Post Traumatic Stress Disorder  (PTSD) has now become one of America’s most urgent national problems, costing thousands of lives and the US government over $2 billion annually. The US Dept. of Veteran’s Affairs estimates that 31% of the 2.7 million Viet Nam vets and 30% of the almost one million vets fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan have significant PTSD.

Beyond the sky-high rates of domestic violence, drug addiction, and suicide,  the NY Times recently reported that American veterans account for 13 percent of the adult population, but more than a third of the adult perpetrators of the 43 worst mass killings in the US since 1984.  US veterans also kill themselves at a 50 percent higher rate than their civilian counterparts.  So while the US lost 58,220 troops in Viet Nam, the Vietnamese lost an estimated 3,000,000 soldiers and civilians, with over 5,000,000 injured or made homeless.  Yet, the Vietnamese, for reasons this film will illuminate, have not experienced extensive PTSD, nor the psychological disturbances and life-changing emotional impairments that their American adversaries did.

AFTER THE AMERICAN WAR will venture deeper into the underlying cultural, philosophical and moral components of PTSD, and force us to reappraise what we as a society understand about PTSD and what we can do about reducing its prevalence and its soul and life-damaging effects. We believe AFTER THE AMERICAN WAR will become an important contribution, to vets, their families and US society at large, by catalyzing a new national discussion about America, war and PTSD. We hope you will consider supporting this important project.

We are asking you to support, at whatever level you are able, our documentary film AFTER THE AMERICAN WAR which will ask and explore a number of difficult but critically important questions about America’s war in Viet Nam, and the profound psychological and moral impact of that war on hundreds of thousands of PTSD-suffering US vets.