CURRENTLY READING

Joseph Campbell’s MYTHS TO LIVE BY and
Charles Baudelaire’s THE FLOWERS OF EVIL and
of course my NEWSWEEK


IRAQ? ANOTHER VIETNAM IN ONE SUBTLE WAY. LISTEN UP!

A fairly recent NEWSWEEK report (December 6, 2004) reveals that veterans returning from Iraq are showing a 17 to 20 percent rate for post-traumatic stress disorder. That’s PTSD to you. The report goes on:

[Open quote] Without treatment, some conditions such as chronic PTSD can be lethal. Five years after the Vietnam War, epidemiologists studying combat veterans found that they were nearly twice as likely to die from motor-vehicle accidents and accidental poisoning than veterans who didn’t see combat. In a 30-year follow up, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine this year, the same combat vets continued to die at greater rates and remained especially vulnerable to drug overdose and accidental poisoning. “We had the John Wayne syndrome,” says Vietnam veteran Greg Helle, who grappled with severe PTSD for decades. “We were men, we’d been to war. We thought we could tough it out.” Doctors hadn’t developed effective treatment for PTSD and besides, says Helle, seeking help was an admission of weakness.

Doctors now know that PTSD is the product of subtle biological changes that occur in the brain in response to extreme stress. Using sophisticated imaging techniques, researchers now believe that extreme stress alters the way memory is stored. During a major upheaval, the body releases massive doses of adrenaline which speeds up the heart, quickens the reflexes and, over several hours, burns vivid memories that are capable of activating the amygdala, or fear center, in the brain. People can get PTSD, doctors say, when that mechanism works too well. Instead of creating protective memories (ducking at the sound of gunfire), says Dr. Roger Pitman, a psychiatry professor at Harvard Medical School, “the rush of adrenaline creates memories that intrude on everyday life and without treatment, can actually hinder survival.”

Why some people get PTSD and others don’t remains a mystery. Recent studies suggest that a predisposition to the disorder may be genetic and that previous traumatic experiences can make soldiers more vulnerable to it. Once a soldier has it, though, says Dr. Matthew J. Friedman, executive director of the Department of Veterans Affairs National Center for PTSD, the good news is that the medical community now knows that “PTSD is very real and very treatable.” [Close quote]

Now it gets interesting. Let's ask again, "Why do combat veterans get PTSD? What is this stress they encounter? We know it’s having bullets flying from every which way towards them and their comrades, plus walking down streets where any friendly face might have planted a bomb waiting to blow them to smithereens around the next bend. But let’s zoom in on a specific case mentioned in the NEWSWEEK article.

“Help came too late for Marine reservist Jeffrey Lucey. In July 2003, he returned home to Belchertown, Mass., from Iraq and gradually sank into a deep depression. His family looked on in anguish as he began drinking too much and isolating himself from their close-knit clan. By spring of 2004, he’d stopped sleeping, eating and attending college. When his sister Debra Lucey tried to have a heart-to-heart, “he’d describe the terrible things he’d SEEN AND DONE [capitals mine],” she says, “and he’d always end by saying, ‘You’ll never be able to understand’.” Frantic, family members had him committed to a psychiatric hospital but he was soon released. A few weeks later he crashed the family car, and the following month a neighbor found him wandering the streets in the middle of the night dressed in full camouflage with two battle knives he’d been issued in Iraq. Last June, Jeffrey Lucey hanged himself in the basement of his family home.”

Now we know how the Bill O’Reillys and Limbaughs and Roves of the world speak of sissies who need psychiatric care. “We don’t need no help,” we have heard them smugly say. And how they love to lay it onto liberals who “are always the victims who blame others for their troubles and/or encourage the victim mentality in others”. O, yeah!

Okay, “Fug ‘em,” as Norman Mailer would have someone say in THE NAKED AND THE DEAD because that was another conservative time in American history when his novel about WWII came out. He had to use euphemisms. Conservatives don’t like plain speaking of truths. They like Bush secrecy and hidden plans and end runs around legalities and fine points of law. Bush loves his Keriks until he gets caught. But, hey, that particular brand of conservative bullshit still ain’t my point.

Recall the Swift Boat swifties who attacked John Kerry about his testimony before Congress about the atrocities in Vietnam? And recall all the letters to the editor in your local paper from vets who had seen no atrocities in Vietnam? So you gotta ask, “What did this Lucey trooper DO that was troubling him so badly? What did he SEE being DONE? Did he observe what was going on in Abu Ghraib, for instance? Or that trooper who shot dead the wounded and unarmed Iraqi just a couple of weeks ago? Plain to see, ain’t it, that our troopers are witnessing and performing acts of violence (atrocities?) that trouble them badly?

Folks, war is making monsters of men and their consciences are beginning to smart a bit. Just what I knew would happen when I went on my first peace march long before bloody bucker Bush sent in the first death waves of missiles and bombs. Anybody with one-quarter of a brain knows this stuff inside and out. They wouldn’t stand for a president who sends our troops off to war for no good reason or, at least, for a hidden reason to make his oil buddies rich, but we got a very dumb electorate here in America, and we’re paying for our dumbest links in the evolutionary chain of events which has brought us to our current situation in modern America.

Now who will be the Kerry who steps up to reveal what’s going on in Iraq? In fact men are already doing it. That’s how we discovered Abu Ghraib. Let’s just hope that none of the truth tellers want to run for president twenty years from now, ‘cause conservative men will still be trying to hide the truths from civilians in the future too, and they’ll be ready to make their little lying films about heros like Kerry too. The irony! The irony! And just weeks after Kerry was defeated by liars like these.
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"Show me a man who doesn't want his gun registered, and I'll show you a man who shouldn't have a gun." —Homer Cummings

"Guns don't kill people. People with guns kill people." —Geo