As many as one in five veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars grapple with PTSD, according to the National Center for PTSD, which is run by the Department of Veterans Affairs. A 2008 Rand Corp. study put the number of such veterans who have developed PTSD or depression as high as 300,000.
More than 45,000 U.S. service members have been wounded or killed in those two wars, according to Pentagon data. The emotional toll of those losses will continue for years to come.
“It’s been our longest war ever, and so many of them are willing to go back time and time again, because they don’t want to let their buddies down. So they don’t always get a break,” Pratt said.
Some troops, she said, “they go away, they come back, they have PTSD and they deploy again before they fully recover. It just snowballs.”
By Gretel C. Kovach
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