--this goes on and on day and night for three months....
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Despite the host of conflicting opinions about battle fatigue, few people questioned that combat had profound effects on the minds of soldiers. "We were all psychotic, inmates of the greatest madhouse of history," claimed Manchester. Two psychiatrists who worked with veterans after the war noted that "mild traumatic states...are almost universal among combat troops immediately after battle."

Some aspects of war are timeless. The emotional trauma it causes is one of them
http://www.americainwwii.com/stories/haunted.htm

I've seen bodies ripped to pieces by bullets, blown into millions of scraps by bombs, and pierced by booby traps. I’ve smelled the stench of bodies burned. I’ve heard the air sound like it was boiling from rounds flying back and forth. I’ve lived an insanity others should never live..."
-- Dennis Tenety, Fire in the Hole----

Da Nang, Vietnam. A young Marine private waits on the beach during the Marine landing. 08/03/1965

Battle Continues Over Vietnam PTSD Numbers
By Amanda Gardner HealthDay Reporter
http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=83448
THURSDAY, Aug. 23 (HealthDay News) -- Decades after the last U.S. troops departed Vietnam, the debate still rages on how many veterans of that conflict suffered or still suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder
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Last August, a paper published in the prestigious journal Science downgraded the estimated percentage of Vietnam veterans suffering from PTSD to an 18.7 percent lifetime prevalence rate and 9.2 percent current rate. The variance, the authors stated, was due to differences in how they defined PTSD.

But perhaps more important, according to the authors, the Science paper confirmed a strong "dose/response relationship" between the severity of exposure to war-related stressors and PTSD. And they did not find any evidence for exaggeration in veterans' reports, a claim which had been made by some critics of the original estimates.
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Somewhere in all this heated back-and-forth, Dohrenwend contends that the main messages of his 2006 paper have been lost.

"The most important results have been underemphasized, and that is the dose/response relationship, and that's about as close as you can come to a causal relationship," he said. "The other thing is the rate of 1-in-5 war-related onset of PTSD and 1-in-10 still current after the war of impairing PTSD. That is far from trivial. This is a heavy cost by any count"

The observations of Pettera, Johnson, and Zimmer are of striking importance since they came extremely close to the first comprehensive description in Vietnam of what was later defined as PTSD.<8> For this reason it is worth quoting extensively from a section of their article (p. 674).

The syndrome we call Vietnam combat reaction should be classified as a neurosis by virtue of being precipitated by repeated severe psychic trauma and developing over a relative prolonged period of time. . . . Another distinctive trait of this syndrome is the nearly identical case histories of its development from men of widely separated units whose only common denominator is participating in combat in Vietnam.

Interestingly, the least amount of data found on the various termed mental injuries, was the data on the Vietnam war. Instead of war-related, the Post Vietnam Syndrome seems to have been caused by poor discipline and the lack of public support on their return from war. Not surprising there is still a debate about the numbers of Vietnam Veterans that experience, or are still experiencing results from that particular causation.

Vietnam War Veterans Win Legal Victory
(July 20, 2007)--Vietnam War veterans who were exposed to Agent Orange and contracted a form of leukemia have won a legal victory.

A federal appeals court in San Francisco has ordered the Department of Veterans Affairs to pay retroactive benefits to those veterans.

It's not yet known how much the department would have to pay under the order or how many veterans would be affected.

The VA agreed in 2003 to extend benefits to Vietnam vets diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia, known as CLL, which has been linked to Agent Orange exposure.

But the VA did not re-examine previous claims from veterans suffering from the ailment, nor did it pay them retroactive benefits, which was at the heart of the dispute.
http://www.kwtx.com/nationalnews/headlines/8626847.html
http://www.geschichteinchronologie.ch/as/vietnam/vietnamkrieg-fotos.html

What is Agent Orange?
http://hss.co.san-bernardino.ca.us/va/1-AgentOrange.htm

Gulf War Syndrome: http://www.cfs-news.org/gulfwar.htm
The Pentagon denies that U.S. soldiers were exposed to chemical and biological warfare agents during the Gulf war, but its own records contradict the official line.

Spec. 1st Class Dean Lundholm, of the National Guard's 649th Military Police Company, was assigned to guard duty at the Hafar Al Batin POW camp near the Iraq-Kuwait border. He was in the shower when the Scud landed. Amid the wail of activated chemical warfare alarms, he dashed naked, holding his breath, through the open air to where his protective gear was stored. Soon after, he fell into a three-day coma. Now he is diagnosed as having Gulf War Syndrome.

