Hagel speaks up for vets

Chuck Hagel can't forget his jarring trip home in 1968, when he left Vietnam at the end of the war's bloodiest year and returned to the cold, the tranquility, the strangeness of Omaha.

The memory of what the former U.S. senator calls “adjustment issues” brought him back to Omaha on Monday to speak for a new program that aids veterans struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Hagel doesn't believe he personally exhibited symptoms of PTSD, then commonly known as “shell shock,” when he returned home after being wounded twice during the brutal fighting that surrounded the Tet Offensive.

But he has plenty of friends who suffered from PTSD, Hagel said, and his own brother struggled with recurring nightmares and intense feelings of guilt, according to previous reports.

“War produces these kinds of scars ... that are always with us,” Hagel said. “These are the after-effects of men and women who have seen terrible things.”

Hagel spoke at a benefit for the Lutheran Family Services' At Ease program, which provides counseling and treatment for PTSD-afflicted veterans in Nebraska. The program, a collaboration with At Ease U.S.A, an Omaha volunteer group, also helps family members deal with the personality changes often seen in veterans recently returned from combat.

Ruth Henrichs, the president and CEO of Lutheran Family Services, told the crowd at the Qwest Center Omaha that an estimated 35 percent of troops deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq will return with a diagnosed or undiagnosed case of PTSD.

As many as 700,000 men and women could exhibit the symptoms of post-combat PTSD, she said — symptoms such as repeated flashbacks, constant anxiety and depression, which also take a heavy toll on the veterans' spouses, children and friends.

Hagel praised the At Ease program as a potential national model, saying local public-private partnerships could be the quickest and most compassionate way to get veterans the help they need.

The government is spending billions of dollars annually trying to help veterans, he said, but “our circuits are overloaded” after nine years of war and a crippling recession.

Nonprofits, religious groups and businesses must step up, he said, ignoring old assumptions that only veterans wearing a sling or a bandage are in need of serious help.

“We can't let (returning veterans) just drift,” Hagel said. “We don't say, ‘Well, it looks like you don't have a problem. You look fine.'”

The former Republican senator, who now serves as co-chairman of President Obama's intelligence advisory board, said arguments about policies and strategy often obscure the service of Americans fighting and dying in the post-Sept. 11 wars.

But ordinary Americans, even those who oppose the wars, now tend to treat returning soldiers with respect and compassion, he said. That wasn't always the case, Hagel said, when he and so many others returned from the jungles of Vietnam.

“They didn't have a say in policy, and they did what the country asked them to do,” he said of veterans. “They should be thanked, and they should be helped.”

Contact the writer:

444-1064, matthew.hansen@owh.com

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