Shinseki.
The stress that's been put on American military personnel by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq has been well documented.
The man who's in charge of efforts to help veterans cope with the aftereffects of multiple deployments is retired Gen. Eric Shinseki, who heads the Department of Veteran Affairs.
On Morning Edition today, there was a fascinating conversation between Shinseki and host Steve Inskeep. One particularly interesting moment was when Shinseki, an engineer by training, likened the effect that multiple deployments can have on a soldier to what happens when you drop a ball.
"A few years ago," Shinseki says, "I used to use the term resilience. The term is still used today. When I used the term, resilience was a throwback to my days as an engineering student — where you hold a ball at a certain level and you drop it and the ball bounces back up. ... It never bounces back up to where you dropped it from. That delta, that difference, is the coefficient of resilience. ... Well, if you let it bounce again, each succeeding bounce is some portion of that. ... This also describes the multiple deployments. Quality of resilience is affected."
Here's the audio of their conversation. It begins with Shinseki talking about conversations he's had with veterans about their post-combat stress:
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