Toy Soldiers With PTSD

These little green army men by Dorothy have a twist. Rather than glorifying the heroic myth of battle, they show the grim reality of life afterward when “the hell of war comes home.” Dorothy calls the piece, “Casualties of War,” and writes the following:

The hell of war comes home. In July 2009 Colorado Springs Gazettea published a two-part series entitled “Casualties of War”. The articles focused on a single battalion based at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs, who since returning from duty in Iraq had been involved in brawls, beatings, rapes, drunk driving, drug deals, domestic violence, shootings, stabbings, kidnapping and suicides. Returning soldiers were committing murder at a rate 20 times greater than other young American males. A seperate investiagtion into the high suicide rate among veterans published in the New York Times in October 2010 revealed that three times as many California veterans and active service members were dying soon after returning home than those being killed in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. We hear little about the personal hell soldiers live through after returning home.

The figures are not for sale, but PTSD is free and widely available these days.