By Brian Handwerk
War is hell, and for many of the U.S. veterans who served in the Vietnam conflict, the psychological nightmare rages on even 40 years after the last Marine left Saigon. Psychological surveys suggest that some 271,000 veterans of the war may still have full post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. And for many vets, the PTSD symptoms are only getting worse with time.
“Roughly 11 percent of Vietnam veterans, over a 40-year period, continue to suffer from clinically important PTSD symptoms, either having the full diagnosis or very strong features of the diagnosis that interfere with function,” says study author Charles Marmar, director of The Steven & Alexandra Cohen Veterans Center at the NYU Langone Medical Center.
The latest study follows up on participants in the National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Study conducted in the 1980s. According to Marmar, who co-authored the original report, the work serves a dual purpose in assessing the long-term affects of wartime trauma: “We owe it to the Vietnam 
generation, it’s an amazing sacrifice that they made,” he says. “But it’s also the path ahead for the Iraq and Afghanistan generation, and we have to do better than we did for Vietnam.”
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