New Jersey Rep. Bill Pascrell, co-chair of the Congressional Brain Injury Task Force, said an estimated 360,000 veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, or 20 percent, are believed to return with brain injuries. He called it “absolutely inadequate” to not have a consistent metric to evaluate them before and after deployment.
http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=58849
New Jersey Rep. Bill Pascrell's estimate of 20% or 360,000 is just that, an estimate. I have read in other Department of Defense and Veterans Administration articles over the past several years that the estimate was 35-40%. Whichever number is more accurate is not the basic problem; the basic problem is “A Failure to Act”, to plan, to anticipate, and to prepare.
I am not here to “bash” the VA or the VA Hospitals, but I am here to say that there are some significant holes in the system. Some are understandable. When you have over 12,000,000 Veterans to consider when you write rules, it is very easy to leave a portion out without intending to. When you are underfunded, the VA has to make choices that inevitably will have a negative impact on some of our Veterans. But to fail to plan when you have past experiences of Vietnam Veterans and PTSD is hard for me to understand.
I am a Vietnam Veteran who was just recently diagnosed with PTSD and rated 50% (the highest allowed is 70%). During my 40 years after returning from Vietnam no one tried to contact me from the VA suggesting that I go to the nearest VA Hospital for an evaluation, and yet I was a combat infantryman, serving during the Tet Offensive, 1968 (a category where there was a high incidence of PTSD). It wasn’t until 1980 that the VA began to recognize this illness and gave it the name Post Traumatic Stress Disorder; however it is still a difficult proposition to get through the ratings process and then get a determination.
The frustration of the process for someone who has this illness or TBI compounds the feelings that negatively affect the individual with the illness and of course everyone around him. No one seems what to do or how to handle the change they are seeing in this friend, co-worker, neighbor, son, daughter, spouse, or father. And I can state from personal experience all of this change and cautious reaction to the problem tends to intensify the confusion for all parties.
The lessons learned about the impact of war on the combatant should carry equal weight with the logistical and tactical planning of executing any new or perceived conflict. If we don’t learn from our past we are bound to repeat the same mistakes. It appears that we failed to plan for and set aside the necessary monies to treat our new PTSD combatants and as we expanded into Iraq did not take into consideration the toll on our troops from TBI (traumatic brain damage). This is a true shame of National proportions.
Over the next few weeks I will be writing about specific incidents that will elaborate on the effects of PTSD and TBI. My next Blog will talk about, “6,000 veterans committing suicide every year –- and 98 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan taking their own lives during fiscal 2009”