I'm working on my computer with the volume on the TV low as the otherwise unremarkable movie The Hunted with Benecio del Toro and Tommy Lee Jones is playing and then it hits me:

Toro's character, Aaron, has almost all the symptoms of PTSD and his leutenant, Jones' character, refuses to respond to Aaron's letters crying out for help with his PTSD. And the US military moves to 'sweep' away Aaron as a lost cause.

While this move is about characters, the underlying connection with reality is the failure of the military and government to confront the REAL issue of PTSD as a personality altering, behavior altering and impacting disorder.

And hence, the only solution for Aaron is for Leutenant to face off against him and kill him, releasing him from his agony.

The movie was in 2003, but just recently in May 2008 in Orlando, an Iraqi war vet and military contractor was arrested at the Orlando International airport for carrying explosive devices on a plane to Jamaica allegedly to kill the murderers of his late mother.

The prosecution is planning to throw the book at him, but newspaper has revealed him to be deeply troubled by both the war in Iraq and the murder of his mother, pushing him what one Jamaican psychologist recognized as an obvious case of PTSD.

How sad that fiction takes the form of reality.