Lundholm came home to a blaze of post-war hyperpatriotism and technophilia, as the allied powers gloated over among many other things their astoundingly low casualty figures. The number tossed around at the time was indeed minuscule: about 150 dead for the allies, contrasted against as many as 100,000 Iraqi corpses.
Yet now, four years after war's end, the euphoria seems premature. Tens of thousands of Gulf War personnel have come down with one or more of a number of disabling and life-threatening medical conditions collectively known as Gulf War Syndrome (GWS). The syndrome's cause is unclear, but veterans and researchers have focused on the elements of a toxic chemical soup in the war zone that includes insecticides, pesticides, various preventive medicines given experimentally to GIs, and smoke from the burning oilfields of Iraq and Kuwait.

There is also reliable evidence that one of its causes is exposure to low levels of chemical and biological warfare (CBW) agents during the war. According to a variety of sources, including just declassified Marine Corps battlefield Command
Chronologies and After Action Reports, widespread exposure to CBW agents occurred when U.S.-led forces bombed Iraqi chemical facilities, and during direct attacks by the Iraqis.
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WHY DENY IT?
At first glance, it seems counterintuitive for the U.S. to downplay CBW exposure, especially if it can be blamed on Saddam Hussein. Yet there are good reasons for the U.S. government to stonewall. To admit that CBW exposures occurred means the government must address some uncomfortable issues, such as the
military's inability to protect U.S. forces from CBW agents. But with U.S. troops possibly facing lingering contaminants as they carry out training exercises in the region, silence could be deadly.
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In the five years leading up to the Gulf War, the Commerce Department licensed more than $1.5 billion of strategically sensitive U.S. exports to Iraq, from companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Honeywell, Rockwell, and Tektronix. Many of these dual use exports were delivered directly to chemical and nuclear plants in Iraq. The Riegle committee found that some of the materials the Iraqis had in their storage dumps, and which they used to create their CBW capability, came from U.S. corporations.

By the time of the invasion of Kuwait, the Pentagon knew Iraq had developed CBW weapons and that its biological warfare program was the most advanced in the Arab world. Large-scale production of these agents began in 1989 at four facilities near Baghdad, and Iraq had developed delivery systems, including aerial bombs, artillery, rockets, and surface-to-surface missiles. A more prosaic contribution to the cover-up probably resides in the military bureaucracy's eternal instinct to cover itself in the face of any problem or scandal.

In an attempt to get at the source of their medical problems, and as a way to sidestep prohibitions against suing the government for injuries resulting from exposure to CBW weapons, veterans filed a billion-dollar class action lawsuit against the companies including Bechtel, M.W. Kellogg, Dresser Industries, and Interchem Inc. that peddled these deadly technologies to Iraq. The suit, filed last November in federal court in Galveston, Texas, could break new ground, holding companies liable in cases in which third parties use their products to cause bodily harm or death. Vic Silvester of Odessa, Texas, is a plaintiff in the suit. His 24-year-old son James was deployed near Scud missile attack sites, and he now suffers a variety of disabling medical conditions including nerve damage, rashes, severe headaches, and chronic fatigue. He can't sleep. He goes to the store and can't remember what to get, Silvester says of his son. And he gets no disability. The companies that made the chemical-biologicals should pay.
While it is at least theoretically possible to hold corporations accountable, the government and the military are legally immune from financial liability. But the potential political liabilities are enormous. Admitting that the U.S. role in arming Iraq eventually resulted in U.S. veterans suffering the torments of exposure to debilitating toxins is a prospect the Pentagon is so far unwilling to face.
http://mediafilter.org/caq/Caq53.gws.html

Overview of Combat Stress Control
Field Manual No. 22-51: Leaders' Manual for Combat Stress Control: Booklet 1
Headquarters, Department of the Army, Washington, DC

1-6. The Potential High-Tech Battlefield
United States Army planners have predicted what future high-tech combat could entail. This was demonstrated in the recent past with the world's confrontation with Iraq over the seizure of Kuwait. Based on the current world situation, such future battles are not unthinkable. The unprecedented debilitating effects of battlefield in the twenty-first century will demand even more attention to the preparation of soldiers, crews, and leaders for combat hardships. In such battlefields, the soldier will face many challenges.
http://www.ptsdsupport.net/overview_of_Combat_Stress_Control.htm