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PTSD

G'day skinny, both my parents as far as I'm concerned suffered from this. They were both 18 year olds at the time, one was posted overseas (Dad), and one was on the homefront (Mum).

Dads ptsd was obvious from his experiences and his reactions to stress, and Mums wasn't so obvious, but was still there. Dad wouldn't talk about his experiences, and Mum wouldn't shut up about it , to the point of glorifying her service.

If I think about it, family life was seeing Mum and Dad revolve around each other, and not in a good way, knocking sparks of each other, while us kids dodged the kicks and punchs.

At the time and where we were, it didn't seem too unusual, and we just took it as life, because it wasn't unusual for kids to come to school on a monday morning and tell each other about their dad clashing their mother, and you should see her eye an' all.

I suppose what you do learn is there are two ways to bring up kids and how to relate to your partner - one is what you saw your parents do, or, there is the way you know would've worked better - the former is easy, it's just a reaction, the latter isn't easy and it takes deliberate action.


I think that any kid who went through a similar childhood is always waiting for the second shoe to fall - it's what kept us safe - the anticipation of violence or danger - and looking for a way out of it.

Well, that's my story Skinny, anything ring a bell?
One of the most insightful posts I've seen here, MM. The bolded area is right on. I understand what you're getting at and I'm saddened by your experiences. I'll let out that I recall often pledging mentally not to do what they did if I ever got married. Different doesn't mean better. I have a post earlier in the thread that states my thoughts on the cycle of violence. I think chain is a more apt term than cycle.
 
Chain does seem to be the correct terminology Skinny, it's all linked, isn't it.

I've always been a lucky bugger Skinny, and it could have been much worse - Dad and Mum didn't drink.
 
RiAUS article link

soliders%20army%20vintage.png

The Social Acceptance of PTSD
Submitted by riaus on Thu, 21/04/2016 - 16:32
Staff Picks Mix
Who are these? Why sit they here in twilight?
300px-8165210449_d807857884_o.jpg

Wherefore rock they, purgatorial shadows,
Drooping tongues from jaws that slob their relish,
Baring teeth that leer like skulls’ tongues wicked?
Stroke on stroke of pain, — but what slow panic,
Gouged these chasms round their fretted sockets?
Ever from their hair and through their hand palms
Misery swelters. Surely we have perished
Sleeping, and walk hell; but who these hellish?

Wilfred Owen, Mental Cases 1917

The legendary American comedian George Carlin once did a piece about soldier combat neurosis. He argued that the terminology used to label the shattering of the human nervous system after traumatic events had, over the twentieth century, become riddled and confused with euphemistic language. In WW1 it was called shell shock, ‘it even sounds a bit like the guns, shell-shock’ he said, motioning his hand back and forth like an artillery gun to the audience. As time passed, political correctness altered language and the name of the conditioned was changed. By Vietnam, shell shock had metamorphosed into post-traumatic stress disorder. Stressing the clinical, multi-syllabic and obscured nature of the new term, Carlin states that ‘the pain is completely buried under jargon’.‘I bet ya,’ Carlin says, ‘if we were still calling it shell shock, some of those Vietnam veterans may have gotten the attention they needed at the time’.

I always found that bit interesting. There is no doubt language has shifted dramatically since the early twentieth century – but is it due to political correctness, avoiding offense and dilution of emotion or has the language matched our greater understanding of the subject? Even Owen’s war poem I began this piece with – Mental Cases, now a retrograde, and hurtful term to describe someone with mental illness in the present, evokes imagery. Today, PTSD is generally considered a problem that anyone can develop through experience of a traumatic event: car crashes, extreme sickness, violence, death of a loved one – they all top the lists of likely causes of the condition. It’s an umbrella term, useful for encompassing all types of extreme neurosis whether civilian or soldier. In this way it works. But, when one thinks of PTSD, the first thought conjured is still of a young man, wide-eyed and staring into a void. The imagery of the condition forever bound to those who suffer war – immortalised through front-line poetry from soldiers such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon.

body-U.S._Army_Medic.jpg


I think it would be a fair assumption that humans have suffered mental trauma for most of our history. For example, the earliest written evidence of something akin to PTSD lies inDeuteronomy 20:1-9, humanity’s first epic – Gilgamesh and The Battle of Marathon by Herodotus. But it is not until the modern world that the condition begins to be better understood. In the American Civil War, returning soldiers had physiological problems related to combat stress. Because these problems often were related to blood pressure, the term Soldier’s Heart was coined. Essentially the mental trauma of war had a profound and long lasting physiological effect on the returning soldiers.

Skip forward in time to WW1. This is when the disorder becomes widely known, mainly through the writings of troops stationed on the Western Front, experiencing the horror of trench warfare. In this war the terms change to suit the time. Soldier’s Heart is replaced with Shell Shock, as the constant, overwhelming bombardment of artillery and mortar fire shattered the nervous system of many soldiers. Seriously traumatised men were unable to fight – they were casualties. Modern scientific psychiatry is for the first time used to treat these soldiers, as the need for combat ready troops is seemingly endless. Furthermore, social progress was made, as it quickly became obvious that Shell Shock wasn’t selective of weakness, whether it was class or race, as was previously thought. It affected everyone equally, even battle-hardened officers. Other types of shock in this war were the German Panzer angst (tank fear) and trauma related to hand-to-hand combat in the trenches. It becomes clear in WW1, with the multitude of differing trauma that a more holistic title for mental illness derived from combat needs to be coined to encompass all varieties.

body-Gibraltar_bunker_Pozieres_AWM_EZ0098.jpg


World War Two begins – the second Total War. In this war civilian casualties are greater than at any time in history, partially due to systemic civilian targeting for the purpose of breaking morale. Day-in, Day-out bombing raids traumatise civilian populations and Air Force personnel. The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki leaves millions of people horrified by the newfound capacity of total destruction. And the holocaust combined with the Japanese occupation of China highlighted a capacity for human malevolence unseen at such magnitude in history. In the wake of this war, previous conditions such as shell shock are grouped into War Neurosis and Operational Exhaustion, the latter coined by the American Air Force.

