Movies of the 70s were packed with psychologically damaged veterans, even though it was a decade before the war was recreated on film.
He was the forerunner: the first of all the silenced, traumatized, physically damaged veterans — living spectres — who would inspire the "Regeneration" trilogy, the masterpiece that Pat Barker was to produce in the nineteen-nineties.
To this must be added the cost of caring for wounded and otherwise damaged veterans, which has been mounting precipitously as medical advances allow more of the injured to survive.
A battlefield nurse who was wounded in Flanders in World War I, Maisie took up the career of "psychologist and investigator" to help damaged veterans and the grieving families of the dead.
The plight of damaged veterans is a debt that must be paid in full.
Not all informants are as obviously suspect as that, but many of them have ulterior motives and too often their half-baked or biased information leads to guns-out raids on old women or emotionally damaged veterans.
