All right y'all, welcome back.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest on the show is Eric Newhouse.
He's a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, the author of Faces of Combat and a blog called Invisible Wounds on Vets' Mental Health Issues.
Invisible Wounds can be found at psychologytoday.com/blog/invisible-wounds.
And if you didn't catch that, rewind it.
All right, welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm great, Scott.
Thanks for having me aboard.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here and you have a piece at Truth Out that we're running in the front line section today at antiwar.com that caught my eye.
Half of vets returning from Iraq and Afghanistan need medical attention.
Break it down for us, please.
It's an amazing number.
Of the two million plus soldiers that we've sent to Iraq and Afghanistan, about 1.3 million have left the service.
They've returned to the United States and 53% of those guys have come to the VA seeking medical help.
To me, that's an amazing number.
Well, and there's all different kinds of battlefield injuries, I guess.
But in these wars, a lot has really changed because of the, first of all, the medical technology, but secondly, the ability to get guys from where they were wounded to the crash MASH unit, you know, in record time.
And so and also body armor and the rest of it has improved.
So you have people surviving wounds that in any other war before they would have died, right?
So that's a big part of this is people with no arms, no legs, but they're still alive, laying in a bed, Walter Reed or wherever they put them now.
You're absolutely right.
We are saving more kids than we have saved in any other war before.
But the problem with that is that they come back with injuries that we really don't see.
I call those the invisible wounds of war.
And so we're going to have to war.
Yeah, don't anybody get us wrong that they'd be better off dead or anything.
It's a great thing that their lives are being saved.
Obviously, it's just there's another side to the effects of that.
That's absolutely right.
And one of the problems, and it's become called a signature wound of this war, is that there are an awful lot of kids that are suffering concussions.
There are IEDs, improvised explosive devices.
There are RPG rocket propelled grenades.
There are mortars.
There are all kinds of things that shake a kid's head up, rattle his brains around, leave him unconscious or disoriented for a while.
And it happens not once, not twice, but it happens with alarming frequency to these soldiers.
Well, and, you know, I wonder about that, because obviously that's part of the signature weapon, the homemade landmine on the side of the road, whatever acronym they give them.
But I wonder why that's so different from the previous wars.
I mean, you think World War One, World War Two, there's shells going off everywhere.
It seems like there would have been a lot of that same concussion type injury.
No.
Why is this?
Yeah, I think that is correct.
Yeah, I think that there have always been concussion injuries like that.
But I also think that in previous wars, we didn't recognize them.
It took us until 1980 to figure out that post-traumatic stress disorder was a recognizable emotional wound of war.
Well, the Greeks and the Romans knew that for thousands of years.
The writers had been writing about warriors who came back from combat with emotional injuries that turned them into very different people than the people that they were before they went to war.
And so, you know, it's basically taken us about 3000 years to get a medical explanation for what we've all known for all this, all these millennia.
Well, you know, just being a kid in the 80s, always heard stories of, you know, the quote unquote, Vietnam flashback, that kind of thing.
And George Carlin, of course, had a great bit about how we used to call it shell shock.
And then they changed it to battle fatigue and then operational exhaustion.
And then finally, post-traumatic stress disorder.
And so the pain is all buried under jargon.
He said, if only we had called it shell shock the whole time, maybe some of those Vietnam veterans would have got the help that they needed.
He was saying that, I guess that's from the very early 1990s.
But it is the same sort of thing, right?
To have a syndrome or an effect lingering that has eight syllables and a hyphen in there.
It really does kind of you can see how the military culture would just look down on people claiming this as as some kind of weaklings, whereas if they were just shell shocked, like, hey, it happens to the best of us after all.
It's a shock.
It's this horrible thing, you know, waking nightmares all day and whatever.
How is someone supposed to be able to deal with that?
And then maybe there would be more understanding and better medical attention to it.
You know, I personally like the term shell shock.
Shock is a very strong, active verb.
Shell is a very positive, strong noun.
You put them together and you get a very graphic image.
And I think that in today's combat, that's precisely what we're seeing.
We're seeing a lot of kids whose heads have been jarred, whose brains have been scrambled and who are having difficulty functioning.
