American War Veterans Research Articles

ПОГЛЯДИ АМЕРИКАНСЬКОГО СУСПІЛЬСТВА НА ВИВЕДЕННЯ СПОЛУЧЕНИМИ ШТАТАМИ ВІЙСЬК ІЗ АФГАНІСТАНУ В 2021 Р.

The aim of the article is to analyze and compare the differences and similarities in the reactions of various groups of American society to the end of the military campaign in Afghanistan. The groups in question are the general public, whose opinion is measured through social surveys, various political experts and think tanks, as well as the American politicians of a wide spectrum of views. The scientific novelty of the article is that the authors research the phenomenon of American public opinion on the aforementioned issue from various angles. The article describes in detail the views of the American public in general and its ideologically differentiated groups; the views of political experts as well as the politicians themselves. The methodological basis of the article. The authors use the analysis method as a general scientific method to explore the opinions of various public groups, including American war veterans, political experts, and politicians. Another method (peculiar for historical analysis) is the comparative-historical method, which is used to compare different societal perspectives on this historical event to discern similarities and differences between those perspectives. The systematic approach is also used to describe the view of American society as a system. The principle of objectivity is also applied to promote the unbiased nature of the authors’ conclusions. Results. The article helps to understand the reaction of different societal groups, including politicians and experts, on the US Armed Forces withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. Conclusions of the authors of this article demonstrate that the majority of the ordinary citizens as well as of the politicians were dissatisfied with the realities of the process of the evacuation of troops and civilians from Afghanistan. The actions of the American government in this regard also received critical appraisal. On the other hand, the majority of the population generally supported the end of the war. The political experts and members of think tanks were divided among themselves on the question of what influence this withdrawal may have on the US popularity and image in the world.

Afghanistan war vets have new or worsening MH symptoms

A new survey examining Taliban control of Afghanistan and its impact on American war veterans found that the majority of Afghanistan veterans 18 and older have struggled with their mental health since serving in Afghanistan. During the month of August, the Taliban overran Afghanistan as U.S. troops left the country following a 20‐year war. The Afghanistan fall intensified veterans' mental health struggles, according to the survey.

CILALANMIŞ KAHRAMANLAR: AMERİKAN KURGUSUNDA SAVAŞ YÜZLERİ

Phil Klay is one of many American war veterans to mould their experiences in war into works of literature. In his first story collection, Redeployment (first published in 2014), Klay employs first person narrators with diverse backgrounds and occupations to provide multi-faceted perspectives and insights into war. This study examines service members in these stories within the context of the 2001 War in Afghanistan and 2003 War in Iraq and their behaviour in terms of heroism/post-heroism. Post-heroism declares the decline of heroic mindset in present wars since soldiers are less concerned with the grandeur of achievements and more obsessed with their own survival. This paper investigates two aspects of the collection’s representation of war, specifically, soldiers’ emotive and psychological interaction with lethal experiences in and after war in addition to impetuses behind soldiers’ involvement in the military. Even though Klay’s stories are abundant with combat scenes, characters are preoccupied with the appalling reality of war rather than grandeur of valour. War is framed within conflicting sensitivities and motivations through twelve narrators which reflect a rather gloomy perspective.

Healthcare professionals\u2019 views of palliative care for American war veterans with non-malignant respiratory disease living in a rural area: a qualitative study

BackgroundChronic lung diseases, such as COPD, are a growing health concern within the veteran population. Palliative care programs have mainly focused on the needs of people with malignant disease in the past, however the majority of those worldwide needing palliative care have a non-malignant diagnosis. Additionally, palliative care provision can often be fragmented and varied dependent upon a patient’s geographical location. This study aimed to explore palliative care provision for veterans with non-malignant respiratory disease, and their family carers, living in a rural area of America.MethodsQualitative study involving a convenience sample of 16 healthcare professionals from a large veteran hospital in Boise, Idaho. Data collection consisted of 5 focus groups which were transcribed verbatim and analysed using thematic analysis.ResultsHealthcare professionals perceived that a lack of education regarding disease progression enhanced feelings of anxiety amongst veterans with NMRD, and their family carers. Additionally, the uncertain disease trajectory impeded referral to palliative and hospice services due to healthcare professionals own ambiguity regarding the veteran’s prognosis. A particular barrier also related to this particular patient population, was a perceived lack of ability to afford relevant services and a lack of local palliative service provision. Healthcare professionals expressed that a compounding factor to palliative care uptake was the perceptions held by the veteran population. Healthcare professionals expressed that alongside aligning palliative care with dying, veterans also viewed accepting palliative care as ‘surrendering’ to their disease. Findings indicated that telemedicine may be a beneficial platform to which palliative care can be provided to veterans with NMRD, and their family carers, in rural areas using a digital platform.ConclusionNon-malignant respiratory disease is a life limiting condition commonly experienced within the veteran population. A new model of palliative care utilising a dynamic digital platform for this particular veteran population may provide an optimal way of providing efficient holistic care to areas with limited palliative services.

