Saturday, March 08, 2008

A fifth of soldiers at PTSD risk

That was the headline of a story in USA Today recently. The story starts:

More than five years of recycling soldiers through Iraq and Afghanistan's battlefields is creating record levels of mental health problems, as about three in 10 GIs on their third tour admit emotional illnesses, according to an Army study released Thursday.
The report goes on to say:

The report underscores concerns raised by military leaders that the current year-long break soldiers receive between successive 12- to 15-month combat deployments is far too short for them to recover. In fact, certain mental illnesses such as PTSD grow more intense as the soldiers prepare to go back into combat, the report shows.


Once again we are shown how the complete lack of planning by the Bush Administration is placing our soldiers at risk. If there'd been a post war strategy beyond Mission Accomplished our soldiers would not be going through this. But there wasn't and they are going through it. And it seems at every step along the way the military is trying to play catch up. I'd say there not doing a particular good job at it.

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