This has a two part trigger, for me, I saw a bus stop sign saying that 1 in 5 returning soldiers have TBI and a BBC headline about “stocks fall on manufacturing data”, the last being a poorly constructed sentence that can be read two ways, manufacturing as a noun or as a verb transformed to adjective. Either way it would be accurate, recent events on Wall Street show they’ve been manufacturing the data for a long long time.
But with the TBI example, we get some really complex thought-lines from the one sentence. Is that perhaps 20% of ALL returning military personnel? Even with that 20% being limited to Combat Infantry personnel that would be a shocker. And you KNOW the Army would make it minimal. They’ve been treating (and getting busted doing it) TBI as “underlying personality disorders with onset prior to service” which means the Pentagoons are Covering Their Collective Poopy Butt.

That gives them the opportunity to give the soldiers thus affected anywhere from an “Unfit for Service – Psychiatric” Honorable Discharge BUT, since it’s not officially service connected, they don’t have to pay a dime to the broken soldiers. Just throw them away and holler “NEXT!”… To Bad Conduct or Dishonorable discharges complete with Prison Time if their injuries, or battlefield-induced psychoses caused by an overdose of combined Conscience and Unconscionable Deeds they’re ordered to commit, cause them to commit “crimes” like telling their Commanding Officer to fuck himself and go kill the “enemy” civilians himself if he wants them dead so damn bad. That’s called “mutiny” and punishable by death at the highest level or “insubordination” and punishable as a Federal felony at the lowest.

By denying TBI and PTSD claims the Pentagoons can handle a lot of the symptoms of both as crimes, to be punished, rather than as symptoms of damages caused by the Pentagon Mission.

They can also punish the soldiers for “malingering” – faking illness to get out of performance of their duties… if they report the symptoms to Medical Personnel and Medical, who are under orders from their “superiors” (which would make themselves “inferiors”, something the military discourages you mentioning) and if those orders pointedly Exclude diagnosing PTSD or TBI, that means the Medical Personnel themselves would be required to report the soldier for “malingering”.

They did that crap with Agent Orange victims too, and still do. File an A.O. claim and they’ll investigate YOU as a criminal rather than Monsanto, Dow and Union Carbide…

That leads to the Other Interpretation of the statistic. If “Soldiers” is limited to the Army, possibly the Marines, that’s still the largest chunk of Military personnel and would mean possibly 37% of returning Army and Marine Corps being affected. That’s one in three instead of one in five.

Be All That You Can Be, as the lying ass recruiter slogan used to say.