Culture, history and traumatic memory: an interpretation

Efforts to investigate psychiatric disorders across cultures routinely ignore a pervasive cultural influence, namely the culture of psychiatry. This article focuses on how the culture of psychiatry affects our understanding of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). PTSD is diagnosed by means of standardized symptom criteria and scales. Yet it is a heterogeneous phenomenon. The illusion of homogeneity is fostered by a categorical conception of traumatic memory that homogenizes posttraumatic memories and erects an obstacle to investigating the disorder’s historical nature, clinical phenomenology, and neuro-physiology and neuro-anatomy. I illustrate this process, via an epidemic of PTSD that now affects a quarter of a million American war veterans.

Care for Those Who Wore the Uniform

Considerations were granted to American war veterans as far back as 1636, when the pilgrims, in the midst of an Indian insurrection, devised a special law providing rights and assistance to those who fought. Various of the early American colonies passed similar laws for disabled veterans, and by the time of the Revolution the benefits concept had been firmly established.Said Calvin Coolidge in 1920: nation which forgets its defenders will itself be forgotten. But such platitudes did little to solve the fragmented administration of veterans' affairs, which inevitably was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of cases. Thus was established, in 1930, the Veterans Administration. Even at its creation the new agency had a budget of $641 million and a staff of 31,500 people, serving roughly 4.7 million living veterans.Today the annual budget of the VA is more than $20 billion, processed by some 250,000 public servants. There are about 25 million veterans, whose dependents may be three times that number. The VA runs 171 medical centers, 132 nursing-home units and more than 30 clinics. It is a world leader in the treatment of spinal-cord injuries and post-traumatic stress disorders, rehabilitation of the blind and care of the elderly.

Introduction

Introduction James Marten (bio) The sesquicentennial of the Civil War has passed, but it remains appropriate to turn fresh eyes to the experiences of the men who fought it. No one knew how the peace would turn out—either for the country or for the men returning home—and Reconstruction issues, vast economic and cultural changes wrought by the war and its aftermath, even the growing role of the United States in the world, ensured that veterans were confronted immediately and for the rest of their lives with a very different world than the one they left. This special issue of the Journal of the Civil War Era offers snapshots of some of the ways veterans responded to that world and were seen by others. According to Susan-Mary Grant, the millions of men who fought and survived the war quickly faded from the thoughts of many Americans, replaced by the “reimagined community” that emerged from the conflict. There were really a number of “reimagined communities” brought on by the social, cultural, racial, and economic changes wrought by war, but Grant’s larger point remains valid: military service irrevocably differentiated soldiers from civilians during and long after the war.1 But the process of “reimagining” postwar communities did not affect everyone equally or in the same ways, as this issue of JCWE reveals. To provide just one example, Confederate veterans are not as well-represented as Union veterans. As I’ve argued elsewhere, “veterans in the North were seen through multiple lenses,” exposed to criticism for opinions stated and choices made, while to southerners, Confederate veterans “would always be those proud, ragged, honorable men who limped home with heads held high.” As a result, as the authors of these essays seek to complicate perceptions of specific elements of the Civil War veteran experience, Yankees drew our attention more than their Confederate counterparts.2 Brian Jordan retrieves the stories of Union veterans from the old chestnut of the “hibernation” period, showing how, scarred nearly as much by victory as Confederates had been by defeat, they reflected bitterly on the [End Page 481] sacrifices they believed might have been wasted and vowed to continue to defend the Union they had fought to uphold. My own piece locates Union and Confederate veterans in the popular literature of the Gilded Age (leaking a bit back into the 1860s and forward into the early twentieth century) to show that Americans were aware of the complicated relationships between old soldiers and civilians. Barbara Gannon shows how a later generation of “heroes,” the men who fought in the “splendid little war” with Spain, got under the skin of the fading generation of Civil War veterans, who looked with bemusement and resentment at the attention poured onto Spanish American War veterans. And, with a transnational reflection on the historiography of veterans of other nineteenth-century wars, Wayne Hsieh provides a much larger context to the ways Civil War veterans have been interpreted. Three examples capture glimpses of the complex places occupied by veterans in the larger society, one from a soldier, one from the son of a soldier, and one from a newspaper unfriendly to old soldiers’ interests: • When asked “What has happened to Ambrose Bierce the youth, who fought at Chickamauga?” the famously cynical veteran Ambrose Bierce stated simply, “He is dead.”3 • Hamlin Garland ended his barely fictionalized version of his father’s return from war by acknowledging that nothing would come easy: “The common soldier of the American volunteer army had returned. His war with the South was over, and his fight, his daily running fight with nature and against the injustice of his fellow-men, was begun again.”4 • And when President Grover Cleveland vetoed the generous 1888 pension passed by the Republican Congress, the anti-pension Chicago Tribune editorialized, “Thank God! The claim-agents, the demagogues, the dead-beats and . . . deserters and coffee-coolers and bounty-jumpers, composing our great standing army of volunteer me[n]dicants have been defeated. . . . It will be a happy day for the republic when the last beggar of the Grand Army humbug is securely planted.”5 As these passages imply, there were many aftermaths for veterans of...

