UCLA study

Battlefield camaraderie yields long-term

dividends for veterans, study finds

The benefits of wartime camaraderie extend far beyond the battlefield, a new UCLA study of U.S. Civil War veterans suggests.

Veterans who served in military units characterized by a strong esprit de corps were much less likely decades later to die of a stroke or heart condition than veterans from less cohesive companies, two UCLA economists have found.

"On the battlefield, you'd expect your buddy to have your back," said Dora Kosta, the study's lead author and a UCLA professor of economics. "But the fact that camaraderie provides a protective effect that endures long after the war has ended is a new and surprising finding."

"We're not sure how it works, but somehow, being armed with close social bonds in the extremely stressful situation of battlefield combat has a protective effect that continues long after the fighting has ended," said Matthew Kahn, the study's co-author and a fellow UCLA economics professor. "Men who went into battle with this emotional armor were much less likely in their late 50s and early 60s to fall victim to stress-related illnesses."

The study, which tracked the veterans for up to 68 years, constitutes the first long-term look at the effect of unit cohesion on soldiers' mortality and health at older ages. It is also one of the longest-running studies of the effect of human social bonds on extreme stress. The findings appear in the latest issue of the peer-reviewed scholarly journal Demography, which is expected to ship Feb. 19 to subscribers.

Drawing on data amassed by the University of Chicago's Center for Population Economics, Costa and Kahn looked at records for more than 35,000 Union veterans who served between 1861 and 1865 in 303 infantry companies. The economists first determined how many men each company lost, reasoning that the companies with the most losses also experienced the most stress.

They also figured out whether the veterans served with men of shared ethnicity, occupation and other commonalities. Previous research has shown that soldiers who fought in companies with men who shared similar characteristics — a common race, religion, ethnicity, socioeconomic status or hometown — displayed a higher degree of loyalty to one another than their counterparts in more diverse companies.

The researchers then examined meticulously detailed medical records kept by the Pension Bureau — the precursor to today's Department of Veterans Affairs — for the purposes of ascertaining whether the veterans were eligible for age- and disability-related benefits as they aged. In particular, Costa and Kahn looked at whether the men experienced medical conditions with well-documented links to stress, such as arteriosclerosis, heart attacks and strokes.

Finally, they scoured U.S. Census records from 1850 to 1930 for details of the veterans' lives as they unfolded. The researchers were especially interested in the veterans' economic situation and martial status, two variables that have been shown to have a significant effect on an individual's health.

Even after adjusting for these factors, Costa and Kahn found that veterans from companies lacking in cohesion were six times more likely than peers from cohesive companies to suffer from arteriolosclerosis or to have heart attacks or strokes by their late 50s or early 60s.

When translated into total lifespan, the toll was considerable. Of the veterans who died from heart disease or stroke, men who served in an uncohesive company lived one year and four months less than men from a cohesive company.

Costa and Kahn admit they're not sure of the mechanism behind camaraderie's long-term protective influence, but they suspect social bonds somehow moderate stress hormones released either during or after intense battles.

"It may be that you don't have the same release of stress hormones when you go into battle with comrades on whom you feel like you can depend," Costa said.

The study quotes from the journal of a Civil War captain whose personal experiences seem to reinforce this view: "I have always found comforting in battle the companionship of a friend, one in whom you had confidence, one you felt assured would stand by you until the last," Frank Hollinger wrote.

Having a friendly shoulder to cry on at the end of the day also may help dissipate stress hormones, Costa said.

"If you actually see people being killed, your comrade can say, 'No, no. It's all right. It's not your fault.' "

Also unclear is whether veterans from less cohesive units sustained damage that led to stress-related conditions during the war itself or in the years that followed the conflict.

"One theory is that release of hormones in battle may cause systemic inflammation that later in life leads to heart disease and other potentially fatal diseases," Kahn said.

Alternatively, the absence of camaraderie may have made veterans more likely later on to relive battle trauma in the form of post-traumatic stress syndrome.

"Every time a veteran experiences a PTSD reaction, stress hormones are released again," Costa said. "So PTSD leads to repeated exposure to hormones that may over time lead to damaging inflammation."

The latter theory, the researchers admit, is just conjecture. The Pension Bureau did not track PTSD symptoms because the illness was not accepted into diagnostic literature until more than a century later. Neither did the bureau track symptoms that could be ascribed, with the benefit of hindsight, to PTSD. Nonetheless, the researchers view the data as a goldmine.

"Many studies have investigated how social networks combat the effects of stress in people," Costa said. "But they've tended to focus on stress generated in a laboratory setting, where researchers naturally would be prevented from inflicting the high levels experienced on a battlefield. The beauty of the Civil War data is it lets us get as close to a randomized, experimental study of extreme stress and social networks as you can ethically get."

The study also takes advantage of record-keeping quirks unique to the era. To ensure delivery of the country's earliest comprehensive benefits for veterans, the Pension Bureau tracked the veterans to their death. Because neither the Pension Bureau's records nor corresponding U.S. Census data is protected by the kinds of privacy safeguards that U.S. citizens now enjoy, the researchers were able to reconstruct a vivid picture of the types of conditions under which the men served and how they fared as they aged.

Moreover, Civil War soldiers who joined one company stayed with that company for their entire tour of duty. Only in very rare cases did companies add new soldiers as old ones were injured or killed. This distinction facilitated tracking the effects of cohesion. By contrast, soldiers repeatedly cycled in and out of companies during World War II and the Korean and Vietnam wars, infinitely complicating such research.

Even though the findings may date from a 145-year-old conflict, the researchers hope they will shed light on contemporary problems.

