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Frontline’s “The Wounded Platoon” is documentary that follows members of Third Platoon, Charlie Company, 1st battalion, 506th infantry…the regiment known as the “Band of Brothers”. It exposes some of the repercussions of modern warfare on the psychological health of our troops.

One of the biggest impacts is PTSD.

PTSD was a term that emerged from the wars in Viet Nam. Some have said that it’s a new term that’s the same as the old adage that “War is hell”.

However, something else is going on:

Since 2002, the number of Fort Carson soldiers diagnosed each year with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, has risen from 26 to 1,120, a rise of over 4,000 percent.

In recent decades, medical science has greatly increased our knowledge of PTSD. One might naively think that a deeper understanding would result in more humane treatment of soldiers who can’t cope. That is true in some circumstances. However, our deeper understanding has also led our military to adapt policies and approaches for dealing with combat troops exposed to inhuman situations:

Before the Iraq War, American soldiers in combat zones were not allowed to take psychiatric medications…

But by the time of “The Surge”, more than 20,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq were taking antidepressants and sleeping pills. These drugs enable the Army to keep soldiers with post-traumatic stress on the battlefield.

One soldier, Kenny Eastridge, came home with PTSD and got into some really bad trouble. He was convicted for participating in a crime spree that included drive-by shootings, aggravated robbery, running over and stabbing a nursing student and finally the execution-style murder of two fellow soldiers.

From his jail cell, soldier Kenny Eastridge recalls his own experiences from that his time in The Surge:

I was having, like, a total mental breakdown. Every day, we were getting in battles and never having a break, it seemed like. It was just crazy. I just got to where I couldn’t take it. I tried to go to mental health, and they put me on all kinds of meds, too, and I was still going out on missions.

Like, they had me on Ambien, Remeron, Lexapro, Celexa, all kind of different stuff. They tried different medications at different doses and nothing would work.

How is this different from human medical experimentation?