The Washington Post has a brief article on Sunday by Tom Ricks, about one Marine's return from multiple tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq, to find that he has PSTD. Tom Ricks is famous to many of us as the author of multiple books about being in today's military. In fact, it's one of his books that inspired Nate Fick to become a Marine -- without which we wouldn't have had the benefit of Fick's excellent book, One Bullet Away: the Making of a Marine Officer.
The Marine Ricks profiles in the short piece is Staff Sgt. Travis Twiggs. Apparently the full article about Twiggs is available in the January issue of the Marine Corps Gazette. Ricks writes:
People sometimes talk about the sacrifices made by U.S. troops without grasping just what that means. In the January issue of the Marine Corps Gazette, a Marine infantryman, Staff Sgt. Travis Twiggs, recounts how he slowly came to recognize that he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after serving one tour in Afghanistan and two in Iraq.
While you're visiting the Gazette site, you might want to check out the "Letter on PTSD from MEF 
Commanding Generals," which we've linked, here. It wouldn't win any awards for clear, compelling writing -- unlike Ricks' or Fick's -- but it has an interesting graphic at the end, chock full of too much information, which nevertheless calls for PTSD to be treated early, and to be treated like any other injury, without stigma. That is, if I'm reading the graphic right. In which case, that's great.
Editor's Note: Tom Ricks is the Washington Post's military correspondent. He's also the author of Making the Corps (the book that persuaded Nate Fick to become a Marine), and the controversially-titled Fiasco: the American Military Adventure in Iraq.
