Today, the United States military ended its policy of allowing gay troops to serve as long as they didn't publicly identify themselves as gay. The "don't ask, don't tell" policy, enacted 18 years ago during the Clinton administration, was a bridge from the days when being homosexual was an automatic ticket to a dishonorable discharge, to today, where gay soldiers, sailors and airmen can serve openly. Over the years, Miller-McCune has examined the process that led to the repeal of DADT, starting with a 2009 piece that examined the general acceptance — based on polling of both the public ... Read More
An Army of Change
September 19, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
As U.S. soldiers pull out of Iraq this December, and with 33,000 more scheduled to leave Afghanistan by the fall of 2012, American land forces may find themselves the victims of their own success. The budget deal signed by the president in August promises big cuts in defense dollars, and the burden of leaner budgets is expected to fall on the troops. A key Pentagon review published last year signaled that the future belongs largely to the Navy and the Air Force; Libya seems a proving ground for the use of U.S. air and naval power (combined with that of their NATO peers) fighting to overthrow ... Read More
Myth of the Modern Religious War
September 10, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Not long ago, a church leader at the Protestant sect I belong to gave a sermon criticizing the role of religion in today's conflicts. He cited the Crusades, clashes between Catholics and Protestants, and other "religious wars" of the Middle East and throughout Asia. It made me wonder how prevalent these are, given that many of these conflicts cited either occurred a long time ago or are predominantly fought over other reasons. The political science literature on the subject is overshadowed by Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations, frequently cited by the mainstream media and numerous ... Read More
PTSD Therapy: Restoring Honor to the Enemy
August 3, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
One side of post-traumatic stress that not many people talk about — maybe because it's so hard to separate from waging a modern war — is the way a nation and its military tend to dehumanize the opposing side. Erich Maria Remarque's novel about World War I, All Quiet on the Western Front, took dehumanization as its theme, and it still has a lot to say about war trauma even if Americans have cornered the market on clinical descriptions of PTSD. All Quiet follows a young, German soldier named Paul Bäumer through the trenches of the war in France. He's a tough-skinned narrator with no ... Read More
Vets With PTSD Awarded Higher Disability Benefits
July 29, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
The Associated Press reports today that "more than a thousand Iraq and Afghanistan veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder would be given lifetime disability retirement benefits such as military health insurance under the terms of a settlement reached between the government and the veterans." The veterans had filed a class-action lawsuit in response to the slow pace of the U.S. military's review of their cases, in which they argued that their disability benefits were lower than that to which they were legally entitled. Michael Scott Moore has reported on PTSD extensively for ... Read More
A Brief History of Combat Trauma
July 27, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
One side effect of NATO's 10-year war in Afghanistan is a steady rise in post-traumatic stress in Western Europe — especially Germany and Britain — for the first time since World War II. The statistics are small compared to America's, but German experts were startled by a spike in the number of registered PTSD victims in the Bundeswehr, or German military. The Germans unexpectedly found themselves not in a peaceful reconstruction project but in a war. Car bombings and other attacks against German troops flared in provinces like Kunduz between 2006 and 2009, and the number of PTSD cases ... Read More
Addressing PTSD With Surf Therapy
July 20, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
For the last handful of years, Britain and the United States have done quiet experiments with a new form of therapy for veterans suffering from combat stress, using a resource neither nation lacks along their coasts: surf. "Ocean therapy," or surf therapy, will surprise longtime surfers mainly because of the official-sounding name; the idea that an ocean and a surfboard can be good for the body and mind is otherwise not very new. But recent studies have tried to quantify just what happens in the water. The United Kingdom's National Health Service is still conducting trials in Cornwall, ... Read More
PTSD’s Trauma Symptoms Ring Out Through Ages
June 29, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
The irony of post-traumatic stress disorder is that it sounds modern — the term is so clinically bureaucratic some people think it may be the invention of some American psychological board. But the symptoms have been around for hundreds or thousands of years, or perhaps as long as there have been people. The symptoms were called "nostalgia" in the Civil War, "shell shock" in World War I, and Jonathan Shay, author of Achilles in Vietnam, has pointed out that The Iliad may be the first work of literature based on combat stress. But Samuel Pepys may be the earliest historical figure ... Read More
PTSD Affecting More U.S. Soldiers Than British
June 22, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Combat stress is still a murky and sometimes taboo element of soldiering, but one of the strangest discoveries is that the strain isn't evenly spread among vets from different countries. For example: A far higher percentage of American soldiers suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder after combat in Iraq and Afghanistan than British soldiers do. Americans involved in those wars have suffered from PTSD at a rate of 30 percent, compared to 4 percent among Brits, according to a study published by the U.K.'s Royal Society of Medicine. And researchers say the difference isn't a reflection of ... Read More