Project Healing Waters Fly Fishing and Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River”

The nonprofit organization Project Healing Waters Fly Fishing, established in 2005, is committed to helping American war veterans deal with the physical and emotional wounds incurred in combat. Volunteers teach veterans how to fly fish, tie flies, and build rods, and they accompany the vets to streams, rivers, and lakes for angling. Although the Project Healing Waters website makes no mention of Ernest Hemingway or his story “Big Two-Hearted River,” the organization’s mission suggests that contemporary veterans, like Hemingway’s Nick Adams, can find peace and become healthy while fishing on a body of water.

Troubles in Traumatology

(Can J Psychiatry 2005;50:815-816) No area within psychiatry has expanded as much as traumatology-the study of the causes and treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Despite its phenomenal growth, traumatology has been wracked with controversy (1,2). From the beginning, critics of the PTSD diagnosis wondered whether its advocates had discovered a disease entity in nature or whether they had cobbled together a cluster of symptoms shared with other syndromes and then traced its etiology to the unpopular war in Vietnam (3). Was PTSD discovered by clinical scientists or created by them? Several years later, the National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment (NVVRS) study reported that 30.9% of all men who had served in that war-cooks and clerks as well as infantrymenhad developed PTSD and that another 22.5% had developed partial, subclinical PTSD (4, p 63). That over one-half of all who served developed at least the subclinical form of the dis ease should have been surprising, especially because only 15% of those who served in Vietnam were in combat units (5, I 209). The NVVRS suggested a hidden epidemic of untreated PTSD among Vietnam veterans, and funds poured into Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) hospitals to cope with the problem. However, few seemed to notice that the NVVRS reported that twice as many men developed PTSD as were assigned to combat units. The mystery behind the discrepancy in numbers of those with the disease and of those in combat remains unsolved today. Meanwhile, beginning in the 1980s, the notion that many adults harboured repressed (or dissociated) memories of their childhood sexual abuse (CSA) began to spread. Although architects of the PTSD diagnosis emphasized that traumatic events were remembered all too well, other traumatologists argued that the mind can protect itself by banishing horrific memories from awareness. Therapists began interpreting diverse symptoms as signs of inaccessible memories of trauma and began to use hypnosis and other methods to unlock and detoxify the supposed dissociated memories that were silently poisoning the mental health of victims. The movement to help survivors recall these allegedly repressed memories resulted in the worst catastrophe to befall the mental health field since the lobotomy era. Therapy designed to recovered alleged repressed memories of trauma was based on misunderstandings of how memory works. The 2 articles in this issue were written to help counteract these misunderstandings. The first covers a multitude of errors that continue to plague the literature on trauma (6). Clinical theorists endorsing the concept of traumatic dissociative amnesia often misunderstand the very studies they cite in support of this alleged phenomenon. They often misinterpret diverse memory impairments as if they indicated an inability to remember the trauma itself. The second article reviews evidence that people can come to believe they experienced emotionally intense events that never happened (7). It refutes the claims that people can only develop false memories of trivial events devoid of emotional significance and that memories of trauma are invariably accurate. This article is cowritten by Elizabeth F Loftus, one of the great figures in the history of psychology-a recent empirical study ranked her 58th in a list of the 99 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century (8). Like a tsunami that has yet to strike shore, the impact of the most serious controversy in traumatology has yet to be felt. It concerns the validity of self-reported trauma exposure in American war veterans receiving service-connected disability payments for PTSD. Burkett and Whitley's award-winning book Stolen Valor: How the Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of its Heroes and its History (9) alerted the field to the possibility that many individuals diagnosed with PTSD may never have been exposed to trauma in the first place. Mainstream traumatologists, however, have either ignored Stolen Valor or privately maligned the authors ' motives without substantively rebutting Burkett and Whitley's critique of the field. …

