Apparently Rep. Tancredo (R-nativist lunatic and Republican presidential candidate) thinks he wasn’t qualified to be a soldier in Vietnam, but he is qualified to be Commander in Chief now.

Buzzflash quotes an article in the Rocky Mountain News: Tancredo was given protected status once his student deferment ran out because, he said, he’d been treated for panic attacks, anxiety, and depression in high school.

OK, I’m a liberal, so I think it’s great Tom Tancredo acknowledges getting treatment for what he claims ailed him back in the day, even if it does suggest that he thinks that the bar is set higher for being a soldier than it is for being the man who sends soldiers off to die (and certainly it’d be hard to argue that hasn’t been true these past seven years).

Here’s what I do have a problem with.

PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) is an increasing problem for our returning soldiers.

As the United States nears the two-year mark in its military presence in Iraq still fighting a violent insurgency, it is also coming to grips with one of the products of war at home: a new generation of veterans, some of them scarred in ways seen and unseen. While military hospitals mend the physical wounds, the VA is attempting to focus its massive health and benefits bureaucracy on the long-term needs of combat veterans after they leave military service. Some suffer from wounds of flesh and bone, others of emotions and psyche.

These injured and disabled men and women represent the most grievously wounded group of returning combat veterans since the Vietnam War, which officially ended in 1975. Of more than 5 million veterans treated at VA facilities last year, from counseling centers like this one to big hospitals, 48,733 were from the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Many of the most common wounds aren’t seen until soldiers return home. Post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, is an often-debilitating mental condition that can produce a range of unwanted emotional responses to the trauma of combat. It can emerge weeks, months or years later. If left untreated, it can severely affect the lives not only of veterans, but their families as well.

Of the 244,054 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan already discharged from service, 12,422 have been in VA counseling centers for readjustment problems and symptoms associated with PTSD. Comparisons to past wars are difficult because emotional problems were often ignored or written off as "combat fatigue" or "shell shock." PTSD wasn’t even an official diagnosis, accepted by the medical profession, until after Vietnam.

There is greater recognition of the mental-health consequences of combat now, and much research has been done in the past 25 years. The VA has a program that attempts to address them and supports extensive research. Harrison is one of 50 veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars hired by the VA as counselors for their fellow veterans.

‘It takes you back there’

Post-traumatic stress was defined in 1980, partly based on the experiences of soldiers and victims of war. It produces a wide range of symptoms in men and women who have experienced a traumatic event that provoked intense fear, helplessness or horror.

The events are sometimes re-experienced later through intrusive memories, nightmares, hallucinations or flashbacks, usually triggered by anything that symbolizes or resembles the trauma. Troubled sleep, irritability, anger, poor concentration, hypervigilance and exaggerated responses are often symptoms.

Individuals may feel depression, detachment or estrangement, guilt, intense anxiety and panic, and other negative emotions.

Well, our representatives in congress assembled passed a bill to help those soldiers.

The Survivors’ and Dependents’ Educational Assistance Program Extension (H.R. 6314) was intended to, among other things, provide "grants for homeless veterans; treatment and rehabilitation for seriously mentally ill veterans"

I think we can all agree on that, can’t we?

Well, remarkably, most of the House did agree. 393 Representatives voted to support H.R. 6314. 39 didn’t trouble to vote.

One of those 39 was Tom Tancredo.

With all due respect to Rep. Tancredo (that’s a lovely elastic phrase, don’t you think?), if he knows from personal experience that high school can, for some people, be too much to deal with without medical help, he should (as a supporter of the troops) be willing to offer that same help to people who’ve lost limbs and watched their friends die in yet another war he supports from a distance.

Unless, of course, his commitment to the soldiers is on the same level as his willingness to put himself on the line for the war.

Again.

Related posts:

  1. What Have We Done? Single Mothers Among New Homeless Vets
  2. Minuteman Killer Co-Hosted Anti-Immigration Event in 2007 Featuring Tom Tancredo, Duncan Hunter and Fred Thompson
  3. FDL Book Salon Welcomes Dahr Jamail, The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan
  4. Costs of Iraq, Afghanistan Wars Proving Unsustainable
  5. 2,266 Veterans Died in 2008 Because They were Uninsured; Vastly More Than Combat Deaths