WESTERN SKIES - February 26, 2005

*** COMMENTARY: HELL IN UNIFORM ***

ERIC WHITNEY: Earlier in the show, we reported on the fifty-two hundred Army troops from Fort Carson who will soon depart for Iraq. All of them hope they'll have a homecoming like the soldiers who went over in 2003 had when they got back. In this commentary, Doctor Mark Ringel remembers the times when soldiers weren't welcomed back so enthusiastically.

MARC RINGEL: The summer before medical school, I drove a Chicago bus. In order to keep my job, I wore regulation short hair, a trim moustache, and official Chicago Transit Authority shirt, pants, and cap. In short, during four months of 1970 I was a man in uniform.

It was the height of the Vietnam War and of the protest movement against that war, definitely not a cool time to be wearing a uniform, not even one issued by the CTA. On lunch breaks and after work, dressed in my Ralph Cramden getup, I was sneered at by the same young people who I might have stood shoulder-to-shoulder with in a different uniform (a tie-died one) at an anti-war protest.

Of course, the hostile looks I got as a bus driver were nothing compared to the insults and sputum hurled at young men dressed in military uniforms. To this day, many veterans who served in Vietnam bear emotional scars inflicted by battle with the enemy, compounded by the ill treatment they received at the hands of their own countrymen when they returned home.

We're a bit wiser now. Nobody spits on our troops when they come home. No matter what we think of the leaders and policies that have brought military engagement in the Middle East, we all recognize the sacrifices being made by our young people who serve in a very dangerous corner of the world. Hopefully, compassion will soften the emotional blows suffered by the latest crop of combatants.

An article published this July in the New England Journal of Medicine found that, so far, our hopes that this wave of soldiers will be spared some of the psychological pain that comes with battle are just that: hopes. The authors, psychiatrists and psychologists at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, studied members of four infantry units, two thousand five hundred and thirty soldiers before they left for Iraq and three thousand six hundred and seventy-one after they returned from combat duty in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Each subject filled out a standardized psychological test designed to identify major depression, generalized anxiety disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder. PTSD, at its extreme, is usually the primary diagnosis of the sort of paranoid misfit Vietnam vet who occasionally makes the news. Nine percent of the troops tested positive for one of these ailments before being sent into battle overseas. On return, eleven percent of the soldiers who had served in Afghanistan and sixteen percent of those who had been in Iraq were diagnosed with at least one of these three conditions, PTSD being the one that increased most. Most disturbing, perhaps, is that only about one-third of these suffering human beings had sought mental health care, mostly, they said, for fear of being stigmatized.

It's too early to know if, in a decade or so, they'll be writing novels and making movies about messed up Iraq War vets, just as they have about psychiatric casualties of the Vietnam conflict, many of whom are still with us. The one thing you certainly can do now is to show compassion for our men and women in uniform. But there's no getting around the fact that war is hell, including the one we're currently up to our necks in. Even the folks at Walter Reed will tell you that.

ERIC WHITNEY: Doctor Mark Ringel is a physician practicing in northeastern Colorado. He;s a regular commentator for KUNC in Greeley, which is kind enough to share his work with us.

If you have an opinion you'd like to share on Western Skies, please get in touch, and we'll try to make help it happen. You can find commentary guidelines on our website, krcc.org, or request a copy by giving us a call at 473-4801, our toll free number is 800-748-2727.

And that's it for this edition of Western Skies. Thanks for tuning in, and to the folks who make the show possible: Stephen Raher, our associate producer, Jonathan Wilson, our intern, Delany Utterback, our IT guy, and the rest of the KRCC staff. I'm Eric Whitney.