The Effects of Combat

 I had a PTSD episode about a week ago in the middle of the night and it scared me into thinking how much physical damage I could unknowingly cause my partner. I started to do a little research. I was surprised to find that the prevalence of PTSD among Vietnam veterans was far above the rate for more recent conflicts: VN=30%; Gulf War=12%' Iraq=11-20%; Afghanistan=11-20%. I am now 84 years old, and it has only been within the last 10 years or so that I have accepted that I have PTSD. It just wasn't something that a tough Special Forces soldier admitted to, either to himself or others. I spent five years fighting the wars in southeast asia, many of those performing clandestine operations into Laos, Cambodia, South Vietnam, Thailand, and yes, even (mostly) North Vietnam. At least three of those years my country still doesn't admit to having had combat troops in the area. The men (boys really) we lost or who were badly injured were officially reported as having been so as a result of training accidents at Fort Bragg, NC, Fort Gulick, CZ or other non-combat training areas. The effects of my PTSD didn't show up until well after my 30-year retirement from the military. It is so strange that the medical community didn't formally recognize PTSD as a thing until 1980. Homer's epic, The Odyssey is exactly about a man cannot return home the same man after his Odysseus. And Sophocles continually emphasized the idea that war changes, even destroys, the men who fought it. Many more recent authors, thinkers, and filmmakers have emphasized the fact that the man who returns from war is not the same man who left. Combat rewires a person. It changes men at a deep psychological level. And the homecoming, more often than not, piles onto war's trauma.