Tag: Trauma of War

This isn’t rocket science, if the country had paid attention as we were returning from Vietnam and recognizing what that did to many of our brothers, thousands then, as we tried for decades to push the issues into the public conscious we’d be much more advanced in the understanding of what war and extreme trauma does to the human mind, especially from wars of choice. And it wasn’t only as to our brothers! There also would have been a better understanding as to the civilian populations of these conflicts as well as those anywhere who live through the extreme trauma’s, of many descriptions, that affect individuals in their own lives

N.C. death row inmate receives medals earned in Vietnam

James Floyd Davis would never know freedom again.

Now 62 years old, slightly stooped with thick reading glasses and pasty skin, he looks far removed from the wild-eyed loner who snapped in a violent, bloody spree 14 years ago.

And he looks far removed from the tanned, wiry young man who traded an abusive home life for two tours in the jungles of Vietnam – and a chunk of shrapnel that still throbs in his thigh when the weather turns cold.

All of that past, all of that horror and hurt, stared through thick reading glasses at Jim Johnson as the retired Fayetteville therapist tried to discover who James Davis was.

Last week the Colorado Springs ‘The Gazette’ had another very disturbing report, in two parts, following up previous reports of soldiers of OIF and OEF who committed murders. These, from all I can find out, were just regular teens, no trouble out of the ordinary prior to their military service. But once sent to these occupations, sometimes more then once, they returned like many of our brother ‘Nam Vets, very troubled and not getting the help needed or not seeking because of the nature of military service, added to their situations of multiple tours, longer tours then we served and little down time between, their nightmares caught up to them by abusing drugs and alcohol, by acting out in rage, by loosing control.

There’s a reason I use the breakin line to Greg Mitchells book So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits–and the President–Failed on Iraq.

Part of that reason is an article printed in the Asian Times, I just finished reading.