Earlier this week, Sgt. John M. Russell, a communications specialist with the 54th Engineering Battalion at Camp Liberty outside Baghdad, was arrested by military police after the shooting and killing two staff officers from an Army reserve unit in Indianapolis and three other soldiers. Russell was suffering from the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD. The term was coined in mid 1970 as a result of the problems that were being experienced by Vietnam veterans. PTSD has also been recognized in the past as stress syndrome, shell shock and battle fatigue.

According to government figures, nearly 20% of the more than 1.7 million who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan are believed to have symptoms of anxiety, depression and other emotional problems. Some studies show that about half of those who need help don’t seek it. The Veterans Affairs Department has reported that 60,000 of the nearly 120,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, who have received a preliminary mental health diagnosis, have been diagnosed with PTSD. Mental health experts attribute the large numbers and dramatic increases in the last few years to more troops serving their second, third or fourth tours of duty; a factor they say dramatically increases stress. Lengths of tours were also extended from 12 to 15 months during the “surge”, another factor that caused extra emotional strain.

While there are tremendous emotional costs to Russell and his family and to the families of the victims, Nobel Prize winning economist and Colombia University professor Joseph Stiglitz, together with Linda Bilmes, a Harvard budget expert, have calculated that the costs for the Iraq war extend well beyond the economic value of lost and shattered lives.

When a young soldier is killed in Iraq or Afghanistan, his or her family receives a U.S. government check for $500,000. While no amount can truly compensate the families, this sum is far less than the typical amount paid by insurance companies for the death of a young person in a car accident. In areas such as health and safety regulation, the US Government values a life of a young man at the peak of his future earnings capacity in excess of $7 million. Using this figure, Stiglitz and Bilmes estimate the cost of nearly 4,300 American troops killed in Iraq at $28 billion. If a soldier is wounded or disabled, the pay seldom provides adequate compensation for the soldier or their family. In one out of every five cases of seriously injured soldiers, someone in their family has to give up a job to take care of them. Due to improvements in body armor, there have been an unusually high number of soldiers who have survived major wounds such as brain damage, spinal injuries and amputations. Recent figures show that more than 31,000 military personnel have been wounded in Iraq and 320,000 of those have brain injuries.

Stiglitz and Bilmes predict the cost of lifetime care for the thousands of troops who have suffered brain injuries alone could run as high as $35 billion. Factoring in increased defense spending as a result of the war, veterans’ disability payments and demobilization costs, the economists predict the budgetary costs of the war could surpass $3 trillion dollars. The link http://costofwar.com/ takes you to the National Priorities Project website, which calculates the dollar costs for the two wars by the second.

While the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may mercifully end in the next decade, the psychological emotional and disability costs for those wars will continue long into the future.