corrente

"Failing to plan is planning to fail," as some football coach or other is said to have said. To failing to plan to win the peace to failing to plan for a type of casualty as old as warfare, the Bushco Brain Trust is nothing if not consistent:

(via LA Times)

Matt LaBranche got the tattoos at a seedy place down the street from the Army hospital here where he was a patient in the psychiatric ward.

The pain of the needle felt good to the 40-year-old former Army sergeant, whose memories of his nine months as a machine-gunner in Iraq had left him, he said, "feeling dead inside." LaBranche's back is now covered in images, the largest the dark outline of a sword. Drawn from his neck to the small of his back, it is emblazoned with the words LaBranche says encapsulate the war's effect on him: "I've come to bring you hell."

In soldiers like LaBranche — their bodies whole but their psyches deeply wounded — a crisis is unfolding, mental health experts say. One out of six soldiers returning from Iraq is suffering the effects of post-traumatic stress — and as more come home, that number is widely expected to grow.

The Pentagon, which did not anticipate the extent of the problem, is scrambling to find resources to address it.

"We're gearing ourselves up now and preparing ourselves to meet whatever the need is, but clearly this is something that could not be planned for," said Dr. Alfonso Batres, a psychologist who heads the VA's national office of readjustment counseling services.

Disclosure: My father worked for the VA as a psychiatric social worker. Trained in the talk therapies, he became increasingly frustrated as the psychoactive drugs came into wider use. Not only were the early ones both powerful and crude, "calming" the patient into a stupor, but they were seen as replacements rather than supplements to the Talking Cure.

Go read the whole story, it's vastly worse than these excerpts show. These guys, and the ones now at Ramstein and Walter Reed with overt brain damage and the ones still in the field with milder forms, will be coming soon to a streetcorner near you.