The war that comes home, uninvited and unrelenting..... doing what

[HysteryDiagnosis]

bullets in a foreign land couldn't.

http://scoop.epluribusmedia.org/story/2007/1/5/175143/1821


"My name is Laurel Laing, wife of Thomas Laing. We have been married 37 years. Since the start of the Iraq war Tom has had increased nightmares, night sweats and acting out. He has become more short tempered and withdrawn from his family, work and daily activities of a normal life. Tom is restless and he cries when the news announces that we have casualties and soldiers are dying. He says this War is turning out to be another Vietnam.

"He said he'd had enough. "35 Marines died today in Iraq, only slightly more noticed than my legs," the former second lieutenant typed on Feb. 4. ... With his final decision to call 911 from his church office and turn his pistol to his chest on Feb. 11, McLean, 62, became a casualty of two wars, his family members said."

"Instead, Kanke poured a can of gasoline over himself and lit a match, dying in a hospital three days later. ... On the night of his suicide, after talking by phone to Cameron, Kanke roused Carol and pushed her out of the house before setting himself on fire. She says she watched the fire from the outside, then tried to douse her husband with a garden hose. "We had a wonderful life. But when the war started, he just got more and more depressed. He didn't handle things' going wrong very well," she says. Now she's hoping her husband's story will help other veterans spot the symptoms and avoid his fate."

"PTSD researcher John P. Wilson, who oversaw a small recent survey of 70 veterans -- nearly all from Vietnam -- at Cleveland State University, said:

* 57 percent reported flashbacks after watching reports about the war on television
* almost 46 percent said their sleep was disrupted
* nearly 44 percent said they had fallen into a depression since the war began
* nearly 30 percent said they had sought counseling since combat started in Iraq

"Clearly the current Iraq war, and their exposure to it, created significantly increased distress for them," said Wilson, who has done extensive research on Vietnam veterans since the 1970s. "We found very high levels of intensification of their symptoms. . . . It's like a fever that has gone from 99 to 104."