By the Vietnam War, psychiatry is recognised as a necessary part of an effective combat machine. Great care was given to treat cases quickly, in order to limit psychiatric casualties. However, after the war, even with the care administered during the war, approximately 700,000 veterans, who represent close to one quarter of the entire fighting force sent to Vietnam, required psychological assistance. It is the Vietnam War that leads to the term post-traumatic stress disorder and it’s subsequent adoption as a recognised psychological category in the DSM-III (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) in 1980. This is the term used today.

body-A_Romanian_soldier_provides_medical_aid_to_a_fellow_soldier_during_a_counter_improvised_explosive_device_training_mission_for_operational_mentor_liaison_team_OMLT_training_at_the_Joint_Multinational_Readiness_120120-A-HZ258-092.jpg


Sadly, even though psychiatry and social perceptions of mental illness have progressed since the First World War, those who suffer combat related PTSD, or mental illness are still not adequately rehabilitated. Just recently,ABC’s Four Corners explored mental illness in Australian Veterans returning from Afghanistan. The servicemen showed in the episode stated that they were not properly diagnosed in the Army and had struggled returning to civilian life, being filled with rage, emptiness and thoughts of suicide. And this problem is certainly not limited to our military. Veteran suicide in the US has been a major issue for quite some time. A study in 2008 found that the rate of suicide increased to approximately 18.1 out of 100,000 veterans – and this figure has likely risen since. In the UK too, it is now estimated that more veterans of the Falklands War have committed suicide than died in the conflict. The question is: If we have come so far with psychiatry and social perceptions of mental illness, why do veterans in the first world still suffer without adequate help?

There is no good answer. It is now known that PTSD is prevalent amongst civilian populations, as is mental illness and unfortunately, suicide. Veterans have experiences outside of comprehension for the general population, which may lead to social isolation. A feeling exacerbated due to the wide range of opinions regarding whether war is justified. It also may be true, as Dr Khoo stated on ABC’s Four Corners, ‘That we are good at turning a human being into a warrior, but we are really shit at taking a warrior and turning them back into a human being.’

George Carlin may be a comedian, and famously anti-war, but he does have a point that veterans often do not receive the psychiatric help they deserve.

Body image 1: Flickr
Body image 2: Wikipedia
Body image 3: Wikipedia
Body image 4: Wikimedia Commons
 
soliders%20army%20vintage.png

The Social Acceptance of PTSD

300px-8165210449_d807857884_o.jpg

Wherefore rock they, purgatorial shadows,
Drooping tongues from jaws that slob their relish,
Baring teeth that leer like skulls’ tongues wicked?
Stroke on stroke of pain, — but what slow panic,
Gouged these chasms round their fretted sockets?
Ever from their hair and through their hand palms
Misery swelters. Surely we have perished
Sleeping, and walk hell; but who these hellish?

Wilfred Owen, Mental Cases 1917

The legendary American comedian George Carlin once did a piece about soldier combat neurosis. He argued that the terminology used to label the shattering of the human nervous system after traumatic events had, over the twentieth century, become riddled and confused with euphemistic language. In WW1 it was called shell shock, ‘it even sounds a bit like the guns, shell-shock’ he said, motioning his hand back and forth like an artillery gun to the audience. As time passed, political correctness altered language and the name of the conditioned was changed. By Vietnam, shell shock had metamorphosed into post-traumatic stress disorder. Stressing the clinical, multi-syllabic and obscured nature of the new term, Carlin states that ‘the pain is completely buried under jargon’.‘I bet ya,’ Carlin says, ‘if we were still calling it shell shock, some of those Vietnam veterans may have gotten the attention they needed at the time’.

I always found that bit interesting. There is no doubt language has shifted dramatically since the early twentieth century – but is it due to political correctness, avoiding offense and dilution of emotion or has the language matched our greater understanding of the subject? Even Owen’s war poem I began this piece with – Mental Cases, now a retrograde, and hurtful term to describe someone with mental illness in the present, evokes imagery. Today, PTSD is generally considered a problem that anyone can develop through experience of a traumatic event: car crashes, extreme sickness, violence, death of a loved one – they all top the lists of likely causes of the condition. It’s an umbrella term, useful for encompassing all types of extreme neurosis whether civilian or soldier. In this way it works. But, when one thinks of PTSD, the first thought conjured is still of a young man, wide-eyed and staring into a void. The imagery of the condition forever bound to those who suffer war – immortalised through front-line poetry from soldiers such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon.

body-U.S._Army_Medic.jpg


I think it would be a fair assumption that humans have suffered mental trauma for most of our history. For example, the earliest written evidence of something akin to PTSD lies inDeuteronomy 20:1-9, humanity’s first epic – Gilgamesh and The Battle of Marathon by Herodotus. But it is not until the modern world that the condition begins to be better understood. In the American Civil War, returning soldiers had physiological problems related to combat stress. Because these problems often were related to blood pressure, the term Soldier’s Heart was coined. Essentially the mental trauma of war had a profound and long lasting physiological effect on the returning soldiers.

Skip forward in time to WW1. This is when the disorder becomes widely known, mainly through the writings of troops stationed on the Western Front, experiencing the horror of trench warfare. In this war the terms change to suit the time. Soldier’s Heart is replaced with Shell Shock, as the constant, overwhelming bombardment of artillery and mortar fire shattered the nervous system of many soldiers. Seriously traumatised men were unable to fight – they were casualties. Modern scientific psychiatry is for the first time used to treat these soldiers, as the need for combat ready troops is seemingly endless. Furthermore, social progress was made, as it quickly became obvious that Shell Shock wasn’t selective of weakness, whether it was class or race, as was previously thought. It affected everyone equally, even battle-hardened officers. Other types of shock in this war were the German Panzer angst (tank fear) and trauma related to hand-to-hand combat in the trenches. It becomes clear in WW1, with the multitude of differing trauma that a more holistic title for mental illness derived from combat needs to be coined to encompass all varieties.

body-Gibraltar_bunker_Pozieres_AWM_EZ0098.jpg

"It is sweet and fitting to die for your country" Wilfred Owen and Seigried Sasoon .... it's not politically correct to say that these dudes were gay ... they were and they were also brilliant .. they wrote excellent satire and managed even to sneak the poetry into propaganda magazines whilst serving as soldiers .. even 'coding' in Latin

http://www.warpoetry.co.uk/owen1.html
 
G'day skinny, both my parents as far as I'm concerned suffered from this. They were both 18 year olds at the time, one was posted overseas (Dad), and one was on the homefront (Mum).

Dads ptsd was obvious from his experiences and his reactions to stress, and Mums wasn't so obvious, but was still there. Dad wouldn't talk about his experiences, and Mum wouldn't shut up about it , to the point of glorifying her service.

If I think about it, family life was seeing Mum and Dad revolve around each other, and not in a good way, knocking sparks of each other, while us kids dodged the kicks and punchs.

At the time and where we were, it didn't seem too unusual, and we just took it as life, because it wasn't unusual for kids to come to school on a monday morning and tell each other about their dad clashing their mother, and you should see her eye an' all.

I suppose what you do learn is there are two ways to bring up kids and how to relate to your partner - one is what you saw your parents do, or, there is the way you know would've worked better - the former is easy, it's just a reaction, the latter isn't easy and it takes deliberate action.

I think that any kid who went through a similar childhood is always waiting for the second shoe to fall - it's what kept us safe - the anticipation of violence or danger - and looking for a way out of it.

Well, that's my story Skinny, anything ring a bell?

