“If we don’t take care of our veterans, people aren’t going to want to sign up and join the military.” Elspeth Ritchie, a former military psychia- trist who held the top mental-health job in the Army. “The mental health of our troops is very much a national security issue,” says Dr. And in 2012, 45 percent of the 1.6 million veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq applied for disability benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs. Only 50 percent say the war in Afghanistan was worth it. Of Post-9/11 veterans, 20 percent suffer from PTSD. The infantry makes up only 15 percent of the Army by comparison, elderly people make up 14 percent of the general population. This number includes all members of the military-from stateside desk jockeys to foul-smelling infantry privates-and most are serving in soft jobs, whether or not they’re deployed. That’s about the same number who identify as New Age At any given time, only about one half of one per- cent of Americans are in the military. It is spaced-out in front of glowing rectangles. This is the longest war in American history and the least debated. This is a postwar story.Īmerica has been at war for more than 14 years since September 11, 2001.

The thing is, he wore my face and occupied my brain. Back in the States, the enemy also hid in plain sight. He hid in plain sight and used IEDs or indirect fire. Army combat infantryman in Afghanistan, the enemy lived outside the wire and had no face. As hard as I had to fight in Afghanistan, I had to fight doubly hard to get here, a place where I'm celebrating two years without getting locked in a loony bin or a cell.ĭuring my 16 months as a U.S. I came back from Afghanistan in the spring of 2007, developed insomnia that was eventually diagnosed as PTSD in 2008 and every few months for the next five years had either a major legal or psychological issue-the kind that led to hospitalization or jail time.

Eugene Lipov, the man who administered my shot and who has pioneered the use of the so-called stellate ganglion block for PTSD, tells me the Navy SEALs call it the God shot. Two injections of a couple of local anesthetics-lidocaine, the same thing dentists use, and bupivacaine-into that part of the neck and I was pretty much back to my old self.ĭr. Well, six or seven inches under my nose and a couple of inches back and to the right, in a cluster of nerves by the spinal column called the stellate ganglion. It turns out a big part of the cure was under my nose the whole time. Nothing I did in seven years of trying to get back to normal-therapy, meds, madcap schemes-really helped. I haven’t been quite right since the war, posttraumatic stress and all. I would be pissed pissed I didn’t get this shot earlier if I weren’t so grateful I got it at all. The God Shot - by Matt Farwell (Playboy, April 2016)

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