Mike Haynie's Effect On Veterans

In the recent years, the number of mental health professionals providing for the military has dwindled, there is almost no combat-specific psychologists left, and the wait time to be treated for a mental health issue by the Department of Veterans Affairs has drastically increased. Examining MilitaryOneSource and the Department of Veterans Affairs, two of the most highly regarded military health providers, the lack of mental health services for veterans and active duty members has diminished and has resulted in a multitude of veterans going untreated or even ending their own life instead of receiving the help they

USA Today reported a suicide rate of 19.9 per 100,000 for civilian men compared to rates of 31.8 per 100,000 for male soldiers and 34.2 per 100,000 for men in the National Guard. The system for how we distribute the claims made by veterans in the U.S. is not performing as it should. Soldiers cannot refuse to take medications that the government has deemed “mandatory” without the threat of a court martial. Veterans are not always easily acclimated back into civilian life and sometimes they need extra help financially after they come back, but many cannot get that kind of assistance and are simply living with very little. America’s veterans are not being treated unfairly for the sacrifices they made for this country, because the system meant to help them is currently ill equip to handle the situation.

Fussell cited a newspaper story about a London man who killed himself out of concern that he might not be accepted for service in the Great War, and noted, “How can we forbear condescending to the eager lines at the recruiting stations or smiling at news like this.” But in the summer of 1968 Tim O’Brien, a twenty-one-year-old in a small Minnesota town, a liberal supporter of Eugene McCarthy and an opponent of the war in Vietnam, submitted himself for induction into the United States Army. O’Brien couldn’t bring himself “to upset a peculiar balance between the order I knew, the people I knew, and my own private world,” he wrote, in “If I Die in a Combat Zone,” his 1973 Vietnam memoir. “It was not just that I valued that order. I also feared its opposite—inevitable chaos, censure, embarrassment, the end of everything that had happened in my life, the end of it all.”

Paula Schnurr explains that people felt found relief when their condition was finally identified because before the diagnosis Schnurr explains the veterans’ thoughts, “Many people felt isolated and crazy and they thought it was just them. And they didn't talk about it” (Madigan). Because they believed the inner lies that they were alone, they discontinued a personal relationship with their families which created a stronger presence of being alone. A neglectance in communication caused many heartbreaks and trust issues. A WWII veteran's, Otis Mackey, interview appeared in the essay and supported the theme that war's psychological and emotional impacts will result in problems with the family. Otis Mackey debriefed his psychiatrist, "I get that empty feeling, just deep down, and I don't care

In the New York Times article Death of a Marine, Bob Herbert discloses a story regarding a young man who participated in the Marines. Jeffrey Lucey of Massachusetts enlisted in the army instead of going to college. Despite his parents’ disapproval, he still joined. When Jeffery turned 22, his unit was one of the first to mobilize in the Iraq War. The damage that impacted Jeffery in Iraq included, explosions “just short of blowing out your eardrums”, damaged nerves, nightmare hallucinations and above all else, PTSD.

We all have our highs and lows. For the men who served in Vietnam the lows outweighed the highs. Looking through the psych lens at the chapter “Speaking of Courage” shows the fact that the Vietnam War devastated many soldiers mentally. The soldiers that made it home from the war were mentally scarred for life. Norman Bowker kept his feelings bottled up inside and never shared them with anyone.

Mike Royko describes the Veteran’s Administration 's treatment of Leroy Bailey in his article, “A Faceless Man’s Plea” published in the Chicago Daily News. Royko’s purpose was to expose the unfair treatment of veteran’s such as Leroy Bailey. He uses a frustrated and critical tone to convey the inefficiency and hypocrisy of the Veteran’s Administration. Royko centers the beginning of his article on Leroy Bailey, a Vietnam War veteran who was sent to the infantry and was later on injured by a rocket at the age of twenty-six.

