Sex is Therapy for Some Combat Vets

For some combat veterans, physical intimacy acts as therapy because it triggers positive brain chemicals that reduce stress, build safety, and combat emotional numbness. These veterans may use intense physical and sexual stimulation to briefly dull or escape persistent emotional pain, intrusive thoughts, and combat-related trauma.

Combat veterans who engage in high-risk sexual behavior in countries like Thailand despite the threat of imprisonment are often driven by complex psychological factors, including Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), compulsive sexual behavior (CSB), and trauma-induced impulsivity. Research from the VA Office of Research and Development shows that veterans have considerably more behavioral addictions than the general population, often engaging in extreme risk-taking as an unhealthy coping mechanism to manage severe psychological distress.

https://www.research.va.gov/currents/0617-study_yields_insight_on_sexual_disorder.cfm

The chronic adrenaline and high-alert state caused by combat exposure can alter the brain’s threat and drive systems. This prompts certain people to pursue intense experiences to achieve a sense of typical arousal or dominion.

https://www.swords-to-plowshares.org/toolbox-article/common-mental-and-behavioral-health-conditions

How Intimacy Helps Some Combat Veterans

Oxytocin release: Sex and close touch release oxytocin, a brain chemical that lowers fear and builds trust.

A sense of being grounded: Reassuring contact aids a detached mind in returning to the present.

Reducing isolation: PTSD often makes people feel cut off from others; physical closeness restores a human connection.

Reclaiming joy: It replaces memories of war and danger with a positive, shared human experience.

The Varied Impact of Trauma on Individuals

Not a universal rule: Loving sex is not therapy for every combat veteran. Many vets struggle with avoidance, anger, or being triggered during sex.

Shared struggles: Both survivors of abuse and combat veterans can experience hyperarousal (high anxiety), emotional numbing, or pain because their nervous systems are stuck in “survival mode.”

The role of safety: Healing depends on mutual trust and consent. If a partner is insecure or under duress, intimacy can result in damage rather than recovery, irrespective of the nature of the trauma.

“Clinical research demonstrates a complex picture. While some veterans view sexual intimacy as a comforting ‘means to an end’ to manage symptoms, the data repeatedly shows that PTSD often disrupts intimacy. Emotional numbing, hyper-vigilance, and trauma-focused medications commonly make physical closeness a significant challenge for veterans.”

https://www.ptsd.va.gov/professional/treat/specific/ptsd_family.asp

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2783889

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/01/01/507749611/for-veterans-trauma-of-war-can-persist-in-struggles-with-sexual-intimacy

https://www.research.va.gov/currents/spring2015/spring2015-3.cfm

Combat veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) may take sexual risks to cope with emotional numbness, recreate adrenaline highs, or self-regulate intense internal distress.

Why Risk-Taking Happens

In Search of Excitement: PTSD commonly leads to emotional detachment or a lack of sensation (anhedonia). High-risk sexual behavior can trigger a massive surge of adrenaline, allowing veterans to for a short time perceive a sense of intensity or aliveness that everyday life lacks.

Some individuals unconsciously search for turbulent, perilous, or pivotal scenarios because it matches the known nervous system excitement they felt while serving.

Handling Negative Feelings: Research indicates that sudden increases in unhappiness or bad moods often result in unwise sexual behavior. Sex becomes a maladaptive coping mechanism to distract from or soothe painful memories, anxiety, or depression.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4684959

Substance Use Impairment: Many veterans deal with co-occurring alcohol or substance use disorders. Intoxicants lower inhibitions and impair judgment, thereby causing reckless or high-risk decisions.

Compulsive Behaviors: Trauma is linked to compulsive sexual behaviors, where the act functions as a powerful psychological reinforcement loop to briefly escape core PTSD symptoms like hypervigilance or intrusive thoughts.

Compulsive Sexual Behavior Among Military Veterans

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-debrief/201802/why-do-veterans-have-issues-sex-and-intimacy

Locations such as Pattaya, Thailand, at first grew as Rest and Recreation (R&R) locations throughout the Vietnam War, establishing a heritage of a military environment and easily available adult amusement.

Despite prostitution being completely prohibited by Thai legislation, its application can vary in significant tourist destinations, causing people to undervalue the real danger of being apprehended and facing serious legal repercussions.

U.S. Troops are Speaking Out — Adam Kinzinger Explains What They’re Saying

The next link leads to a post I recently published on one of my other blogs. The two are related!

