There's over 1 MILLION DEAD IRAQIS who don't have to worry about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder....

However, over 4 Million displaced Iraqis who do have to worry about PTSD....

MSM would have you believe the average Iraqi citizen doesn't exist or have any grievances....

Murdering innocent people will do that to ya.

Yeah right, stress and alcoholism. Try being an Iraqi, raped, family wiped out, home demolished, done nothing wrong but be born an Iraqi.

If you sign up to go and illegally invade and kill, don't whine about stress. Jail should be the future.

Jassim I feel bad for both the soldiers and the Iraqis. A lot of those soldiers were guardsmen and signed up to get a college education only to find themselves in Iraq. Let's blame the administration chickenhawks for this one!

This is news! Has there eve been a time where soldiers go to war and return happy and satisfied?

WWI, WWII, Vietnam, etc... Why would the Iraq war be any different? I think an overall study of the mental health of government leaders is in order. We need to determine the mental predisposition of politicians and institutionalize the ones that favor war over diplomacy.

I am ashamed and stressed and angry and I'm not even over there.

At least the oligarchy is happy.

jassim:

If it was your son that signed up without your consent, would you just tell him to stop whining? Come on. I feel some of that irony as well, but can't judge them all so harshly, being aware of the poverty draft, poor state of education in this society, the violence in our culture, and the young age at which so many do sign up. In fact, all Americans, unless they were in jail on the day of the Iraq invasion, have blood on their hands.
Anger is good when placed well, which is often hard to do. Channel a little more of that energy to those who really are responsible.

I participated in the resistance to the Vietnam war and faced prison rather than submission to the draft. While it's true that many of those drafted were victims of poverty and the lack of educational opportunities, many more went to war who should have known better. I believed then and do so now that we are all responsible for our own actions. We are what we do.

"Prolonged periods in conflict are linked to higher levels of post-traumatic stress disorder, psychological distress and problems at home, researchers report in the British Medical Journal online."

Yes, that is because war and military life are poison to the human organism. It doesn't work, and we need another way to live in the world!

"If you sign up to go and illegally invade and kill, don't whine about stress. Jail should be the future."

So let's disenfranchise our troops as if they haven't been disenfranchised enough let alone duped.

Jail should be the future for this administration, not the people underneath.

Ordinary Iraqis and Americans have both been victims in all of this.

Hell, I work with a guy that served. He's miserable and not long ago got a DUI.

misanthrope:

I hope I'm not one of the anthropes that your mis-ing, but, as I asked Jassim:
"If it was your son that signed up without your consent, would you just tell him to stop whining?"

Why shouldn't "the troops" be disenfranchised? I wonder how the millions of homeless Iraqi refugees feel right now, on the brink of starving to death somewhere in the dangerous, lonely desert? But oh no, I wouldn't want to discourage the invading army from busting in on homes in the middle of the night and killing more people.

They worry about stress? Every ground pounder who has been to Iraq for only one day is a dead man walking. The radiation readings there range up to 2,000 times above normal. Normal for DU is zero.

Of the 600,000 troops who were in the First Gulf War, over 400,000 are suffering from what the government calls the Gulf War Syndome and they are now permanently disabled. Actually it is radiaton poisoning from inhaling microscopic specks of depleted uranium isotopes. Many have already died, the others will be dead at any time within the next twenty years. These are still young men and wemon. Most of the chrlden born ot them are born with serious medical problems, like brain damage, missing limbs, eyes, sex organs, and or have autism or diabetes.

Please do not accept my words as gospel. read this website.

http://usinfo.state.gov/media/archives/2006/jan/12-623470.html

One of the under-reported stories of the last 40 years was the disproportionate number of Vietnam vets who made up the ranks of homeless, depressed and incarcerated.

We'll be paying for the domestic aftershocks of Iraq for decades--even if Kem is wrong about DU.

misanthrope asks:

"If it was your son that signed up without your consent, would you just tell him to stop whining?"

Yes I absolutely would. This illegal invasion was a wickedness - and a continuing one - of historic proportions. Infact Nuremberg's 'supreme international crime.'

I would also ask him how many widows, widowers and orphans he left behind, how many destroyed homes, how many bodies.

Kem is absolutely right re DU - only the DOD and MOD in UK are trying to cover up because of another wickedness of enormity which condemns generations yet unborn, not alone the living.

jassim:

"Yes I absolutely would."