Sorry to hear that. For what it's worth , my father - WW2 - and grandfather - WW1 - both went through what must have been very traumatic war service and could hardly be persuaded to talk about it. What I know about their service comes from either jokes they made or from the paperwork I've inherited since they passed. I have my Grandad's medals - Dad never claimed his, but I came across the citation once. I looked for it again after he died but Mum probably threw it out. They may or may not have had PTSD - they were both dead way before the acronym was in common usage - but luckily for me they (perhaps illogically) believed that education and respect was the best way to prevent another war.

My Dad in particular was kind to just about everyone, sometimes to his considerable personal cost since not everyone is kind back, and although Grandad may have had the odd prejudice he also had the oddity of treating me from the age of about 5 onwards pretty much like an adult and teaching me to read early etc. He was a poor man, but he had worked most of his life for WD and HO Wills and he had a huge stock of cigarette cards which represented my early learning. I don't know what happened to them, many of them were large pre - WW2 cards which I think came in packets of tobacco rather then the fairly familiar cigarette package size. Everything from battleships of the world to flowers and butterflies. And then Dad bought me the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which I managed to read up to the volume P to Planti before I gave up. This was while I was still at primary school... Of course a lot of it went to waste when I got to my mid-teens and discovered booze, bands and birds :)

I had nothing but kindness (even the discipline was only there when I provoked them unreasonably - I was a stubborn little sod - still am) from my parents, and I am immensely grateful to them since i've discovered just how many people have had unfortunate or damaged parents. I didn't have some sort of perfect childhood, what with one thing and another I was well aware how tough life could be by the time I was 12, but at least I was lucky in my family.
 
My PTSD isn't related to war, but it's miserably stubborn. I inadvertently managed to trigger it a few days ago by reading an old journal. I always think it will be safe to read it, but (weirdly, because it's my own life experiences I'm recounting) it never is. Suddenly, I'm back 20+ years ago experiencing this profound helplessness and despair.

All the years of working to understand the psychological and neurological aspects of the trauma amount to zilch when this happens. Well, a small part of my consciousness is aware and keep saying "erm, it's 2016, woman. This is all past. Look how old you are. Go look in the mirror!" But it seems the traumatized part of me can't be reached, is not educable as far as relative safety, the passage of time or anything else is concerned.

As near as I can figure, it's as if the traumatized part of the self is in suspended animation, completely unchanged, until something comes along to wake it. Then this reanimated part goes rambling about, swallowing up most conscious awareness as it goes.

OK, that may not be the neurological explanation, but that's how it feels.

I should count myself lucky that I do have that small part of my brain that is aware of the present, but I have to do all my cognitive functioning from that part until this phase passes. All the rest is being siphoned off into surviving some old trauma. It's very difficult.

In short, PTSD is the most effed-up back-in-time machine ever. :(
 
My PTSD isn't related to war, but it's miserably stubborn. I inadvertently managed to trigger it a few days ago by reading an old journal. I always think it will be safe to read it, but (weirdly, because it's my own life experiences I'm recounting) it never is. Suddenly, I'm back 20+ years ago experiencing this profound helplessness and despair.

All the years of working to understand the psychological and neurological aspects of the trauma amount to zilch when this happens. Well, a small part of my consciousness is aware and keep saying "erm, it's 2016, woman. This is all past. Look how old you are. Go look in the mirror!" But it seems the traumatized part of me can't be reached, is not educable as far as relative safety, the passage of time or anything else is concerned.

As near as I can figure, it's as if the traumatized part of the self is in suspended animation, completely unchanged, until something comes along to wake it. Then this reanimated part goes rambling about, swallowing up most conscious awareness as it goes.

OK, that may not be the neurological explanation, but that's how it feels.

I should count myself lucky that I do have that small part of my brain that is aware of the present, but I have to do all my cognitive functioning from that part until this phase passes. All the rest is being siphoned off into surviving some old trauma. It's very difficult.

In short, PTSD is the most effed-up back-in-time machine ever. :(

Small things can trigger PTSD. I had an ache in my left foot yesterday and suddenly it came flooding back - when my foot was trapped by a car and I was dragged.

Not a major thing this time but uncomfortable.
 
They have come a long way since WW2 when they simple called it LOMF “Lack of Moral Fiber”. I’m a vet and can relate to this and have seen the effects of PTSD 1st hand.

it takes the courage of a warrior to ASK for help, and anyone else for that matter.

Thank you for your service!

I worked with combined/joint forces in Afghanistan, Iraq and other fun locations.
 
My PTSD isn't related to war, but it's miserably stubborn. I inadvertently managed to trigger it a few days ago by reading an old journal. I always think it will be safe to read it, but (weirdly, because it's my own life experiences I'm recounting) it never is. Suddenly, I'm back 20+ years ago experiencing this profound helplessness and despair.

All the years of working to understand the psychological and neurological aspects of the trauma amount to zilch when this happens. Well, a small part of my consciousness is aware and keep saying "erm, it's 2016, woman. This is all past. Look how old you are. Go look in the mirror!" But it seems the traumatized part of me can't be reached, is not educable as far as relative safety, the passage of time or anything else is concerned.

As near as I can figure, it's as if the traumatized part of the self is in suspended animation, completely unchanged, until something comes along to wake it. Then this reanimated part goes rambling about, swallowing up most conscious awareness as it goes.

OK, that may not be the neurological explanation, but that's how it feels.

I should count myself lucky that I do have that small part of my brain that is aware of the present, but I have to do all my cognitive functioning from that part until this phase passes. All the rest is being siphoned off into surviving some old trauma. It's very difficult.

In short, PTSD is the most effed-up back-in-time machine ever. :(



Ulahume -a bit of advice here:-

Destroy your old journals!

I got rid of many years' worth of old diaries last year -I think I mentioned it in"Chat".
It hurt to do it, but I'm glad I did.
There's a masochistic streak in most of us that can't resist picking psychological scabs, opening up old wounds.
Don't keep /reread stuff when you know you shouldn't!
 
The US veterans going back to live in Vietnam
By Ate Hoekstra Da Nang, Vietnam
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-36363537
Image copyright Charles Fox

More than 40 years after the end of the Vietnam war, dozens of ageing former American soldiers have gone back to the country to live. Some had difficulty adapting to civilian life in the US. Others have gone back in the hope of atoning for wrongs they believe were committed during the war.

At the foot of one of Da Nang's Marble Mountains women with rice hats walk around selling souvenirs. A lift takes tourists to the top, where on one side they look out over the countryside of central Vietnam, on the other the South China Sea.

In 1968 David Edward Clark was camped behind these mountains, but then it was impossible to climb them, the 66-year-old says. Anyone doing so would be a sitting duck for the Vietcong camped nearby.

"We even had the rule that you would never leave the camp without a gun," says Clark. "So I walked around with an M16 all day. And I put that thing in the face of every Vietnamese I encountered. Men, women and children. I wanted them to be scared of me. That would give me a bigger chance to survive."

