The medical and psychological effects of deployment do not necessarily dissipate once the deployment is over. Service members and their families make significant, though incompletely understood, sacrifices during deployment and may need to make major readjustments after the deployment ends. This is not a new phenomenon, but it has been much better illuminated in the wake of the Persian Gulf War.

Sergeant Varisano was part of an art team called upon to document Operation Desert Shield in the Persian Gulf War. This watercolor, depicting the loneliness and responsibility of guard duty, also depicts all soldiers who, by virtue of being soldiers, set aside their individual autonomy for this period to be part of the team and the mission.

An exaggerated response to emotional stimuli is among the many symptoms widely reported by veterans of the 1991 Persian Gulf War. These symptomologies have been attributed to damage and dysfunction associated with deployment-related exposures. We collected event-related potential data from 22 veterans meeting Haley criteria for Gulf War (GW) Syndromes 1-3 and from 8 matched GW veteran controls,...

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 ...

There is significant support for exposure therapy as an effective treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) across a variety of populations, including veterans; however, there is little empirical information regarding how veterans of different war theaters respond to exposure therapy. Accordingly, questions remain regarding therapy effectiveness for treatment of PTSD for veterans of di...

Gulf War Illness (GWI), which affects at least one fourth of the 700,000 veterans deployed to the Gulf War (GW), is characterized by persistent and heterogeneous symptoms, including pain, fatigue and cognitive problems. As a consequence, this illness remains difficult to diagnose. Rodent models have been shown to exhibit different symptomatic features of GWI following exposure to particular GW ...

Mortality data on Gulf War veterans was reviewed as a means of evaluating the long term consequences of the war. Studies were located from searches of Medline, Proceedings of the Conference on Federally Sponsored Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses Research, Proceedings of the American Public Health Association Annual Meetings, Annual Reports to Congress, and personal contacts with knowledgeable inves...

In 1990 and 1991, approximately 697,000 U.S. troops were deployed in the Persian Gulf during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm. The United States suffered relatively few casualties during the brief air and ground war against Iraq. Since returning home, however, many veterans have developed illnesses that appear to be related to their military service in the Gulf. Researchers caution tha...

BACKGROUND Veterans of the Persian Gulf War of 1991 have reported a range of adverse health symptoms. This systematic review aims to identify all studies that have compared the prevalence of symptoms of pain in veterans of the Gulf War to that in a non-Gulf military comparison group, and to determine whether Gulf War veterans are at increased risk of reporting pain. METHODS Studies published ...