Method Aretrospective studywas conducted of field and in-patient psychiatric assessments of116 military personnel evacuated to the UKmilitary psychiatric in-patient facilityin Catterick

Declaration of interest None. The recent claim against the UK Ministry of Defence for failing to prevent, detect and treat psychiatric injury in veterans of military action in Northern Ireland, the Falklands, the Persian Gulf and Bosnia was lost in all significant respects (Multiple Claimants v. The Ministry of Defence, 2003). Furthermore, in a climate in which it is increasingly accepted that ‘Gulf War syndrome’ is as much a product of culture as of war (Wessely, 2001), the compensation bid by veterans of the first Persian Gulf War also failed (Dyer, 2004). The way is now clear for an assessment of the psychological consequences of the ongoing conflict in Iraq that is not blurred by either a failure to recognise that contemporary postcombat psychosomatic syndromes are ‘old wine in new bottles’ (Wessely, 1990), or a mistaken belief that the mental health requirements of military veterans are systematically neglected. Unfortunately, we have already been subjected to misleading reports about the psychiatric casualties from Iraq (Kite & Rayment, 2004), which, if unchallenged, may lead to yet another round of misattributions.