I've done some work with PTSD, not vets but children/teenagers with trauma. My wife has had two bouts of PTSD from her work wearing a blue uniform (actually she doesn't wear the uniform, preferring plain clothes) from several shootings and recovering dozens of bodies in the Black Saturday fires. She still loves what she does, but the old signs of PTSD never really go away, in her case hyper-vigilence, threat assessment and situational awareness are now just a part of her normal life. From my position, having worked with it as a psych and lived with it at home, it's not so much what the trauma was that gets you, it's everything you do about it every day afterwards that really makes or breaks a person.
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