Nicholas Schmidle at the New Yorker on the second Fort Hood shooting and how our wars are brought home. Heres just a snippet: On Tuesday, iCasualties.org, a site that tracks American fatalities in Iraq and Afghanistan, published a comforting statistic: for the first time since 2002, no U.S. serviceman or woman had died at war during the previous month. Then, one day later, a thirty-four-year-old Iraq veteran named Ivan Lopez opened fired on his colleagues at Fort Hood, killing three soldiers—and then himself. ... It is important... to understand these events as symptomatic of a broader challenge facing veterans, and the country as a whole. The after-war is just beginning, said [Phil Carter, a veteran and a fellow at the Center for New America Security who oversees a research program on veterans’ issues]. He compared this period to the one following Vietnam. As Vietnam was winding down, demand for mental-health services went up, homelessness went up. That’s when people transition. That’s when symptoms occur or latent issues manifest, he said. War has a long tail. -Erika
Posted on: Mon, 07 Apr 2014 19:00:01 +0000
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