Image copyright Charles Fox
Forty years later Clark came back to Vietnam, this time not to fight Communists, but to build a new life. Clark is one of about 100 American veterans, maybe more, who have established themselves in Vietnam. Many of them live in and around Da Nang, the city where the US had its busiest military airfield during the war and where the first American troops arrived in 1965.

Back in the US, after the war, not a day went by without thinking of Vietnam, says Clark, who hides his eyes behind a big pair of sunglasses. "I often woke up, bathing in sweat. I saw people when they weren't there. Once I got up in the middle of the night, planning to place ambushes around my house, because I thought the Vietcong were coming to get me. The only way I could escape from these memories was by getting drunk. So I drank way, way too much."

I was so heavily brainwashed that before I went to war I wanted to kill Communists
Richard Parker, Veteran
In 2007, Clark finally managed to take a step back. For this he had go back to the mountain that separated his platoon from the enemy and for the first time in his life he climbed all the way up. "On the top I had a feeling of peace I never had before. There were no more bombs, there was no more fighting, there were no more jet fighters flying over. Then I realised the war is over."

It's estimated that tens of thousands of veterans have returned to Vietnam since the 1990s, mostly for short visits to the places where they once served. Decades after the fall of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) many former soldiers still wonder why they were fighting.

That goes for Richard Parker, also 66, who says he "lost the plot" after Vietnam, and for 20 years led a life of alcohol, drugs and sex.

Image copyright Charles Fox
"I was a vagabond who worked in restaurants and who went from town to town. It didn't matter to me if I was dead or alive," he says.

I have the feeling that we need to restore some things... we have done so many stupid things here
Larry Vetter, Veteran
Memories of destruction and death in Vietnam continuously haunted him. "I was so heavily brainwashed that before I went to war I wanted to kill Communists. But when I left Vietnam, I loved the people there," he says. "How were they dangerous? The only thing they wanted to do was grow rice and make babies."

For many years Parker suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, a disease that today affects 11% of Vietnam veterans. Tens of thousands have committed suicide.

For Parker the only way to put his demons to rest was to return to Vietnam. "Here I found, more or less, peace with myself. Sometimes I go to a place where we used to fight. What was chaos and destruction at the time, is now a hopeful place full of life."

Another veteran, Larry Vetter works for Child of War Vietnam, a website that aims to tell people about the legacy of the Vietnam War. Both American and Vietnamese flags hang in his spacious house. Above the sofa there is a wedding portrait - this summer, the 73-year-old married his Vietnamese girlfriend, Doan Ha.

Image copyright Charles Fox
When Vetter came to Da Nang in November 2012 he only intended to stay three months to help a family care for two sick boys apparently suffering from the effects of Agent Orange, a chemical herbicide used by the US military to kill trees and shrubs, which is still causing cancer, deformities and paralysis today.

Back in the US everything felt meaningless - I was like a piece of the puzzle that didn't fit in
Chas Lehman, Veteran
"I have the feeling that we need to restore some things," says Vetter, who is known to his friends as Captain Larry. "The US government refuses to do that, so I'm here to do my part."

It was partly a sense of guilt that led Vetter to stay in Vietnam after the three months were over.

"There's a closet in my head that I don't want to open, because I fear of what comes out of it. I don't know exactly what's in there, but every now and then the door opens a bit and I get bad dreams. Maybe this closet is the reason I'm in Vietnam. We have done so many stupid things here."

Chas Lehman, a man in his 70s with a white beard and dark sunglasses, describes his return to Vietnam as the will of God. It was conversion to Christianity, he says, that saved him from falling into a black hole of depression, disillusion and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Image copyright Charles Fox
"When I was sent to Vietnam, the mission seemed simple: I had to prevent the free South Vietnam from becoming a slave of the Communist North. But from the time I arrived on Vietnamese soil, I knew this wasn't right and that I had to get out of here," he says. "Back in the US everything felt meaningless. I was like a piece of the puzzle that didn't fit in. Then Jesus saved me and gave meaning to my life."

I know this is where I have to be - the war is over, and I will die here
David Edward Clark, Veteran
Together with other volunteers Lehman distributes food, drinks, clothing and blankets to needy minority groups in Vietnam's Central Highlands. On a single trip they can assist 65 to 300 families. "During the war, I felt sorry for the people in Vietnam, but I couldn't trust them. Now I feel affection for them," he says.

Returning to Vietnam is a way to end frozen memories, says Richard Parker. "As long as you don't return, you will remember Vietnam as the country of the war."

Although he sometimes teaches English, most of the former vagabond's days are a simple pattern of reading, walking, talking with friends and enjoying Vietnamese cuisine.

Image copyright Charles Fox
His eyes light up when he explains how Vietnam has made him a happy man again. He laughs a lot these days. "And the Vietnamese show respect for me, even more respect than I get as a veteran in the US," he says.

David Clark would like to see more veterans coming back to Vietnam. He himself came back several times after his first trip. During a motor bike journey from north of the country to the south something else happened that he would never have expected in 1968 - he fell in love with a Vietnamese woman. They married two years ago.

Image copyright Charles Fox
The veteran takes a deep breath. He takes off his sunglasses, wipes away a tear. His voice breaks. "I used to think the Vietnamese were the dirtiest, lowest scumbags in the world. But now I feel blessed for living here. I know this is where I have to be. The war is over, and I will die here."

Image copyright Charles Fox
In his living room Larry Vetter shows me a picture on his laptop. There he is, a young twenty-something man in a helicopter, at the end of the 1960s. Beneath him is the Vietnamese jungle, next to him a soldier with a machine gun. "After the war I had a lot of questions, but there was no-one who gave me answers," says Vetter. "So I went to study myself. And the more I read, the less I understood about why we were sent to Vietnam. I found out how much they lied to us and thought to myself: 'If I were Vietnamese, I would have fought with the Vietcong.'"

From the kitchen his wife, Doan Ha, looks at him lovingly. Captain Larry may be much older and may have memories of Vietnam that she will never fully understand, but she loves him. "He has a good heart," she says. "Not just for me, but for everyone."

Image copyright Charles Fox
 
Private military contract training for stress ... and I thought I had bad days at work ..

 
Surely it isn't a good idea to keep pushing someone over while they're trying to fire a rifle? Isn't it a bit dangerous?
 
A follow-up to the story that prompted the thread:

15f0f4a834fbb330f45eec0e8c4cf841

Captain Paul McKay’s body was found on Scarface Mountain in upstate New York. Supplied by family
http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/lifes...n/news-story/fb5a5d94c799b1b1874f55b5ea9e217a

The disappearing soldier - why Adelaide man Paul McKay died alone on a frozen mountain
fb5a5d94c799b1b1874f55b5ea9e217a

Kathryn Joyce, The Advertiser
July 22, 2016 9:30pm


fb5a5d94c799b1b1874f55b5ea9e217a

ON the second-to-last day of 2013, when the glow of Christmas had passed and there was nothing to do but settle in for months of unbroken winter, a stranger arrived in Saranac Lake, a 5400-person mountain town 70 miles shy of the Canadian border. Set amid the patchwork of forest preserves and villages, Saranac Lake is the self-appointed “Capital of the Adirondacks”, a one-time best small town of New York, and the place I come from.

