PTSD In Vietnam War Essay

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Soldiers give up a lot during a war, even when they get home they are still in pain or shock from what they have seen during the war. Soldiers not only give up time and risk their life during war, they come home with PTSD, wounded, and troubles of returning home.

Many soldiers give up many things while they are fighting a war, what many forget is that the soldiers come home different from when they left because of a mental health condition called PTSD. 31 percent of the soldiers who fought in Vietnam came home with PTSD (Medline Plus). That is almost 1/3 of the soldiers who fought in Vietnam. Some of the common side effects of PTSD are flashbacks, nightmares, and reliving the events that cause the PTSD. There are many people who also think that PTSD isn’t a thing and people are just making it up. Even if you believe it or not, people are suffering from something that …show more content…

“The Vietnam Conflict Extract Data File of the Defense Casualty Analysis System (DCAS) Extract Files contains records of 58,220 U.S. military fatal casualties of the Vietnam War.” (National Archives). On top of the 58,00+ that died, 303,704 soldiers were injure. (History World). Of those 303,00+ injured, 75,000 were disabled in some way and 5,283 lost a limb. Vietnam was very damaging for a lot of people and affected a lot of people’s families. Many soldiers who were injured also suffer from PTSD. That makes the want to live even less for those people making them more likely to harm themselves or even kill themselves. Sometimes men in America are the only ones working in the family, or his wife might work only part time because of the kids they may have. For example, losing a leg would disqualify you from having most jobs in America. When you get injured the government gives you disability checks but that is hard to maintain a person and even harder to maintain a