Accompanying these weapons was the first emphasis on war trauma-related mental illness, with soldiers returning from battle with PTSD, misnomered and misunderstood as ‘shell-shock’. Rates of PTSD climbed steadily after World War II and the Vietnam War as weaponry became more and more advanced, reaching 12% of soldiers who saw direct combat in the Gulf War being diagnosed with PTSD afterwards (cite). Clearly, there is a strong connection between advanced weaponry and mental illness in soldiers, proving that violent weaponry negatively affects those who are forced to encounter

Hidden somewhere within the blurred lines of fiction and reality, lies a great war story trapped in the mind of a veteran. On a day to day basis, most are not willing to murder someone, but in the Vietnam War, America’s youth population was forced to after being pulled in by the draft. Author Tim O’Brien expertly blends the lines between fiction, reality, and their effects on psychological viewpoints in the series of short stories embedded within his novel, The Things They Carried. He forces the reader to rethink the purpose of storytelling and breaks down not only what it means to be human, but how mortality and experience influence the way we see our world. In general, he attempts to question why we choose to tell the stories in the way

The True Weight of War “The Things They Carried,” by Tim O’Brien, brings to light the psychological impact of what soldiers go through during times of war. We learn that the effects of traumatic events weigh heavier on the minds of men than all of the provisions and equipment they shouldered. Wartime truly tests the human body and and mind, to the point where some men return home completely destroyed. Some soldiers have been driven to the point of mentally altering reality in order to survive day to day. An indefinite number of men became numb to the deaths of their comrades, and yet secretly desired to die and bring a conclusion to their misery.

Another issue that veterans struggle with when they come back from war is mental illnesses like PTSD. According to “bringing the war back home”, “Of 103 788 OEF/OIF veterans seen at VA health care facilities, 25 658 (25%) received mental health diagnosis(es)”. This disabilities can make getting into the workforce much more difficult and even leave veterans to live on the streets from lack of employment. The solution discovered from this research is that if these mental diseases are caught early enough, the veterans will receive the help they need and be able to continue their normal civilian lives. “Targeted early detection and intervention beginning in primary care settings are needed to prevent chronic mental illness and

This article was about Andrew Brannan, a Vietnam veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (“PTSD”), who shot and killed 22 years old Deputy Kyle Dinkheller in Dublin Georgia. On January 12, 1998, Brannan was pulled over by Laurens County Sheriff Deputy Kyle Dinkheller for driving nearly 100 miles down a country road near Dublin, GA. Once pulled over, 66 year-old Brannan exited his truck and started screaming he was “a goddamn Vietnam veteran” and yelling profanities at Deputy Dinkheller. Then Brannan retrieved a rifle from his truck and fired several shot at Deputy Dinkheller. The deputy was able to return fire but was ultimately killed by Brannan.

Sights you see, events you take part in, people you kill never really seem to leave your conscious and sometimes haunt you. This eats away at the sanity of many soldiers who’ve seen the face of the the fight. Joseph Robertson, a WWII veteran, clearly recalls a time from the war when he killed a young german boy. He described the boy he killed as a “blonde, blue eyes, fair skin, so handsome he was like a little angel(German in the Woods). Joseph, at the age of eighty six, still would wake up during the night crying over the german boy he killed and claimed that specific memory the saddest in his lifetime.

In Soldier from the War Returning, Thomas Childers writes that “a curious silence lingers over what for many was the last great battle of the war.” This final battle was the soldier’s return home. After World War II, veterans came back to the United States and struggled with stigmatized mental illnesses as well as financial and social issues. During the war, many soldiers struggled with mental health issues that persisted after they came home.

More than 5,000 families in the United States, have sedulous relative fighting for our country’s freedom. Many of those families have not the slightest idea of what war is like, and all of its physical and mental effects. The author uses descriptive words to take the reader on a mental voyage. The soldier keeps a conversationalist tone and uses rhetorical strategies such as imagery and rhetorical questions to show how miserable he is living. The e-mail begins with the solider mentally describing your living area; he describes it like a million dust particles that are glued to you.