Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
I'm going to take this to a personal level for a second. In 1974 I was a signal maintainer for the railway, and I had four people killed on one crossing over 11 months. Over a period of years I had mental strain as a result of that; PTSD, I guess, is the word for it.
Then in the 1980s I was involved in a car accident. I pulled a guy out of a burning truck. When I first went to the side of that vehicle, I looked in. Your mind will try to protect you: oh, no, he's already dead, don't worry. I paused for maybe 20 seconds. I had nightmares for five years after that because I even considered leaving him, when in fact we got him out.
Using a lay term, I'd call the result of all that “mental anguish”. When you take that kind of thinking and you apply it to our veterans who are coming back from Afghanistan--I understand there are about 3,000 young men and women coming back from there with various injuries--what's the correlation between the mental anguish potentially causing it or a combination of physical and mental anguish leading to this kind of outcome? Is there evidence that this could be happening? And is there evidence that just the mental side alone might lead to something like this as opposed to physical head trauma?