I was assigned section 10

Today she’s fielding phone calls from a woman whose veteran son was committed to a non-VA psychiatric facility, but he doesn’t want to be at the facility because he, a severe-PTSD sufferer, was already paranoid before one of the other resident loons threatened to kill him, and anyway he fought for his fucking country and they promised they wouldn’t abandon him and he swears to God he will have to kill himself if the VA doesn’t put him in with the other soldiers. 

• This would be an example of an Ethical or Moral claim. That is because this section of writing is making an opinion on a social situation, or what is right or wrong to do. This claim is ethical because it is saying how the soldiers who suffer from PTSD already have to go through so much, and should not be placed in facilities that are adding to the stress and paranoia. There should be places for the people who suffer from PTSD to go and feel safe and try and get better, but not get death threats and added stress. 

Another veteran’s wife calls from the parking lot of a diner to which she fled when her husband looked like he was going to boil over in rage. Another woman’s husband had a service dog die in the night, and the death smell in the morning triggered an episode she worries will end in him hurting himself or someone else if she doesn’t get him into a VA hospital, and the closest major clinic is four hours away and she is eight and a half months pregnant and got three hours of sleep, and the clinic’s website says its case manager position for veterans of Iraq or Afghanistan is currently unstaffed, anyway.

• This would be an example of an illustrative claim. That is because of how the text was explaining how a certain smell could trigger an episode, which is linked to PTSD. The sympathy aspect is achieved with this type of claim due to when it was explained how the episodes could lead to physical and emotional despair, affecting individuals and the people around them. That statement paints the picture and can make you visual a scene, and draw in sympathy. The descriptive words such as “death smell” paints the picture and can trigger your senses into really picturing that situation. 

The phone never stops ringing. If it does for 14 seconds, Brannan writes an email to help get whatever someone needs, or publishes a blog post about her own struggles. Caleb was not amused the first time one of these posts went live. But now he’s glad she didn’t ask him his permission. “I’d have said no,” he tells me on the couch one day. It’s a brief emergence from his bedroom—he’s been “sleeping or hiding,” Brannan describes it, 20 or so hours a day for a few days. He leans forward to put his glass of orange juice on the table; it takes many, many long seconds for him to cover the few inches; today, like most days, he feels “like a damn train ran over me.” “But because of the feedback she got, I know that other people were going through the same shit I was. And she’s helping people.” His face softens. “She’s got a good heart. She’s always been like that. I’m glad she’s doing it,” he says again, and shrugs, because that’s the end of that story.

• This paragraph would be an example of a Causal Claim due to the cause and effect aspect of it. The cause of Brannan writing an email to help someone or posting about struggles that she may face, is for the cause of helping other people going through similar situations. At the end of this paragraph this is proved by when it said, “But because of the feedback she got, I know that other people were going through the same shit I was. And she’s helping people.” Brannan achieved her goal of the cause, of helping people and getting her story out there, with the positive effects of making people not feel as alone and depressed about their situation. 

So she doesn’t. If she’s not saving lives on the phone or blogging, she’s offering support via Facebook, where thousands of Family of a Vet users and nearly 500 FOV volunteers congregate and commiserate.

• This would be an example of a Quantitative or Numerical Claim. This is because it is giving a numerical amount of people who are volunteering and who are on Facebook who discuss what they are going through. 

“I am now more hypervigilant than my husband,” volunteer Kateri Peterson posts to her Facebook page, and people comment things like “I know that even if my husband is having a decent day I am still in that alert mode and he is asking me to please relax and for the life of me, as hard as I try, I just can’t, I am still on the lookout. I know people probably think I am nuts.” On a private Facebook group, Kateri tells the story of how her family was at Olive Garden when she started sobbing into her Zuppa Toscana. There was no visible reason for it. Just the general overwhelmingness of her distress, of that awful overstimulating hypervigilance, the sort of thing you develop sometimes when you live with someone who looks out the living room window for danger literally hundreds of times a day, or who goes from room to room, room to room, over and over to make sure everyone in each one is still alive. 

• This portion of the paragraph would be an example of a comparative claim. That is due to the comparison of stress levels from social media (Facebook in this case) to being in a stressful situation at your house or a facility. It is comparing how people can be stressed wherever they are, and that can be on your cell phone, or in person. This is also an example of an Evaluative claim because of how the husbands family member cannot seem to relax due to their own stress, aside from her husbands. It is showing how the family members of people suffering with PTSD can be just as stressed and can be walking on eggshells due to all of the stress and worrying. 

Kateri’s eight-year-old son now also counts the exits in new spaces he enters, points them out to his loved ones, keeps a mental map of them at the ready, until war or fire fails to break out, and everyone is safely back home.

This last part of the paragraph could be an example of an illustrative claim. That is due to the fact that the excerpt is explaining how the eight year olds effects which definitely evokes sympathy, because it is sad that an eight year old is developing traits that are from witnessing PTSD.