From Rand Corp. research
About 18.5 percent of US soldiers who served in Afghanistan and Iraq currently have PTSD or depression. 19.5 percent report traumatic brain injuries.
An estimated 31 percent of troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan have a mental health condition or reported experiencing a TBI (Traumatic Brain Injury)
About 300,000 currently suffer from PTSD or major depression
About 320,000 reported experiencing TBI during deployment
Worse, about half don’t ask for help for fear of hurting their military career or being called a slacker. For those that do ask, half of those get “minimally adequate care”
This is appalling. What is happening to the troops over there and why is their medical treatment so substandard?
The price of allowing war to become a business is the devaluation of
human life for all parties in the action. Soldiers actually go to war for economic reasons.They need the GI bill to go to school, they want the guaranteed regular paycheck. They dont believe the military and governmental rhetoric because it is obviously not true that the US and associated countries are promoting democracy,fighting dictators, or liberating women. Nor is it credible that the US military would be killing and displacing massive numbers of civilians in the militarily disadvantaged countries the US is attacking for anything other than the interests of wealthy corporate elites in the US and its associates. The US and its associate countries internationally are using war to promote business interests. Soldiers know this, civilians in occupied countries know this.
As a result soldiers feel they do not matter, and they know the helpless men,women and children in the countries they invade do not matter either. All the adulatory rhetoric heaped on returning US soldiers like bandaids is like snow hitting the fevered brows of those who know they are being lied to.However sad the plight of soldiers who must live with what they have done to helpless trapped people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere, it is less tragic than the horrible degradation,violence and abuse the men, women and children of those countries live and die in because Americans allow their government to make a business of
mass murders for profit in total disregard for the humanity of their victims. No lie can hide the bodies of those victims or what they show about the motives of Americans and their associates.