“Charles Marmar, a New York University professor who was on the team of the National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Study, the most comprehensive study of combat stress ever conducted, points out that you really have to spend the money to treat PTSD, since the costs of not treating it are so much higher.”

The claim here that you have to spend more money to treat ptsd is a credibility claim because the author cites a credible figure for their argument

“There are an estimated 100,000 homeless vets on the street on any given night.”

This is a quantitative claim because its truth is dependent on a number.

“Experts say it’s nearly impossible to calculate what treating PTSD from Vietnam has and will cost American taxpayers, so vast are its impacts. There were 2.4 million soldiers deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, and while no one is sure what PTSD among them will ultimately cost us, either, everyone agrees on one thing: If it’s not effectively treated, it won’t go away. When Caleb checked into his VA inpatient therapy in 2010, more than two-thirds of his fellow patients were veterans of Vietnam.”

This paragraph contains a lot of numerical claims, but the main claim, that ptsd won’t go away if not effectively treated, is a causal claim.

“Vietnam vets still make up the bulk of Danna’s clients—though she is assisting traumatized men who served in World War II, in the early years of which half the medical disability discharges were psychiatric, and some of those men still show up at Danna’s office and cry, and cry, and cry. Many people at her fundraiser are saying that she saved their lives, kept them from killing themselves, kept them off the streets—or out of the woods, as it were, where she sometimes found vets living on earth floors under cardboard boxes.” 

This is an illustrative claim, as it attempts to illustrate the generous work that Danna has done to describe the harsh situation that some of these veterans have been through.

“By way of example, she introduces me to Steve Holt and Charlene Payton Holt. Steve served in Vietnam, fought in the Tet Offensive. The chaplain assured him that he shouldn’t feel bad about killing gooks, but the chaplain was paid by the Army, and who took moral advice from a chaplain carrying a .38? Back at home, Steve drank wildly. He waged war with his wife, attempted to work odd jobs where he had as little contact with humans as possible. But then he got divorced, and then he got with Charlene in 2001, and then he got in a big fight with Charlene and pulled the rifles out and sent her fleeing into the night, through the woods to the closest neighbor’s house a mile away. But then he got inpatient psychiatric treatment in Seattle, several times, and found Jesus, and only ever has a beer or two, and now you have never seen two people so in love in any double-wide in the United States.”

This paragraph is another illustrative claim, because it tells a story and illustrates a picture of this person’s life and paints a picture.