Traumitized

"PTSD isn't about what's wrong with you, it's about what happened to you." Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is a serious issue that as a nation we must confront. Soldiers face traumatizing experiences everyday, wether it be directly inflicted upon them or someone else, a brother/sister, fellow soldier. So many people who have fought for our safety, risking their own lives, and do not receive proper treatment and care for their health or are homeless or disemployed.
In The Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Billy Pilgrim the principle figure in the story deals with the aftermath of his war experiences in surviving the Dresden bombing. He retells the events in a disordered fashion, which can be related to PTSD. Vonnegut's novel has several indirect anti war sentiments to show his readers the inflictions war does to someone.
Victor Gregg was also a survivor of Dresden he stated "Like Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse-Five, I wrote as I witnessed. I have no axe to grind. I just sat down and tried to empty my mind and clear away the residues of the nightmares that I still occasionally suffered from." That's what many of are soldiers have to deal with upon coming home. They may need more than just the minimum support, they need to be understood and properly cared for. Their thought maybe jumbled, they can relive their war experiences at any second, they can be a danger to their loved ones and even themselves. "Every day, 22 veterans take their own lives. That's a suicide every 65 minutes. As shocking as the number is, it may actually be higher."
By bringing more attention to the need of our returning soldiers, we can aide them in coping, we can save a life.  Just as we have felt the whirlpool plot of Vonnegut's novel, we can come to terms with how this may be just how all other soldiers may be traumatically affected. As a nation we have to act to bring a stop to the ailments of our brave soldiers and lessen their burdens and traumatic experiences that will be reoccurring with PTSD and other impairments, physically and psychologically.