Support the Troops, Screw the Veterans — Part II
Nick was never the same after Vietnam. He would lapse into deep depressions. He let his teeth go, chain smoked cigarettes and pot and drank way too much booze, fought with his wife and would leave home for days at a time after suffering nightmares about the people that he had killed and seen killed.
I was one of the few people who knew about Nick’s Vietnam experience. It was horrific — skippering a Navy river boat that patrolled the Mekong River.
You know what I’m talking about if you’ve seen “Apocalypse Now.” Nick lived it.
It helped that Nick was married to a drug counselor who worked with psychiatrists, and he was diagnosed fairly early on with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from his Vietnam experience. Even with the military’s tough standards, he was an obvious candidate for 100 percent disability and got it with little hassle.
Nick couldn’t hold a job, although he did remarry and was house husband to two children. But the demons that he brought home from the war were never far away and he battled them until his lungs packed in from cigarettes at age 60.
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4 Responses to “Support the Troops, Screw the Veterans — Part II”
I know several people who depend on the VA for their care.
Damned straight. It VA often is the medical system of last resort for a lot of vets, including middle-class vets, because of the ongoing collapse of what passes for a health-care insurance system in the U.S.
My friend Nick would have been SOL without the VA.
One reason that the major expansion of the VA health care system is a vital necessity is that our doctors in Iraq are so good. Because of their skill and modern technology more soldiers are surviving wounds that would have been fatal in previous wars. But the wounds they are often left with will require ongoing care for years. It’s one of the reasons that fatality counts aren’t the most accurate gauge of the real cost to Americans of the Iraq war.
Jim S:
Excellent point.