Yeah, well, and now can you tell me this?
Aaron Glantz, who was such a great reporter on the Iraq war and then turned his attention to veterans issues years ago, told me, I guess, probably a year or maybe more now ago that things are really getting better at the V.A., that there was a lot of real problems and that, on the other hand, there's been a lot of real progress in terms of their care for the veterans of these wars.
And he wasn't giving them an A-plus or anything like that, but he said they were really trying and they were really devoting a lot more resources to it.
Is that much true?
I'm not saying he would say that today.
I don't know.
It's been a while since I spoke with him.
But I know that there has been a lot more money that's put into the V.A.
The V.A. budget has gone up 23 percent under President Obama's administration.
So there are more doctors.
There are more counselors.
There are many, many more resources, including vet centers, that I think are absolutely wonderful.
The problem is that the V.A. has never gotten outside of its own box.
The V.A. does things that are proven.
They won't do experimental things.
And so a lot of the V.A. treatment is still talk therapy or pharmaceuticals.
And throwing drugs at a problem really doesn't make any sense to me.
It just addles a soldier, kind of blunts the pain that he's feeling a little bit.
But when you get a bunch of different pharmaceuticals, you put them together, toss them together in a hat, shake them up and give them to some soldier, you're just asking for trouble.
You've got a cocktail that can do very strange things, if not kill you.
Yeah.
Well, not to get all ideological about it or whatever, but I wonder if they just abolished the V.A. and paid these guys on discharge enough that they could afford to just go seek the health care that they wanted in the marketplace, whether that would be better.
It sounds like what they were talking about doing with Social Security.
Forget the bureaucrats.
Take the money, invest it yourself.
And for a strong libertarian, there's a certain appeal to that.
Well, I mean, if you're talking about the Bush plan for Social Security, that was let him invest it in the stock market bubble for you.
And no libertarian is for that.
That's more of a what Mussolini call it, fascism, something like that.
That's an entirely different animal.
If you ask me, I just mean let them have the money and let them go choose in their own way from there.
To a degree, I agree.
I like the idea of people being able to choose their own health care and to figure out what works best for them.
Problem is that many of these kids are functionally disabled and they need the structure.
They need somebody to go to.
Problem, of course, is that the V.A. is very much like the army it serves.
It's high bound, it's rigid, it's inflexible and it frequently doesn't give you what you need.
But at least it's something.
Well, we've seen just absolutely horrifying rates of suicide and abuse and murder.
And there's a terrible thing on 60 Minutes the other night.
I don't know if you saw it about the guy killed his girlfriend and then they're going to try him for it.
But and he was going to plead the PTSD defense, but committed suicide before he got his trial.
This kind of thing is going on way, way too much.
And I want to get to more of these numbers with you, Eric Newhouse, right after this.
It's anti-war radio.
All right, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and I'm in the middle of talking with Eric Newhouse.
He's got this incredible piece, this horrible piece because of how well done it is.
Half of vets returning from Iraq and Afghanistan need medical attention.
And to me, this gets to the whole unfairness of the thing that Eric, the kids, mostly the people who go and join the army are fresh out of high school, their coach and their dad agree that this is a good idea, you know, something like that.
And they trust the rest of us and the so-called democracy with all our sacred elections that make sure that only good things happen when our government does things.
We'll only send them and put them in harm's way and risk their brain being rattled and risk their life in the midst of taking life in the most absolute dire circumstances.
We don't just go to war for fun around here.
We don't go and have extra wars.
We would only risk their life.
That's the implied contract of the whole thing, that they would only be used for legitimate reasons.
And yet you look at the eight year war in Iraq and the complete waste of life on all sides and all these injuries and what amounts to really for nothing, really just empowering Iran's friends and taking over two thirds of the country, something like that.
So it's not just that they're wounded, it's that they're wounded for nothing.
They're dead for nothing.
I think there's one aspect of it that's even a little more cynical than that.
I look at what we're doing today and I see what I call a double P draft.
The first P is poor or poverty.
These are kids who really need a job, who strive to make income, who see the combat pay and who think that's pretty decent money.
And so they enlist and put their lives at risk and their brains at risk, if they have any brains, just because it's a decent paycheck.