I don't believe that for a minute. Just being here on the CommonDreams website, I know you are a person that cares a lot about the suffering of the oppressed. I refer you to the Milgram and Zimbardo experiments at Stanford on how evil actions can come from the most average, "good" people. Dr. Zimbardo has a very informative website at lucifereffect.org. The system that produces people that commit such actions are THE ROOT CAUSE. People must be held accountable for war crimes (not like they do now where no one of high rank is prosecuted), but can't we at the same time be compassionate to people who are really victims as well? I would save my anger for those that sent these "men" to do those deeds FIRST before letting loose on my troubled son.

The sad truth is that it proves so ostensibly that WAR is NEVER worth it... never worth the blood and treasure. Just as studies done on torture show, unconscionable actions justify the victim and the perpetrator. If you were watching this as a sci-fi movie, the symbolism would be overwhelming... that this huge gaping wound to mankind gushing BLOOD is taking place in of all places the Cradle of civilization, the revered birthplace of three of the world's most established religions. What does this say about the belief systems? When the Arabs speak of oil as a "soft loan from Allah," it's more than a metaphor. Suppose the very substance that is necessary for greasing the joints of prosperous economies happens to exist on a "spiritual fault line." This puzzle asks mankind to look closely at its value systems. Do the religions learn to share, to find common ground, to equitably distribute necessary resources, perhaps cutting back the economies of those regions that are given to waste and using FAR more than their needed or fair share? Or do they invest in weapons and turn their fortune into the killing fields; where by virtue of enormous investment in technologies THAT kill, the detritus is so lethal, that NO ONE'S offspring will benefit. In other words by choosing conflict this time, there IS no victor... the end of the age of oil is also the end of the Piscean Age. Pisces = the sea, the bed of those organic sediments that have provided us with oil. It is time for NEW energy systems, new belief systems that transcend the ism divisions that otherwise are bound to tear this earth and its people irreparably asunder. As an English major who dissected novels and short stories based on the metaphors the authors chose to deploy, I assure you, this is humanity's story and it's wise to look deeper at the symbolic language it is writ in.

So, do the troops there abuse any poppy derived substances? I hear ever since the "liberation" they grow more poppies than ever there, and in nearby countries.
If I were there, I would FIND the stuff, to escape, and hopefuly get kicked out, after failing a piss test.

What is unique about this? Veterans of every war have suffered from stress. I think veterans should be treated for the disabilities they incurred and I thoroughly deplore the efforts of the Bush gang to deprive vets of treatment for PTSD by calling it preexisting personality disorder.
But we short change our veterans of other wars by saying that Iraq is somehow unique.

srelf writes of my assertion that 'Yes I absolutely would' abandon my own son, re Iraq, actions and ptsd and further:

'I don't believe that for a minute. Just being here on the CommonDreams website, I know you are a person that cares a lot about the suffering of the oppressed. I refer you to the Milgram and Zimbardo experiments at Stanford on how evil actions can come from the most average, "good" people. Dr. Zimbardo has a very informative website at lucifereffect.org. The system that produces people that commit such actions are THE ROOT CAUSE. People must be held accountable for war crimes (not like they do now where no one of high rank is prosecuted), but can't we at the same time be compassionate to people who are really victims as well? I would save my anger for those that sent these "men" to do those deeds FIRST before letting loose on my troubled son.'

With respect, I meant exactly what I said. If my son had committed Nuremberg's 'supreme international crime' (illegal invasion) and been on the ground with those who had destroyed an entire sovereign nation, raped, pillaged, destroyed homes, killed, thieved and reduced one of the most ancient civilisations on earth (or any nations) to rubble - humanity's history, apart from the body count which is a holocaust, the bissgest population displacement since the formation of the State of Israel, frankly I would not only disown him, if he came back in a box, I would not even go to his funeral.

We are born with a mind and a conscience, the age of consent, the 'coming of age' means we are responsibile enough to use them as adults - and stand out against wrongs. Iraq and Afganistan are the supreme wrong.

However, there is one point: if those they recruit into the military in the US and UK are so ill educated, they knew none of the lies (Colin Powll's supreme one at the UN, Bush and Blair's 'forty five' minutes to Armageddon rubbish etc.) it says a lot about many (not all) they recruit.

Sorry, implacable on my views.

JASSIM:

that's some cold $&*+

Those statistics are very sad. I knew that a lot of veterans suffered from alcoholism, but not that many. My grandfather was veteran and he had issues. He was an alcoholic, and my family made him go to alcohol treatment. That didn't help though. Unfortunately, he still suffers from alcoholism. We don't know what to do to make him stop drinking.