Part II: Soldiering on? The invisible injuries of war

By: Law is Cool · November 8, 2009 · Filed Under Health Law, International Law, Politics · Add Comment 

Guest Post by Krystalline Kraus | Reproduced from www.rabble.ca with permsision

Next week, on November 11, veterans will get only two minutes of recognition — if people stop to reflect at all — while the rest of the year their sacrifice is forgotten.

If Canada’s mission in Afghanistan does end in 2011, 35,000 men and women will have served in that theatre — 133 have been killed thus far — and the Canadian Forces’ (CF) low estimate is that as many as 2,000 could be returning home with an Operational Stress Injury (OSI) such as PTSD.

These soldiers will return home with, among other things, an OSI or plagued by survivor’s guilt and the pressure to do good by their dead friends; first they bury them and then they bury their own feelings. As the saying goes: Survivors die twice.

Massacre at Fort Hood

The problems the U.S. military would prefer to hide violently surged to the public’s attention when Major Nidal Malik Hasan, a 39-year-old U.S. Army psychiatrist, allegedly opened fire yesterday afternoon at Fort Hood, Texas. He is accused of killing 13 people and wounding 30.

A New York Times article features an interview with Hasan’s cousin, who states that he expressed deep concern about being sent to Iraq or Afghanistan; the cousin also notes that Hasan’s job was to counsel returning soldiers suffering with PTSD which gave him an intimate window into the horrors of war. This made him fearful of deploying to either theatre. His cousin also claims he was having second thoughts about his military career a few years ago after other soldiers harassed him for being a Muslim.

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