OPEN SOURCE: Coming Home: Iraq Veterans

Summary:

Four veterans on coming home

Website:

http://www.radioopensource.org

Tones:

Emotional, Personal, Real

Language:

English

Description:

The recent media coverage of Walter Reed Army Hospital is a reminder of the battle that veterans have to fight when they return home. Getting lost in the hospital's bureaucratic wasteland, or treated in a mold and vermin infested facility is hardly an ideal homecoming and that's just the tip of the iceberg. For many, life after war means getting fit for a prosthetic limb, or having to relearn the alphabet, or navigating the world with a guide dog or cane. And those are just the physical consequences. The emotional calamities of war can lead to substance abuse, ruined families, homelessness or suicide. And underlying all of this is often post-traumatic stress. During this hour we?ll be talking with Iraq veterans about how the experience of war reverberates in their everyday worlds.

Of the nearly 600,000 veterans of the Global war on Terror, one in every eight veterans has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. This figure doesn't even include the soldiers who continue to be redeployed even though they've been diagnosed with PTSD.

For many veterans, the road to recovery is paved with stumbling blocks. What obstacles do they face when reentering the civilian world? What is the government doing right? What is the government failing to do? How should we support our troops? How do the consequences of this war differ from all other wars? At what point does endless exposure to such unimaginable violence become the soldiers' universal experience -- from the boy in Sierra Leone to the woman in Fallujah?

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