The stranger was a 31-year-old infantry captain in the Royal Australian Regiment who had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder after returning from Afghanistan two years before.

He arrived at 6pm on the one bus that comes through town each day: an Adirondack Trailways coach that chugs slowly uphill from Albany, stopping in what seems like every town along the way.

To get to Albany, he’d taken a bus from New York City, and before that planes from San Francisco, Sydney, Canberra and Adelaide, his hometown, more than 10,500 miles away. He was male-model good-looking – wholesome and tidy, with intelligent eyes, though he’d recently grown shockingly thin and had cut his brown hair so close it was nearly shaved.

He’d been a battle captain in Afghanistan’s Uruzgan Province, just north of Kandahar, working as part of a NATO coalition force. But he had a medical review coming up in January and, his family would later tell the police, he feared he might be discharged.

The bus stopped in front of the shuttered Hotel Saranac, its six-storey bulk standing dark and silent over the town. From what police would later determine, the stranger probably walked down Main Street, past the fogged windows of bars, under the yellow face of the town hall clock tower, then traced the curve of Lake Flower back in the direction from which his bus had come. He might have stopped in a liquor store and the shopping plaza at the edge of town, then walked a little farther down the road toward neighbouring Lake Placid before turning around where the snowploughs do, at the crossing of the old railroad tracks.

Somewhere around nine, he returned to one of the last motels he’d passed, a two-storey Best Western, and asked the clerk how far the woods extended past town. Hearing the answer – nine miles to Lake Placid – he said he’d stay the night. At 10, he emerged briefly to use the lobby computer.

The next morning, on New Year’s Eve, he bought a shovel and a decorative fleece blanket at the shopping plaza and set off on foot. People would later say they’d seen him pass, dressed in snow pants and a black winter parka, and carrying a large, brown backpack as he walked toward the crossing.

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Paul McKay was reported missing on January 3, 2014
The snow was spotty due to a pre-Christmas thaw, but weather was coming. Weather was coming to the whole country, in fact, as a polar air mass descended from the Arctic.

The railroad tracks cut through a marshy area, continued through the smattering of houses that make up the hamlet of Ray Brook, and past the gates of the federal penitentiary. At noon, two guards on their lunch break saw a man in winter gear walking steadily east.

Just beyond the prison was the trail to Scarface Mountain. Broad but not tall, with no real view, Scarface isn’t majestic, but on the slope facing Saranac Lake there is a distinctive, rocky cliff – its eponymous scar. From the trailhead to the summit, it’s a 3.5-mile climb that takes around two hours in summer. In late December, it would have been slower going, the route covered by snow, crisscrossed with misleading animal trails, and slick with ice. At some point, the man walked off the trail and into the woods.

On a shoulder just below the scar, he stopped, and beside a cluster of mossy boulders laid down his pack, took out his shovel, and began to dig in the frozen earth. With what had to be monumental effort, he cleared a narrow trench the length of a tall man’s body. In the rapidly cooling evening, he stopped to eat tinned beef stew. Perhaps just intending to rest, he covered himself with the thin moose-print fleece. One hundred feet ahead of him, the mountainside dropped off sharply. Beyond it, the sodium streetlights in town flicked on, glowing brown through the dampness that hangs in the air before a snow.

The snow came as predicted. Three days later, the news would hit the town paper: A young Australian named Paul McKay had gone missing in the North Country, last seen in Saranac Lake.

McKay’s father had traced an email his son had sent him back to the motel, and called the Saranac Lake police. In the email McKay said that everything was OK, but that he had some “housekeeping issues” to clarify. What followed was a two-page list, transferring all of his belongings, from his car to his Kindle account, to his father and he authorised his parents to access his civilian email account. Inexplicably, he wrote about what would happen if his body was never found.

Saranac Lake’s police chief at the time, Bruce Nason, contacted McKay’s banks for statements, urgently explaining that he might be missing in the wilderness, and that temperatures were 15 below zero and dropping. As the police knocked on doors in search of clues, the ink froze in their pens, and the people they interviewed were aghast at the idea of anybody being out in that cold.

McKay’s bank records led to an ATM at a Greyhound terminal in Albany, where security footage revealed an image of him leaning on a counter as he bought his ticket north using a fake name. When a family member went to his apartment in Canberra, they found his military dress uniform and medals laid out at neat right angles on his bed, his army sword to its side.

Just before McKay disappeared, his family learned, he’d created profiles on LinkedIn and Facebook. McKay hated social media.

On the LinkedIn page, he specified that he’d served in Afghanistan alongside soldiers from the US Army’s 10th Mountain Division, based out of Fort Drum, New York, three hours west of Saranac Lake. And he noted that he was the battle captain on duty during “Bloody Saturday,” the “green-on-blue” attack of October 29, 2011, when an Afghan coalition member opened fire on a group of 12 Australian soldiers and three of their interpreters on their shared base in Uruzgan, killing four and severely wounding nine.

The Facebook profile contained only photographs – McKay on training exercises, McKay as a tourist in Asia, McKay in his service dress uniform looking handsome, and, for his profile image, a shot taken from a distance: McKay sitting atop a mountain, facing away.

Many who heard about McKay’s disappearance inferred that he’d been present at the Bloody Saturday attack and had watched his colleagues die – that he had survivor’s guilt or felt he’d somehow failed to protect them.

But it wasn’t that simple, said two army colleagues who had been there. The attack had shaken every Australian in Uruzgan, they said, but McKay hadn’t been anywhere near the outpost where the Afghan soldier opened fire. The provenance of his PTSD was something more ambiguous.

McKay had grown up in Adelaide, attending the University of Adelaide, where he earned a double degree in law and commerce. He joined the Adelaide Universities Regiment of the Army Reserve in late 2004. While most reserve officers take two to three years to complete their training, McKay finished in just 13 months. He mapped out a glorious life plan: to excel in both the reserves and the law, to become a partner in a top firm by age 30, and to parlay that into a successful career in politics or business.

His friends believed he would do it. McKay was an over-achiever – exceptionally disciplined and very smart, retaining facts so well that he suspected he had a photographic memory. In a country of sports fanatics, he played almost every game. “Many people have celebrities they look up to,” said his childhood friend Peter O’Leary. “I looked up to Paul.”

...cont in next post
 
...
In 2009, McKay finished his law degree with honours and was admitted to the bar. And then, almost immediately, he quit.

