Veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars have benefited from a growing, if still incomplete, understanding of post-traumatic stress disorder. The government has gotten better at recognizing the affliction and giving them the medical care and benefits they deserve. Vietnam veterans are not always so lucky.
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A class-action lawsuit filed this month in Federal District Court in Connecticut seeks justice for Vietnam veterans with PTSD who say they have been doubly victimized. They were given other-than-honorable discharges for bad behavior — like going AWOL, taking drugs and disobeying orders — that they link to their untreated disorder. Though PTSD was not identified until 1980, the plaintiffs argue that the military has unfairly refused to consider their PTSD diagnoses when they seek retroactively to upgrade their discharges. They say it is reasonable to conclude that those with service-connected PTSD began suffering its ill effects while still in uniform.
The lawsuit was brought against the military branches by an Army veteran, John Shepherd Jr., and the Vietnam Veterans of America on behalf of possibly tens of thousands of veterans. Mr. Shepherd's legal team, the Yale Law School veterans' legal clinic, analyzed decisions by the Army Board of Corrections for Military Records from 2003 to 2012, finding stark evidence of disparate treatment of veterans seeking discharge upgrades. The board approved upgrades at an overall rate of 46 percent, but requests from Vietnam-era veterans claiming PTSD were nearly always denied (of about 145 PTSD-related applications, the board approved two). This "near-categorical refusal" to approve such claims, the lawsuit says, willfully ignores medical evidence that could explain misconduct.
Veterans with other-than-honorable discharges do not qualify for benefits like disability compensation, education assistance and military burials. Their job prospects and careers suffer. Mr. Shepherd, who won the Bronze Star for valor, had a breakdown, he said, after seeing his platoon leader killed. He refused to go on patrol because he was sick, he says, not shirking his duty.
The Yale students found that more than 250,000 Vietnam-era veterans had other-than-honorable discharges, and thousands probably had PTSD. What the plaintiffs are seeking seems only fair — that the military adopt "consistent and medically appropriate standards" to consider PTSD when reviewing discharges. "I want that honorable," Mr. Shepherd said. "I did do my part."
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