Link: Vietnam Veterans and Alcoholism.
Whoa, golly gee willikers -- after 21 years, the original article on the correlation of PTSD and Alcoholism in Vietnam Vets that Bro' Friend, Vince, and I published in The Veteran, the official voice of Vietnam Veterans of America, still reads pretty good. We rewrote it and extensively expanded it in the The Alcoholism Treatment Quarterly in 1988, but unfortunately the digital archives of articles didn't begin until 1994.
How sad that as elders, we still have much good work to do for a whole new cohort of veterans returning from the ignoble desert war, just as we did two decades ago for our generation of vets returning from the equally ignoble jungle war. As a species we are like many alcoholics: we sure don't seem to learn from our past mistakes, and we keep doing the same aberrant behavior, expecting different results.
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