Discussion: Iraq and Afghanistan

Discussion: Iraq and Afghanistan

NOW FOR AN ORIGINAL PAPER ASSIGNMENT:Discussion: Iraq and Afghanistan

Perhaps even more ominous, the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have eerily similar parallels to Vietnam. There are no front lines, the enemy fades into the population, everyone in the theater of operations is essentially in combat. As a result, vigilance must be constant, 24/7, throughout one’s entire rotation. Degree of combat exposure has been found to be one of the major predictors of PTSD (Miller et al., 2008; Smith et al., 2008), and anybody that goes into the “sandboxes” as they now called can expect just that.There are two major differences in these conflicts. So far there is general public support for the troops, whereas in Vietnam there was not. A support group is critical in any crisis, and this is particularly true of troops in an increasingly unpopular war. Lack of support and outright hatred of returning troops was a major contributing factor for PTSD in Vietnam veterans. However, while the armed forces in the current conflicts are all volunteers and not 18-year-old draftees, there are a tremendous number of reserve units in combat action, and there are also huge differences in the number of women involved in direct combat action. The question then becomes what the use of reservists and women in combat portends for the on- set of PTSD. Preliminary results regarding mental health problems in veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan have ranged from 19% to 44% of the samples examined (Hoge, Auchterlonie, & Milliken, 2006; Lapierre, Schweigler, & LaBauve, 2007).