PTSD among contractors in the war zone. Who’s surprised?

I’ve wanted to investigate this for a long time. But luckily, the crack teams at ProPublica have done an awesome job at it. Their story starts with one who came home and hanged himself:

More than three years later, Dill’s loved ones are still reeling, their pain compounded by a drawn-out battle with an insurance company over death benefits from the suicide. Barb Dill, 47, nearly lost the family’s home to foreclosure. “We’re circling the drain,” she said.

While suicide among soldiers has been a focus of Congress and the public, relatively little attention has been paid to the mental health of tens of thousands of civilian contractors returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. When they make the news at all, contractors are usually in the middle of scandal, depicted as cowboys, wastrels or worse.

No agency tracks how many civilian workers have killed themselves after returning from the war zones. A small study in 2007 found that 24 percent of contract employees from DynCorp, a defense contractor, showed signs of depression or post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, after returning home. The figure is roughly equivalent to those found in studies of returning soldiers.

If the pattern holds true on a broad scale, thousands of such workers may be suffering from mental trauma, said Paul Brand, the CEO of Mission Critical Psychological Services, a firm that provides counseling to war zone civilians. More than 200,000 civilians work in Afghanistan and Iraq, according to the most recent figures.

Most of the soldiers/vets I talk to are understandably angered by these guys, who work for companies with generic names like Executive Outcomes and Titan and who, in theatre, are often making five times what they are.

But as Peter Singer, author of Corporate Warriors, taught us long ago, these shadow armies are more and more embedded in U.S. wars — often outnumbering guys in uniform.

And while the contractors have no right to care from the VA, yet another private firm is making millions with contracts to care for those who do.This is something I’m trying to learn more about: anyone have a Valor Health story to tell me? I’ll write next with what I found — and why the phrase “veterans’ healthcare” doesn’t belong in the same sentence as that for “private equity.”

Either way, however, the care for these war vets has to be counted as a cost of war. And if they thought they’d have to pay for it,  could even the likes of John McCain vote to authorize the wars?