While US combat troops fight two wars, its mental-health professionals are waging a battle to save soldiers’ sanity when they come back, one that will cost billions long after combat ends in Baghdad and Kabul. It is a high-intensity conflict.
…U.S. Army specialist Ethan McCord was one of the first on the scene when a group of suspected insurgents was blown up on a Baghdad street in 2007, hit by 30-mm bursts from an Apache helicopter. “The top of one guy’s head was completely off,” he recalls. “Another guy was ripped open from groin to neck. A third had lost a leg … Their insides were out and exposed. I’d never seen anything like this before.” Then McCord heard a child crying from a black minivan caught in the barrage. Inside, he found a frightened and wounded girl, perhaps 4. Next to her was a boy of 7 or so, soaked in blood. Their father, McCord says, “was slumped over on his side, like he was trying to protect the children, but he was just destroyed.” McCord couldn’t look away from the kids. “I started seeing images of my own two children back home in Kansas.” (See pictures of a soldier coping with the aftermath of war.) Ethan McCord’s mind and thousands like his are the U.S. Army’s third front. While its combat troops fight two wars, its…
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Invisible Wounds: Mental Health and the Military