My father served as a radio man (age 17, having to get his parents’ permission to enlist) on a destroyer escort during WW2. Like many men of that era, he didn’t talk much about what he experienced. He did express the fears he felt when he went to sleep, wondering if his ship was going to be hit by a Nazi U-boat torpedo as he slept. He was at Normandy Beach during the D-day invasion of France, on the ship, working the radio. I am sure he knew how many of our men were being slaughtered on the beach. His ship was attacked several times by air. Even though he did not experience hand-to-hand combat, he had untreated PTSD and self-medicated with alcohol, which led to an unhappy ending.
Today, we have men and women in combat roles all over the world, fighting the “war on terror” in various ways. The long deployments in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places in the world to take out key leaders of terrorist organizations has taken its toll on our military personnel.
The new book “The Fort Bragg Cartel” goes into detail about how combat-weary special forces self-medicate using a plethora of hard drugs. Meth, LSD, cocaine, alcohol, heroin, and a variety of other substances only exacerbate their PTSD, and it is mainly concentrated at Fort Bragg and the surrounding community. Frequent divorce, domestic violence, murder, and suicides are the tragic results. 
Army Rangers, Navy Seals, Delta Force, and Green Beret all are concentrated in Special Operations at Bragg and are rotated in and out as needed to carry out covert tasks all over the world. These men, in these cases, get burned out quickly carrying out direct combat missions or covert assassination of “enemy combatant” leaders. The military brass has dropped the ball again on taking care of its own that it has required so much of.
Unfortunately, this is nothing really new in our military culture. In Vietnam, an elite unit called “Tiger Force” was deployed in the highlands where mainly Buddhists grew rice for the country. The NVA and Viet Cong had strongholds in the area and some influence over the local population. Unfortunately, the men in Tiger Force interpreted their loosened defensive rules to carte-blanche kill all they suspected of being in sympathy with the enemy. This led to many murders of civilian men, women, and some children. 
These U.S. military men later suffered from PTSD as a result of their misdeeds and domestic violence, divorce, suicides, and other violent outcomes were the result. As citizens, we need to hold the government accountable to first review and evaluate our military operation methods, and then to medically and psychologically treat the men and women we ask to do our fighting for us.
Mark Roalson
Hoyt Lakes