He shifted his focus to the military. In most circumstances, a reserve officer transferring to the regular army would be compelled to start anew, returning to military college for another 12 to 18 months. Only the most promising reservists were allowed to bypass the process, and at the time McKay applied, there were only two openings for direct transfers available. It surprised no one when he was chosen.

Saranac Lake seems to possess a sort of geographic anonymity, and the police were puzzled by the fact that McKay had even ended up there. “You don’t just end up here,” said my brother James, a police officer in town, who helped with the search. The police thought if they could figure out why McKay had come, it might help them get to him in time. They uploaded a missing person flyer onto Facebook, and within days the post was shared nearly 30,000 times. None of the leads panned out.

McKay’s friends in Australia began to write, too, telling a common story of an intelligent and driven man who’d dropped progressively out of touch. They worried that McKay might not want to be found.

People go missing every year, usually unprepared hikers or hunters who wander off the trail into the dark uniformity of the forest and can’t find their way back. More recently, rangers had seen a spike in the number of people who go into the woods not for recreation, but intending to do themselves harm. Nationally, suicide had become a leading cause of death in parks and open spaces. The pattern was striking enough in the Adirondacks that rangers had requested specialised training for approaching people in mental distress.

But McKay’s disappearance seemed to move people in town far more than other cases had. The newspaper printed his boy-next-door photo, and, in this community full of English and Irish surnames, he could have been anyone’s brother or son. Locals wrote letters to the editor wondering whether McKay had somehow been drawn by Saranac Lake’s peaceful mountains, or its kindly small-town ways. They referred to him with odd formality, as “Captain McKay” or simply “the Australian soldier”, a sort of everyman wounded warrior.

Uruzgan, Afghanistan, is mostly desert and jagged mountains cut through with lush stripes of valley – the Green Zone – where watermelons, pomegranates and wheat grow alongside the poppies. By April 2011, when McKay arrived, Australian military members were there primarily to mentor the fragile Afghan National Army and focus on Australia’s long-term plans for withdrawal.

McKay was stationed at Tarin Kowt, the central headquarters of Combined Team Uruzgan, working in modular offices of reinforced metal. He was a battle captain in the command centre.

For at least nine months, he worked the night shift. His whole job, said one close colleague, was sitting in the command centre and waiting for something to happen. Most of the time nothing did, and the team would pass the hours reading or watching television. But when something did occur – an attack on a forward operating base, soldiers killed – McKay was charged with making decisions about the initial response. He was “like an orchestra conductor,” said another friend, co-ordinating air traffic controllers, specialists in charge of supplies and artillery, ground forces, and medevac helicopters. It was a high-stress job.

With his colleagues, McKay was full of self-doubt, constantly pulling them aside to discuss decisions he’d made the night before, never sure he’d made the right call.

Then came the Bloody Saturday attack at Sorkh Bed Forward Operating Base. McKay was in the command post, manning the morning operations, and helped direct the evacuation helicopters dispatched within moments to the base. Shortly after 8am, as 12 Australians and their Afghan interpreters walked across the compound, they came under sudden, heavy fire from a four-year veteran of the Afghan forces. Ten Australian soldiers, plus three translators, were shot. Days later, McKay would gather in an airport hangar with fellow servicemen and watch as three coffins draped with the Australian flag were loaded onto a military transport.

McKay’s response to the pressure and anxiety was to work harder. While other nightshift workers tried to unwind, he pored over every intelligence briefing and situation report he could find. He shut himself away and returned to his military history books, searching for parallels between the situation in Afghanistan and ancient battles as though it was a puzzle he could solve.

By this point he was working 12- to 16-hour days, operating on little or no sleep. But change was coming. His unit was set to return home in February. In the third week of January, however, something happened and after a medical evaluation, he was placed on a cas-evac – a medical casualty evacuation – and flown to a hospital in Brisbane.

When he returned to Adelaide, he saw his oldest childhood friend, Peter O’Leary, and told him he wasn’t the same anymore. He said he’d been pumped full of drugs and they were making him feel worse. He was put on a restricted medical status and posted to Canberra where he continued to work.

One night in March, he sent a group text to a number of friends, saying he’d shamed himself and his unit; he seemed to be saying goodbye. His friends made panicked calls to each other, and one alerted McKay’s commanding officer. The CO called McKay’s phone, McKay answered, and he ended up in the hospital. To a friend who visited him there, he lamented that his career plans were ruined: Why would the army want him now? It was hard to pinpoint why he felt he’d shamed his unit. While many in the Australian media, and even his friends, would later believe he blamed himself for the losses at Sorkh Bed, one US officer said there was nothing about McKay’s job that could conceivably leave him at fault.

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Paul McKay. Supplied by his family
Another snow came to Saranac Lake, followed by another thaw, eclipsing any hope that the search might be as easy as spotting a set of footprints leading off into the woods. McKay had been missing for five days when, on January 5, 2014, the Saranac Lake police briefed two forest rangers on the case. Ranger Scott van Laer, who lived just off the railroad tracks in Ray Brook, was appointed case section chief, setting the terms of the search. State Police helicopters were sent to hover overhead while rangers walked the tracks where McKay had last been seen.

Eric Olsen, who ran Saranac Lake’s veterans’ program, told the police McKay wouldn’t have stayed on the tracks but would have cut off at the first trail he’d seen.

“Being a ‘man of action,’” Olsen explained, “McKay would try to move through his depression. He would not stop until he was out of the manic mood or otherwise incapacitated.” He would go to extremes. Olsen told the searchers to look up high.

... cont in next post
 
...
January 15 was Scott van Laer’s day off, but he had been mulling over an idea that he just couldn’t shake. Maybe McKay hadn’t followed the Scarface trail at all. Large-scale searches had been going on for five days, with upwards of 30 volunteers, largely regional veterans, working their way up and around the mountain. An Australian news crew had flown over to film the effort. Every day searchers went out in groups of 10, following assigned paths and marking off search blocks with string. They found surprisingly few clues: one day a sock, another the remains of a campfire, neither convincingly tied to McKay.

Van Laer knew there was an ice floe on one side of the mountain covered so thickly with evergreens the searchers in police helicopters wouldn’t have been able to see through. He walked out his backyard, up into the woods, and worked his way toward the floe.

“When I started out that day I didn’t believe I was going to find him; I thought there was no chance,” he recalls. At first he thought that he’d come upon an illegal hunting camp. “And then I got closer and I thought, ‘Oh. We’ve ended the search.’”

McKay’s body was lying on the ground next to a boulder, his hands in his pockets, just beside a shallow trench. His belongings were tucked between the rocks, and the shovel lay nearby. Staff at the complex in Ray Brook had become accustomed to the sound of helicopters moving back and forth over the mountain. But that afternoon, as they looked out their windows and saw a helicopter return bearing a litter, they knew Paul McKay had been found.