The other P is patriotic.
A lot of the kids who are enlisting today are the sons and daughters of Vietnam vets and the grandkids of World War II vets.
Their granddaddies and their daddies probably all have PTSD, wake up in the middle of the night with nightmares, suffer flashbacks and have created households that are difficult to live in.
These kids think this is just their way of life, to go into the service and to come home with PTSD, be dependent on alcohol and be semi-dysfunctional for the rest of their lives, for the glory of their country.
It's a remarkably screwed up way to run a country.
Yeah, you know, I was mentioning that 60 minutes thing the other day, and really they don't cover this very much on TV news, and especially a profile of this guy, and then they talked with his friends too, and I guess, you know, I'm 35 now, I've been doing this for so long, I still feel the same as I did when I was in my 20s or whatever, but now it's really when I look at things like that, I feel my age.
These kids are 10 years younger than me, or more, and it's just insane to think that this is what happened in their life.
The missing opportunity cost from their life, what they could have had instead of this, is just, it's horrifying, you know?
Well, let me take that one step further.
I was drafted in 1968, managed to miss Vietnam, but I was a Vietnam era soldier for a couple of years, not by my choice, and as this war rolled around, I could see exactly what was going to happen.
I could see that these kids were going to be badly messed up, they were going to come home, and there weren't going to be resources to help them, and so one of the things I've tried to do is to get that help for the kids of this generation, the help that my generation never got, and the help that we badly needed.
Well, tell me more about that.
What is it that you do to help them?
I'm doing a lot of writing, including this piece in Truthout.
I knew that the kids coming home from war were going to be suffering, and the VA confirmed that for me a couple of days ago.
Essentially, they told me that the 2008 Rand Report, which was controversial at the time, everybody thought it was way overstated, had said that one vet in three was going to come back home with emotional injuries so severe that they would require treatment, possibly for months, more likely for years, possibly for a lifetime, and basically that's what the VA is now finding.
Twenty-eight and a half percent of the soldiers who are returning from Iraq and Afghanistan are coming back with emotional or mental problems so severe that they require help.
And so what about people in the audience who maybe are among those with these symptoms?
I know my now friend Brian was a listener to the show, and he came back and was having some real problems with this kind of thing, so there may very well be others.
What do they do?
Where do you send them?
The first thing, obviously, is go to the VA, take everything that they can give you for free, but don't stop there.
They're going to try and stick you with drugs.
The VA is one of the largest retailers of pharmaceuticals in the country, and if you're a soldier, unless it's absolutely critical, you don't need that.
There are a bunch of other therapies that work.
One of them is something called Alpha Stem.
It's basically a little hand-held iPod that you plug into your ears.
Put one on each earlobe, and it'll blow an alpha note right through your brain.
It's like being in deep meditation.
I've seen it work, and it just calms vets down and actually allows them to get sleep for the first time in months.
It can be a wonderful tool.
There's something called EMDR, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprogramming, which is essentially thinking bad thoughts but breaking apart those memories and doing things with your eyes that kind of break the routine of the terror that you may be going through.
There's something called EFT, Emotional Freedom Techniques, which essentially is thinking about the things that had tormented you, then talking about why this won't happen again, why you're a good person, why you can be reassured by what's around you, and at the same time, tapping on the Chinese acupressure points in your forehead.
I'm sorry, Eric.
Time is short here, and I just want to make sure that we have the time for me to mention that people can look up your blog at psychologytoday.com/blog/invisible-wounds.
That's psychologytoday.com/blog/invisible-wounds, or just google Eric Newhouse and Invisible Wounds, the blog, where you can find out a lot more information about this.
Are there non-governmental support group type organizations that you would refer them to as well, Eric?
I can't think of any that really are effective.
The Iraqi Afghan Vets Association is probably the best one out there.
Okay.
Well, listen, I really appreciate your journalism on this issue.
It's incredible stuff, heartbreaking stuff, and thank you for your time on the show today.
It has been a pleasure.
Feel free to call anytime.
Everybody, that's Eric Newhouse, appeals to prize-winning reporters.
Psychologytoday.com for his blog, Invisible Wounds.