Psychophysiologic assessment of traumatic imagery in Israeli civilian patients with posttraumatic stress disorder

This study used a script-driven imagery technique, previously used with combat veterans, to assess physiologic responses of Israeli survivors of noncombat traumas. Each subject had experienced an event meeting DSM-III-R criterion A for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The subjects were classified on the basis of the full DSM-III-R criteria into a current PTSD group (N = 13) and a non-PTSD group (N = 13). Thirty-second scripts describing each subject's personal traumatic event, as well as other events, were prepared. The scripts incorporated subjective visceral and muscular responses reported to have accompanied each experience. In the laboratory, the scripts were read one at a time to the subject, who was instructed to imagine each event portrayed as vividly as possible, while heart rate, skin conductance, and left lateral frontalis electromyogram levels were measured. Multivariate analysis of variance revealed that the physiologic responses of the PTSD subjects during imagery of their personal traumatic experiences were significantly greater than those of the non-PTSD subjects. This difference was not explained by age, gender, or rated severity of the traumatic event. A physiologic discriminant function derived from previously studied Vietnam veterans correctly classified nine of the 13 PTSD subjects (sensitivity = 69%) and 10 of the 13 non-PTSD subjects (specificity = 77%). These results replicate previous findings of heightened physiologic responses during personal combat imagery in male American war veterans and extend them to a group of male and female Israeli civilian victims of trauma, supporting the robustness of physiologic responding during personal traumatic imagery as a measure of PTSD.

Post-traumatic stress disorders and European war veterans.

After tracing the history of PTSD as a diagnosis and exemplifying its use among non-European war veteran groups, this review article documents the size and characteristics of European war veteran populations and the known psychological, social and medical sequelae of war experience since 1918. Models of psychopathology vary markedly over time and between countries. Treatment practices owe more to sociopolitical and military expediency than systematic assessment of European veterans' needs and treatment outcomes. PTSD has not yet attained the pivotal status it enjoys in studies of American war veterans. Reasons for this are offered along with a proposal that recent European studies rightly highlight a broad spectrum of post-war adjustment difficulties in which PTSD emerges as a process phenomenon with implications for prognosis and future care planning.

The American Legion of Honor in Mexico

THE BLOODY FRATRICIDAL war of monarchists and republicans in Mexico, better remembered as the struggle between Emperor Maximilian and President Juarez, was related in many ways to the concurrent American Civil War. One interrelationship was the considerable number of men who soldiered in both military theaters. In addition to European knights-errant like Prince Felix Salm-Salm of Prussia, who served in the Union army before fighting in Mexico,' thousands of American war veterans crossed the Rio Grande to join the opposing armies of Maximilian and Juirez. For the most part the ex-Confederates gravitated to the imperial forces, while northern veterans supported the defenders of the republic of Mexico. Two contemporary estimates by responsible and informed officials indicate the strength of the American auxiliary troops. General Philip Sheridan of the United States Army concluded that two thousand Confederate soldiers joined the Mexican Imperialists, and Matias Romero, the Mexican minister to the United States, reported that there were some three thousand American war veterans in the army of the Mexican Republic.2 One group of former United States soldiers was organized as an elite company, its officers commissioned by the President of Mexico, and designated the American Legion of Honor. This corps fought in several of the battles that preceded the downfall of the Mexican Empire, and legion officers were present at the surrender and execution of Maximilian as well as the triumphal entry of Juirez into Mexico City in the summer of 1867. Although there were more than one hundred officers in the American Legion of Honor, its existence has been generally ignored by Mexican and American writers. Indeed, with one exception there is no published work in Spanish or English evaluating the role of the legion or tracing its curious history. The sole account is a highly