The local coroner determined McKay’s death was a suicide, due to intentional hypothermia and emaciation. Saranac Lake Mayor Clyde Rabideau announced the news on Facebook that afternoon. Within hours, the post was viewed and shared thousands of times. Locals wrote to express their sorrow, to say how they’d felt that they’d somehow known McKay. Australians commented in droves, thanking Saranac Lake for treating a stranger as one of their own. Others wrote with more bitterness: “RIP Paul, another soldier let down by the system.”

A State Police escort was arranged to accompany McKay’s body to New York City, from where he was flown home. At 7.30 on the frigid morning of January 23, with thermometers hovering on 20 below, some two dozen locals lined the streets of Saranac Lake and Ray Brook to see him off.

The reception in Australia wasn’t as warm. There was no ceremony to welcome him home, as would have been the case if he’d died in combat. His name wouldn’t be engraved outside the Hall of Memory at Canberra’s Australian War Memorial so that visiting children could participate in the ritual of placing a plastic poppy alongside it.

At the funeral reception, McKay’s friends speculated over why he’d gone where he had. To his mother, a devout Anglican, it seemed that he was on a religious quest, like the biblical wise men, following a star he didn’t quite understand. Other friends thought it must have been the proximity of the 10th Mountain Division, which was in Afghanistan, or just the appeal of a completely foreign environment. Or maybe something as simple as a postcard he’d once seen or something he’d read in a book.

What stuck with van Laer was the unmistakeable impression that McKay had wanted someone to look for him, and one day to be found. “But why would he want there to be a search?” he asked. To Australian veterans, the answer was obvious.

Since 2000, estimates suggest that nearly three times as many active Australian soldiers and nearly five times as many veterans have committed suicide as have died fighting in Afghanistan. But before McKay, almost none had been nationally recognised.

“He could have easily died in Australia,” said Troy Rodgers, a veterans’ assistance worker. “Obviously he had a clear thought in his mind that he’s going to do it and do it in a way that will make some noise.”

John Bale, CEO and co-founder of Soldier On, a national veterans’ support group based in Canberra, agreed. Before McKay’s death there had been a near blackout on news of the growing number of soldier suicides in Australia. It wasn’t so much that McKay changed the conversation, said Bale: “It didn’t exist in conversations before this. It does now.”

On April 25, 2014, Saranac Lake declared its first-ever observation of Anzac Day, and a procession of local and Australian authorities climbed up Scarface Mountain to where the forest rangers had constructed a small stone cairn and a wooden cross, to which one of them tied a poppy while another poured a can of Foster’s on the ground. McKay’s parents came that summer, bringing their son’s ashes to the mountain and scattering them above the cairn.

Why McKay did what he did will probably remain a mystery. Perhaps his unforgiving drive and perfectionism set him up to come apart in the face of the horrors he saw in Afghanistan. Perhaps he needed more help than he got reintegrating into society after serving in a war zone. Perhaps it’s wrong for a civilian like me to even speculate.

What does seem clear from the clues he left behind is that McKay struggled to operate under the weight of his experiences. Those who knew him best described their sense of no longer really knowing him.

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The funeral of Captain Paul McKay at St Peter's Cathedral, Adelaide. Copyright: Commonwealth Australia
One close Australian colleague visited Scarface and sent a note to McKay’s parents, along with a photo of the cross and the cairn in the shadow of the boulder. “It was a very quiet spot,” he wrote. “Sadly I didn’t find Paul there. I think I lost him a long time ago.”

“He disappeared like he had disappeared off the face of the Earth,” recalled Reverend Brian Douglas, McKay’s pastor back in Canberra. “But really, he had disappeared before he actually left. He had gone to another place emotionally, which you couldn’t reach.”

Long before he ever set foot in Saranac Lake, Paul McKay was already gone. ●

First published in Pacific Standard Magazine. If you suffer from PTSD, guidance is available at beyondblue.com.au or soldieron.org.au

____________________________________________________________
I heard this week that today deaths through PTSD outnumber those from actual combat by some 3 to 1.
 
On last night's "Trust me I'm a doctor", they showed an electrical stimulation treatment for PTSD which has had some success with relieving symptoms, if only long enough to allow the sufferers to sleep, but some total cures were reported. Worth checking out.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08fqwvv
 

Nothing fucking changes...does it.
 
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-03-01/supersoldiers-and-the-ethics-of-human-enhancement/8310946

Stronger, faster and more deadly: The ethics of developing supersoldiers
Opinion
The Conversation
By Adam Henschke from the Australian National University
Updated Wed at 9:46am

Photo: Soldiers of the future may be biologically or technologically enhanced — but at what cost? (Reuters: Ho New)
Related Story: Australian AI expert takes fight to ban 'killer robots' to UN
Map: Australia
Enhancing a soldier's capacity to fight is nothing new.

Arguably one of the first forms of enhancement was through improving their diet. The phrase "an army marches on its stomach" goes back at least to Napoleon, and speaks to the belief that being well fed enhances the soldier's chances of winning a battle.

But recent research has gone well beyond diet to enhance the capabilities of soldiers, like purposefully altering the structure and function of soldiers' digestive system to enable them to digest cellulose, meaning they can use grass as a food.

Perhaps their cognitive capabilities could be substantially altered so they can make more rapid decisions during conflict.

Or their sensitivity to pain could be diminished, or even the severity and likelihood of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) reduced.

Or even the direct wiring of prostheses to their brain.

This kind of biological and technological enhancement is often referred to as developing "supersoldiers".

It's not science-fiction; research is underway around the world. And it brings with it a host of ethical concerns.

Ethical dimensions
One concern revolves around the capacity for a soldier — or any other member of a military force — to give meaningful informed consent to partake in clinical research or undergo enhancement.

The concern here is twofold. First, some of these interventions would be confidential; a military might justifiably want to keep new technologies top secret.

Media player: "Space" to play, "M" to mute, "left" and "right" to seek.

Audio: Techtopia: Neuroscience, implants and keeping up with artificial intellige (The World Today)
This need for secrecy can impact how much information the subjects of enhancement receive, thus impacting the "informed" part of informed consent.

Second, we might have concerns about whether a soldier can actively consent to enhancement.

That is, the hierarchical command structures and training in the military may impact the soldier's capacity to refuse enhancement.

Fight to ban killer robots

In 2015, Australian AI expert Toby Walsh addressed the UN to call for a ban on killer robots.
Given the prominence of informed consent to medical ethics, this is a core issue for enhancement before we even get to conflict.

Numerous forms of enhancement look at ways of indirectly or directly impacting the soldier's cognitive capacities.

One example is countering the need for sleep through the use of drugs like amphetamines or Modafinil, or other longer-lasting neurological interventions.

Another is enhancing a soldier's capacity to make moral decisions.

