Combat veterans often return from war with psychological as well as physical injuries. Armed service members who are bodily injured routinely go to hospitals for treatment, first at military hospitals and later in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) system. But those with psychological injuries like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) often go years, if not a lifetime, without treatment, in large part because the VA denies their claims with dubious justification. Veterans’ service organizations like the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), the American Legion, and others, as well as state and county governments, have knowledgeable service officers whose job is to help guide veterans through the VA system and through the many appeals that are often needed to get treatment and an adequate disability rating that could result in monetary payments. This report tells the story of one VFW post in Burnet, Texas, its veterans, their families, and how their success in getting treatment for PTSD has positively affected their lives. It has also enabled them, as they recover, to help other veterans seek treatment and win compensatory disability ratings too. The report focuses on one Vietnam veteran, who four decades after his discharge from the Army came to be treated for PTSD. / text

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1995. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 80-94). / Microfiche. / vii, 94 leaves, bound 29 cm

Thesis (M.M.A.S.)--US Army Command and General Staff College, 2006. / Cover title. AD-A463 835. Includes bibliographical references (p. 58-60). Electronic version available on the Public STINET.

Thesis (M.A.)--West Virginia University, 1999. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains vi, 96 p. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 95-96).

Thesis--School of Advanced Air and Space Studies. / "June 2003." Includes bibliographical references (p. 100-103).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 143-155).

"Thesis presented to the faculty of the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, for completion of graduation requirements, academic year 2003-4." / "August 2006." Includes bibliographical references (p. 53-55).

abstract: This project examines the decision of American policymakers to deny the Amerasians of Vietnam--the offspring of American fathers and Vietnamese mothers born as a result of the Vietnam War--American citizenship in the 1982 Amerasian Immigration Act and the 1987 Amerasian Homecoming Act. It investigates why policymakers deemed a population unfit for the responsibilities of American society, despite the fact that they had American fathers. The examination draws upon numerous archival collections of the key policymakers, humanitarians and non-governmental organizations involved in each piece of legislation. Additionally, archival and published documents from the U.S. government and military, popular media, and veteran's organizations, are important. Since many of those involved in the legislation are still living, oral history interviews are also a critical piece of the methodology. The dissertation argues that the exclusion of citizenship was a component of bigger issues: international relationships in a Cold War era, America's defeat in the Vietnam War, and a history in the United States of racialized exclusionary immigration and citizenship policies against people of Asian descent. It exposes the contradictory approach of policymakers unable to reconcile the Amerasian mixture of race and nation with US law. Consequently, policymakers simultaneously employed an inclusionary discourse that deemed the Amerasians worthy of American attention, guidance and humanitarian aid, and implemented exclusionary policies that designated them unfit for the responsibilities of American citizenship. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation History 2015

The dissertation undertakes an analysis of the dramatic literature engendered by the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s, and illustrates how the dramas of that period reflect the stresses and anxieties that assailed contemporary American society. It investigates the formative influences on the drama, the various styles in which it emerged, and the recurring themes and motifs. The thesis proceeds from the premise that the events of the 1960s fractured American society in a manner unknown since the Civil War. It demonstrates that the social, political, and intellectual divisiveness that characterized the society was interpreted in the theatre by dramatic metaphors of fragmentation of the individual and collective psyche, and that this fragmentation was reflected in characters who experienced a collective and individual sense of loss of cultural identity, cohesion and continuity. Included in the examination of the drama is a description of how the social upheaval of the period influenced playwrights to undertake a reassessment of American values and ethics, and to interpret in dramatic form the nature of the trauma of Vietnam for American society. The study includes a discussion of how individual and collective reality is based on cultural conditioning, and how the challenging of cultural myth in an extra-cultural milieu. / Arts, Faculty of / Theatre and Film, Department of / Graduate

The study is concerned with the recurrent diffusion of novelty in American higher education. By novelty is meant any body of thought, organizational form, and spontaneous phenomenon of collective behaviour which is perceived as new by members of academic institutions. The general thesis of the work is that the dissemination of novelty typically occurs along lines of decreasing academic prestige. This view is derived from a host of porpositions about the relationship of institutional prestige with academic talent, the creation and communication of novelty, the academic marketplace, permissiveness, imitation, and embarrassment. This thesis is verified for the interinstitutional diffusion of the antiwar student movement of the nineteen sixties and early seventies. The central' hypothesis of this case study is that the more prestigious an academic institution was at the time of the birth of the movement, the sooner some of its students initially protested against American involvement in the Vietnam war. Institutional prestige, the independent variable, is operationalized in terms of "objective" indices. The dependent variable is the degree to which students in an institution were relatively earlier in initially protesting than students in other institutions. The antiwar student protests used to test the hypothesis were collected from The New York Times Index. For each institution that was reported, only the first or earliest campus protest was considered. It is assumed that the criteria governing the newspaper's selection of protests were the same for the entire duration of the movement. Two counter-hypotheses are also examined. It is proposed that the larger an institution was at the time of the birth of the movement, the less time it took for some of its students to initially protest against the American involvement in the Vietnam war. It is also hypothesized that the older the institution, the longer it took before some of its students first protested against this military participation abroad. The results provide, at best, moderate support to the main hypothesis of the case study while flatly rejecting its counter-hypotheses. / Arts, Faculty of / Sociology, Department of / Graduate