Leftist media (again) misrepresents PTSD in vets
There are so many things about the drive-by mainstream media that irritate me that it’s sometimes hard to prioritize or quantify them. I can, however, say with alacrity that one of the irritants at the top of my list is the media’s 40+ year-long effort to demonize America’s vets, whom they paint as ticking time-bombs in constant, imminent danger of exploding.
Entirely expectedly, then, that was how the media treated Specialist Ivan Lopez, the man who went on the latest shooting rampage on unarmed troops at Fort Hood (where they had to call 911 to rescue them). “PTSD!” the media shrilled. It turned out, of course, that Lopez wasn’t a combat vet at all. Still, as far as the media is concerned, just being in the military itself is a trauma so great that the media can reasonably claim that every active duty military member and every veteran in America is a potential PTSD explosion waiting to happen.
I’ve never bought that. My parents and all their friends were survivors of at least one war and often two. All experienced WWII (either as troops, refugees, or prisoners of war), and most of them experienced a second war as well: the Israeli War of Independence, the Soviet takeover of Hungary, the Communist takeover in China, etc. Peculiarly enough, all of them, without exception, went on to live productive, non-violent lives.
Were these members of the Greatest Generation always the happiest people in the world? Well, yes, actually — mostly they were quite happy. The only person I met who was a bundle of misery was a man who had escaped from Auschwitz (something extraordinary) by somehow hiding himself in a pile of corpses that, for reasons unclear to me (I was only 9 or 10 when I met him) were being shipped out of the camp. Another Auschwitz survivor I knew, though, was one of the most vital, vibrant people I’ve every met.
All of the WWII survivors in whose shadow I was raised had dark memories and dark moments, but they all still lived with a certain triumphalism. They had survived and were damned proud of that fact, even as many mourned their lost family and their lost friends, and all mourned the lost years of their youth. The Jewish ones also thumbed their noses at Hitler with every child, grandchild, niece, and nephew that they had. They understood that life was to be cherished, not wasted.
That’s why it never, ever, never, absolutely never ever, made sense to me that America’s Vietnam troops all came back as crazed, schizophrenic, psychopathic killers or dysfunctional bums. Why were they so much more vulnerable to war’s horrors than their parents’ generation? Even the excuses offered — lack of support at home or drug use in Vietnam — didn’t make much sense, especially the drug part.
If drugs were the problem, why didn’t every UC Berkeley graduate from 1964 to the present day turn into a crazed killer or drugged-out homeless person? Indeed, I suspect that, if you did a study, you’d find more drugged-out homeless people in the Berkeley graduate cohort than in the American troops cohort. As for rejection by the folks at home, sure that’s demoralizing, but is that really enough to turn you into a mass murderer or dysfunctional bum?
A few years ago, the media, which in the 21st century had opted for the “we love our troops” trope, rather than the dated “we hate our troops” trope, announced that George Bush’s military was driving America’s troops and veterans to mass suicide. I addressed that canard in 2008 (the last year of the Bush presidency). Gateway Pundit also pointed out that the military suicide rate was higher under Clinton’s stint as Command In Chief than it was under George Bush’s.
Just last year, HuffPo again said troops are killing themselves like suicidal flies and the New York Times assured its readers that the high rates weren’t just because the military is made up of young men who are the most likely segment in any population to commit suicide. I’ll just note that, as before, even if one accepts solely for the sake of argument the claim that military suicides exceed those in the generally population, these increased suicide rates occurred under a Democrat Commander In Chief, not a Republican one….
Suicide is a difficult argument for the media to make for three reasons. First, as many have argued and the Times has tried to refute, it’s a sad truth that suicides happen a lot in a population such as the military (lots of young men, especially young men far from home). Second, it’s entirely possible to argue that the suicides aren’t the result of the horrors of combat, which humans are programmed to weather
How much more exciting, then, to revive the moribund “crazed Vietnam vet” myth, this one with the neatly clinical label of PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). We’re right back to the old ticking time bomb, with every vet a mass murderer in the making. Except, as with all of the media’s anti-military narratives, this one isn’t true either:
This generalization — that the millions of veterans of Iraq or Afghanistan are about to snap — plays to a stereotype of veterans being forever broken by war, when the truth is that the vast majority are not afflicted with PTSD.
But even more unfortunate is the perception that veterans are a group people should fear. Indeed, it has become common to mention military service or combat experience of a wrongdoer as if it’s some predictor of crime.
[Snip. Go to the article to see examples of the anti-military canards the media lobs at vets.]
This is a shameful misrepresentation, and it only serves as a stigma to prevent veterans with legitimate mental health issues from seeking the care they need.
“Post-traumatic stress is a manageable condition and a natural response to trauma,” writes Army veteran Alex Horton. “One that can affect a soldier in war as much as a grandmother in a car crash.”
Life is stressful. Life has always been stressful. It was stressful for our prehistoric ancestors duking it out with savage beasts and Neanderthal competitors. It was stressful people in pre-modern eras when disease, famine, and war were ordinary, not exceptional. It’s stressful for the lawyer who loses a case in court, the surgeon whose patient dies on the table, and the check-out clerk who has to play beat the clock every day or lose her job.
If humans couldn’t process stress, even extreme stress, they would have died out a long time ago. Different individuals may suffer more from stress, or certain events may be extraordinarily stressful, but that doesn’t turn every traumatized person into an Al Qaeda bomber. Indeed, the real mass murderers — the Al Qaeda members, the Al Shabaab people (in Kenya), the Nazis, the Soviets in the Ukraine — were and are as often as not products of ordinary lives, not traumatized lives. They don’t have PTSD themselves; they create it in others.