Another concern is what might happen if we reduce a soldier's capacity to experience trauma with a drug like propranolol, which is being investigated for its ability to dampen the emotional force of particular memories.

If administered rapidly after a particularly traumatic military activity — say, killing a teenage combatant to protect a school full of children — this pharmaceutical intervention could reduce the likelihood or severity of the soldier developing post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Moral obligation
The ethical worries here turn on whether such interventions negatively impact a soldier's capacity to follow the laws of war.

However, if these enhancements don't increase the chances of the soldier committing war crimes, then perhaps there is even a moral obligation to enhance soldiers in such situations.

Conversely, there are reasons to be worried that enhancing soldiers can make their opponents, or even civilians, treat those soldiers immorally.

For example, if it is believed that enemy soldiers are enhanced so that they don't feel pain, some might be more inclined to torture them.

Treating the enemy as inhuman or subhuman is sadly all too common through history.

Enhancements may exacerbate this process, particularly if opposing groups can classify their enemies as inhuman mutant supersoldiers.

Another concern is around the soldier's life after conflict ceases or they leave the military.

For instance, does an enhancement have to be reversible?

And if not, what special responsibilities does the military have to care for veterans, above and beyond existing supports?

Similar issues have already been explored in science-fiction.

In a sense, none of these ethical concerns are specially new. Informed consent, limiting war crimes and a responsibility to care for veterans are hardly novel ideas.

What enhancement technologies do is shine a light on existing behaviour.

And though we don't need to worry about enhanced soldiers becoming mutant superheroes quite yet, there is value in considering the ethical aspects of such technologies before they become used rather than after the fact.

Dr Adam Henschke is a lecturer at the National Security College (NSC) at the Australian National University and a research fellow with Delft University of Technology (TUD) in The Hague, The Netherlands.

Originally published in The Conversation
 
Bush retreat helps veterans combat PTSD, offering peace, purpose and a place to talk
ABC Wide Bay
By Trudie Leigo and Brad Marsellos
Updated about 2 hours ago
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-01-18/camp-gregory-bush-camp-helps-veterans-with-ptsd/9335350


Photo: Camp Gregory is a bush retreat in Queensland where veterans of all ages come together. (ABC Wide Bay: Brad Marsellos)
Map: Bundaberg 4670
A Vietnam veteran has created a free bush retreat to help veterans find peace, purpose and a place to talk.

Roger Dwyer established Camp Gregory Veterans Retreat when he realised ex-service personnel sometimes needed to get away from it all and talk to others with shared experiences.

The bush camp nestled on the bank of the Gregory River, halfway between Hervey Bay and Bundaberg in Queensland, has been developed to help veterans combat Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

"Its prime purpose is to look after veterans and their families," he said.

"A lot of veterans suffer with PTSD and one of the issues is the fact that they can't stay in closed rooms and handle noises."

The camp has been under development for seven years, and has largely been built by visiting veterans.

"We've had a lot of work done by veterans, I'm talking 1,000 hours of voluntary work," Mr Dwyer said.

Photo: Roger Dwyer is the founder of Camp Gregory Veteran's Retreat in Queensland. (ABC Wide Bay: Brad Marsellos)


The retreat is located on a 16-hectare property owned by Mr Dwyer and allows for veterans to bring their own caravans and tents.

The retreat also offers accommodation facilities in the form of dongas, a camp kitchen, bathrooms, and other shared facilities.

Helping all ages
Mr Dwyer said he has been motivated to create a retreat not just for his own generation of Vietnam veterans, but for veterans of all ages and conflicts.

He said his concern for the younger veterans was increasing due to the current high rate of suicide among returned military personnel.

"In 2016 there were 80 military suicides, in 2017 there were 84 suicides, and these are all young people," Mr Dwyer said.

"We've got a responsibility to curtail that."

Mr Dwyer said there were marked differences between the experiences of his generation of Vietnam veterans integrating back in to society and today's veterans.

He said that many of his generation had their jobs held while serving and had the opportunity to return to their former work and lives.

"The problem today is these younger people do not have that opportunity," he said.

"There have been a lot of them who have been employed full time by the military from the ages of 16, 17 and 18 and now they are 35 or 40.

"They've served their time, they've supported their country and now they've got nothing to do, there are no jobs for them."

Photo: Daniel Spain, who is a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, is a regular visitor to Camp Gregory. (ABC Wide Bay: Brad Marsellos)


Daniel Spain, at 28, is a young veteran who understands firsthand the challenges of integrating back into society.

"As a civilian there are things in life you are not used to doing, like navigating the health system," Mr Spain said.

"I do a lot of work helping other veterans with their entitlements and welfare work."

Mr Spain said the camp had been vital in bringing veterans together, both young and old.

"These older guys have been through a lot of things we have, whether it is in the military or in life," Mr Spain said.

"There's a lot of skills between us.

"I like to think that some of the older veterans learn just as much from us younger generation as we do off them."

Mr Spain said there had been a lot of positives to come out of the friendships made at the retreat.

"A lot of these guys are old enough to be my parent or grandparent, but we are just the same; we are all just mates," he said.

"If we are not feeling so good, we can ring each other up and say we are heading up to the camp.

"Unfortunately some of the guys don't have much family and for all intents and purposes this place is family for them."

Photo: Camp Gregory location on the Gregory River means veterans can spend plenty of time fishing and crabbing. (ABC Wide Bay: Brad Marsellos)


More work to be done
Mr Dwyer believed the retreat was essential in helping veterans recover and combat the PTSD that many suffered from.

He believed everyone could learn from the mistakes of his generation.

"When we came back there was no mention of PTSD and no compensation for 30 years," Mr Dwyer said.

He was thankful the condition was now acknowledged by the Federal Government, but believed more work needed to be done to support those suffering from the disorder.

Mr Dwyer plans to advocate for similar retreats to be built around Australia.

"You can't imagine how useful it is to have people around the campfire talking," he said.

"It's essential."
Les Hiddins started this kind of thing 20 years ago with Pandanus Park. Good to see the idea is catching on. More needed.
 
Vietnam War veterans unite to build a club to with their former foes
By Zoe Osborne
Updated Sun at 6:28am
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-01-...nd-friendship-reconciliation-vung-tau/9362536

Rod first returned to Vietnam in 2011, finally moving to Vung Tau full time in 2015. Getting to know the country today has been an invaluable source of closure.

"It's a great place to come back and unload those demons you've been carrying," he says. "You've still got the bad memories until you come over and see the place now."

Just the beginning
While he counts himself lucky for his experience after the war, Thu also feels drawn to the mateship that underpins the community of Australian vets at Vung Tau.

"My transition from the war to normal life was easy, especially when compared to other Vietnamese veterans," he says. "I got out of the war alive, I didn't have any life-altering injuries [and] I had a high-paying job."

But the support offered for veterans in Vietnam is minimal and many suffer similar problems to their Australian counterparts.
 
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