The victims of PTSD - a lifetime of struggle, all thanks to the U.S. obsession with war

let's be really clear here... this is the legacy of war, not just the iraq war...

Unexpectedly, in January 2004, [Trinette Johnson] was shipped home three months early, sidelined with severe kidney stones. Later, at Walter Reed, the dreams started: violent dreams, with exploding mortars and hordes of barking dogs. She mentioned them to a doctor.

This was while she was living on the hospital grounds, seeing specialists and worrying about whether anyone in her unit had been injured or killed. She called her unit in Iraq every day. But she had not seen her kids.

A counselor prodded her to visit them -- three were being cared for by Johnson's sister in Falls Church, and one was in Richmond with the child's paternal grandmother. None of the children lived with their fathers.

"Mommy! Mommy!" her youngest daughter, then 2, shrieked during a visit in Falls Church, climbing all over her.

Johnson had been a mother since she had her son at age 14. Now she felt overwhelmed. She rose to leave.

"I can't do this," she told her sister.

In her car, she sobbed, wondering how she could feel so disconnected. "I realized that I just walked out on my babies."

as a vietnam vet, i went for over 30 years denying that i might have ptsd... so far, i've been waiting for over a year and a half for the veterans administration to make a decision on my claim... in putting together that claim, i had to compile a chronology of significant events in my life... after doing so, i was horrified... i knew my life had been challenging, sometimes almost overwhelmingly so, but i neither realized how much nor that it dated from the time of my service in vietnam...

with the u.s. obsession with war, we can look forward to many more cases like trinette johnson's and the never-ending tragedies that go with them...

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