Post Traumatic Stress: Sticker Shock over Shell Shock

The U.S. government is reviewing 72,000 cases in which veterans have been diagnosed with severe post-traumatic stress disorder, claiming that misdiagnosis and fraud have inflated the numbers.

Outraged vets say the plan is a callous attempt to cut the costs of an increasingly expensive war.

By Mark Benjamin

Aug. 9, 2005 Matt LaBranche has memories of Iraq that he does not want to have.

He was a gunner who protected convoys for a National Guard company out of Bangor, Maine.

Once, during his nine-month tour in Iraq, his truck got separated from a convoy headed to Tikrit. He couldn't raise anyone on the radio. Insurgents ambushed. He remembers tumbling out of the truck just as a roadside bomb went off, slamming him against the truck, breaking his coccyx and knocking loose an eye tooth

. He remembers pulling the driver out of the truck and laying down fire with his M249 SAW machine gun until he thought the barrel would melt.

There are more memories he can't shake. Some are worse. Some include children. We agree that I won't print details, but he cries when he tells them to me. LaBranche, 41, also supports the war and has little patience for those who don't.

I first met LaBranche in the summer of 2004 when he was at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington.

He was clearly a troubled man. He spent a month in the lockdown psychiatric unit, Ward 54, and a year receiving outpatient treatment. He is still haunted.

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