"Now that we're in the middle of two long-term wars, it's really important to understand what effect combat has on men's long-term health," Costa said. "If we can find strategies for minimizing the long-term toll of the experience on these brave people, we really need to do so."

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New study from BYU on racial discrimination by Union

Racial discrimination in Union Army pensions detailed by new study

Twenty years after the Civil War ended, the 179,000 African-American veterans of the Union Army saw racial inequality widen as the Pension Bureau left most of them out of a rapid expansion.

According to a new Brigham Young University study, the program shifted away from its relatively color-blind roots when it began granting disability claims based on chronic illness to soldiers who had not been wounded in the war.

During the 1880s, the Pension Bureau approved applications from uninjured white veterans at more than twice the rate of approval for uninjured black veterans. "Black veterans were far less successful than whites for conditions that were hard to verify and required a degree of trust," said Sven Wilson, an associate professor of political science at BYU.

Wilson will report his findings in the American Journal of Public Health.

Extending the history of black Civil War vets

The research draws from a large Union Army data set collected primarily by BYU students at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Typically it took a student one hour to locate and record a single soldier's military, pension, medical and census records.

The project began as a way for University of Chicago economist and Nobel laureate Robert Fogel to study human aging. Wilson's new study is one of the first to explore the experiences of black veterans.

Reconstruction: Powerless without a paper trail

During the Reconstruction period, the Pension Bureau awarded monthly disability payments only to veterans disabled by war injuries. To weed out fraudulent claims, the Bureau required applicants to produce documents like birth certificates, military papers and hospital records.

For many black veterans – three-fourths of whom were former slaves – such records simply didn't exist.

"The Union Army had a hard time staffing the hospitals of black regiments, so ailing black soldiers were not sent to the hospital as often as white soldiers," Wilson said.

"Since they didn't get sent to the hospital, they didn't have a paper trail of illness or injury. As a result they had a harder time applying for a pension."

An enrollment gap emerged, with wounded white veterans getting pensions at twice the rate of wounded black vets.

The silver lining during this period was that blacks who met the application requirements fared about as well as whites. Between 1865 and 1878, the Pension Bureau approved 83 percent of the applications submitted by wounded white veterans and 77 percent submitted by wounded black veterans.

"The fact that the Pension Bureau gave it to both blacks and whites was an accomplishment for the time," Wilson said. "The pension was a tremendous financial boon for black families in a time when the economic opportunities of African-Americans were severely limited by Jim Crow policies."

Ballooning bureaucracy leaves black vets behind During the 1880s, political pressure changed how the Pension Bureau operated.

Review boards became more lenient about linking veterans' various conditions to the war. Veterans awarded new claims also became eligible for back payment.

Racial inequality widened as the program expanded because black veterans' claims were believed far less readily than whites, especially if the disability was harder to verify medically. Wilson's study shows that a claim of chronic back pain, for example, was twice as likely to be approved for a white veteran.

Applicants with highly verifiable ailments such as varicose veins, on the other hand, had roughly the same chances regardless of race. Second chance comes too late for most

Twenty-five years after the war ended, a new law dropped the requirement that the disability must trace back to the war. The new rule required just proof of service and a current disability or chronic illness.

"Even in this period of overwhelming injustice, black veterans benefited from the pension program," Wilson said. "Unfortunately most black veterans did not live to the turn of the century when the program peaked in terms of equal treatment." Wilson holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago. He is the director of the Public Policy Graduate Program at BYU.

Pleasant and meaningful...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Internationale

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=170eniNClIQ

Today's situation....

This time....

For every southern boy fourteen-years-old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two oclock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it's all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even begun yet, it not only hasn't begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave yet it's going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn't need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This Time. Maybe this time...

South...a test

We are sick and tired of hearing about how dumb people are in the South. We challenge any so-called smart Yankee to take this exam, administered by the University of Alabama engineering department.

1. Calculate the smallest limb diameter on a persimmon tree that will support a 10-pound possum.

2. Which of these cars will rust out the quickest when placed on blocks in your front yard? A ’65 Ford Fairlane, a ’69 Chevrolet Chevelle or a ’64 Pontiac GTO.

3. If your uncle builds a still that operates at a capacity of 20 gallons of shine produced per hour, how many car radiators are required to condense the product?

4. A woodcutter has a chainsaw that operates at 2,700 RPM. The density of the pine trees in the plot to be harvested is 470 per acre. The plot is 2.3 acres in size. The average tree diameter is 14 inches. How many Budweisers will be drunk before the trees are cut down?

5. If every old refrigerator in the state vented a charge of R-12 simultaneously, what would be the percentage decrease in the ozone level?

6. A front porch is constructed of 2X8 pine on 24-inch centers with a field rock foundation. The span is 8 feet and the porch length is 16 feet. The porch is 1 inch rough sawn pine. When the porch collapses, how many hound dogs will be killed?

7. A man owns a Kentucky house and 3.7 acres of land in a hollow with an average slope of 15 percent. The man has five children. Can each of his grown children place a mobile home on the man’s land and still have enough property for their electric appliances to sit out front?

8. A 2-ton truck is overloaded and proceeding 900 yards down a steep slope on a secondary road at 45 MPH. The brakes fail. Given average traffic conditions on secondary roads, what is the probability that it will strike a vehicle with a muffler?

9. A coal mine operates a NFPA Class 1, Division 2 Hazardous Area. The mine employs 120 miners per shift. A gas warning is issued at the beginning of the 3^rd shift. How many cartons of unfiltered Camels will be smoked during the shift?

10. At a reduction in the gene pool variability rate of 7.5 percent per generation, how long will it take a town that has been bypassed by the interstate to breed a country western singer?

Hey, I finally found a job!!!!!!