I got a friend retiring from the military and currently doing all the medical stuff for the VA claim. Had hesitation about seeing behavioral health. We talked a bit and I remembered that she saw the "highway of death" in Desert Storm when the burning oil wells were making the...

..sunlight look distorted, some real hell on earth ambience, among other horrible tableau. People who experience great trauma are frequently the last ones to come forward about same IME. My ex, a trauma flight nurse who'd worked with US SF and British SAS, used to tell me...

.."you guys are the absolute worst. You've all got trauma and none of you ever want to admit it." She took a rocket propelled grenade in Iraq. Woman knew a bit about trauma.

Military medicine had a lot of emphasis on screening out malingering. While in the SF medical course they emphasized the opposite, that you had to dig info out of your guys like pulling molars. Some folks want to "rub some dirt on it and walk it off" with injuries of all sorts.