Vietnam War Veterans

In an article written by Lori Daniels, James Boehnlein, and Phillip McCallion about post-traumatic stress disorder, the practice of life review has shown to significantly lower post-traumatic stress disorder among aging veterans suffering from the mental disability. Awareness of this disorder has gradually increased since veterans returned from the Vietnam War, but there has yet to be a breakthrough in how to properly treat post-traumatic stress disorder. The authors state that the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder on someone growing old will not result in successful aging, which is a person’s ability to be more emotionally flexible in social and personal environments. Post-traumatic stress disorder creates potential barriers against successful aging because it causes the person affected to feel anxious, less confident, and have a higher tendency for grief. They add that war veterans may be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder for weeks or months without seeking treatment, which by that point, the disorder will have rooted itself into the mind of the veteran, making it more difficult to treat. In the article, the authors conducted a study with some war veterans by having them do a life review starting from before the war, during the war, and after, which they called autobiography intervention. From their studies, the authors concluded that the use of life review and autobiography intervention has significantly improved the mental health status of some veterans. The authors conclude that a group life review treatment program would work best to treat this disorder among all war veterans. Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is written from the point of view of a Vietnam War veteran. Although O’Brien states that the events he wrote about were not completely true, according to the studies of Lori Daniels, James Boehnlein, and Phillip McCallion, he is using a coping mechanism to treat his PTSD by writing down what had happened. One could argue that his writing could be considered a form of the life review technique, as O’Brien mentions that writing about the war helped him adjust to civilian life in one of …show more content…
She adds that the veterans tend to write fictional stories because it allows them to not sound very political. Risquez states that her article is trying to emphasize the dissent among Vietnam War Veterans. She cites the movie The Big Lebowski as a good example of the social turmoil between veterans and the counterculture citizens during that era. She explains how the two main characters, Walter and the Dude, represent the two sides since Walter is a veteran and the Dude is a counterculture hippie. She explains that the dynamic between the two is often strained and states that at the end when the Dude leaves Walter behind, it is mirroring the way that citizens saw Vietnam War veterans. Due to the strong counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, many citizens believed that the soldiers fighting in the Vietnam War were some of the most heinous people on the planet, even though many of the soldiers did not have a choice because of the conscription. Risquez adds more historical background to the dissent surrounding the Vietnam War by alluding to the time when veterans marched to the Capitol with all of their metals in 1971 to spurn the idea that they were heroes through the many medals they