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Stories: No Interview? No Problem!
The Veterans History Project boasts hundreds of interviews of veterans in America. However, not every person within the collection has an interview. The lack of interviews can be for a number of reasons such as they passed away before an interview was conducted. However, this does not mean they cannot provide insight into the past. In many cases, their relatives were able to provide documents and pictures of that person. Jerome Glaser, born on the 22nd of May, 1898, and died on the 6th of April 1985, left an abundance of documents behind after his death. While he was not a veteran of the Second World War, his documents show…
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PTSD Series: Modern Warfare
Veterans of Middle East Wars I put my arm around and talk to him when ever I could. Kevin brown In the Middle Eastern Conflicts of the twenty-first century, soldiers face the same stressful, traumatic experiences as the previous veterans. As with the previous wars, soldiers relied on each other, they aided one another and helped to cope with the circumstances. In his interview, Colonel Kevin Brown, a veteran of Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Persian Gulf described an encounter with a soldier who was part of a traumatic event. A bullet hit a soldier’s femoral artery, ricocheted out, and hit the Platoon Sergeant in the chest. The medic save the…
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PTSD Series: Vietnam
Vietnam War Veterans In the second part of this series, we will look at the Veterans of the Vietnam War. Vietnam veterans were the first applied with PTSD. The term was coined in 1980, five years after Vietnam, by the American Psychological Association because there was an increase in attention to mental health in academia. Studies of holocaust survivors, world war accounts, comparisons of Homer’s Iliad and Shakespeare’s Henry IV to modern examples of PTSD, and 1800’s psychiatric journals were the focus of the 1980s to the 1990s, and have become more relevant for veterans overseas since 9/11. In the collection, the Vietnam veterans tell their stories of returning home…
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PTSD Series: Second World War
Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder This is the first post of this 3-part series of veteran-related PSTD. The twentieth century saw millions of Americans, men women, and children, mobilizing for war. Unlike previous centuries, the wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries were a marriage of combat and industry, nations built bigger and bigger guns, armed millions of their citizens, and new technological advancements lead to new armament innovations such as tanks and planes. Returning veterans came home changed, their previous personalities and lives were altered by their experiences overseas. The constant traumatic, stressful, and deadly circumstances afflicted the mental state of millions of men and women with what is now known as Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder…
