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Marines, not tougher ones. Marines aren’t stupid. Many of their top bosses are brilliant as well as tough. But they still were caught up in the macho culture of shaming troubled Marines instead of getting them the help they needed. Finally, the Marine Corps is changing and leathernecks with PTSD can now get treatment without ridicule. Now they can get back to work being the serious badasses we need them to be.
The Army used to be just as bad as the Marines. That’s how I lost my friend to untreated PTSD. Identifying him would only serve to open old wounds for his family and friends so I will not name him but I will describe him for you. Like most of my other friends in the U.S. military whose first name is Joseph, my buddy was called G.I. Joe. Of course, that suggests a kind of average guy who steps up when everything goes wrong. This G.I. Joe was anything but ordinary. He graduated a famous college with a degree in science and a second lieutenant’s bar on his shoulders. By 1984, this G.I. Joe was a Colonel. He’d earned rapid promotions the old-fashioned way—in combat. He saw a lot of it in Southeast Asia and enough of it was absolutely so horrific that it began to hollow him out, to grind down his most human of instincts—empathy.
By the time you get to be a 1st Lieutenant in the infantry, you’ve already begun being management—making decisions sending other men into combat knowing that some of them won’t come back in one piece and some of them will go home only in body bags.
When he got to Vietnam, intelligence said the enemy had been cutting off the arms of some villagers to terrify others into silence and non-cooperation with the Americans. My pal Joe like the rest of our troops had been told they were coming to save ‘Nam from
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