Sphincter Police

“Usually starting one of the genre, I find the overwhelming right of center or further right political beliefs. This time, with centralist politics, the story is more on the action than the politics. A good, well-balanced read.” | Michael Wooten – Five Stars – with more than 360 reviews on Goodreads

START READING

Where to Stay SAFER in the U.S. “if” Trump’s MAGA Civil War Explodes into Widespread Violence

In a hypothetical large-scale domestic conflict structured around modern political divisions, heavily Democratic (“blue”) states in the Pacific Northwest and the Northeast—such as Washington, Oregon, Massachusetts, and Vermont—would offer the most aligned governance, institutional backing, and population support for defending democratic constitutional norms.

NOTE: This video was produced more than two years ago, before Trump lied, threatened, and cheated his way back to the white House to avoid prison for what he did on January 6, 2021. Some of the possible predictions mentioned are now happening.

Democratic-Aligned Strongholds

The Pacific Coast (Washington and Oregon): These states possess robust, self-sustaining economies, secure geographic boundaries (bounded by the Pacific Ocean and mountains), strong agricultural and tech sectors, and state leadership firmly committed to democratic institutions

New England (Vermont, Massachusetts, Maine): Consistently ranking high in social stability, community resilience, and overall safety indexes, New England features deeply entrenched civic institutions, strong regional cooperation, and relative distance from primary logistics choke points

Still There Would be Internal Fragmentation: Political scientists and conflict analysts emphasize that a modern American conflict would not resemble the clean, state-vs-state battle lines of the 19th century. The primary division is urban versus rural rather than neat geographic regions, meaning virtually every state contains internal ideological friction.

True safety in any prolonged disruption relies less on state political labels and more on local resource security, including access to fresh water, regional food production, and community-level cohesion rather than macro-level state alignments.

NEVER FORGET who the real Donald John Trump has been for more than 70 years. And he hasn’t changed. He’s much worse!

Donald the Porn Star’s John Trump, who is a lifelong cheat, liar, family crime lord, an alleged pedophile, a convicted rapist, fraud, felon, also known as Cadet Bone Spurs, is the mastermind behind the failed violent, bloody coup attempt on January 6, 2021.

The Josh Kavanagh Thriller Series set during the Trump Era

by Lloyd Lofthouse

“We Know Where You Live! — Leave the Country or Sleep!”

I was up today before 0400. Sleep is a challenge. Since 1966, it always has been

When I sleep, my subconscious takes me to times and places I don’t want to revisit. That’s why I’m sitting here at 0519 writing this blog post when I should be trying to slumber for another hour or two.

I write in my thriller novels about violence and what it does to our minds and bodies. I do that every day for an hour or more. I do that to avoid thinking about 1966, the year I spent in Vietnam in combat. A Marine. A field radio operator.

When I’m awake, I seldom think about that time or talk about what happened over there.

Before I sighed and surrendered to escape the demons waiting to pounce if I attempted to sleep again, I left the bed, thinking about the vital and dangerous job I had driving a Jeep in Vietnam and one specific day after one of our gun companies had been seriously hit.

Serving as a 2531 Field Radio Operator with the 1st Marine Tank Battalion in 1966, meant I was likely driving an M151 MUTT configured as an MRC-83 or MRC-110 communication jeep, stripped down, no armor, for maximum speed and visibility without doors or a weapons mount. We often drove along muddy, unpaved roads with a high risk of landmines or ambushes. The space behind the two front seats was filled with a combat radio. One of our M48 Pattons had hit a one of those IEDs, powerful enough to lift an almost 51-ton tank into the air before it dropped back down, blowing off its tracks. They crew survived with broken ear drums.

The next day, I drove that jeep to Charlie Company’s forward operating base, racing down one of those muddy one lane roads through a jungle behind a tanker truck carying a full load of fuel for the gun company’s tanks. They needed a resupply because the fuel they’d had blew up the night before when their base was overrun, ending in Martines fighting hand to hand with knives in their skivvies in the rain and mud.

I drove the jeep. A staff sergeant sat in the other seat making himself as small as possible as bullets snapped past us through the open cab.

During Donald John Trump’s first year in the White House, I received an old fashioned, unsigned letter in the mail with no return address. The postage stamp revealed it had been mailed from Florida. I live in California.

It said, “We Know where you live?”

After Trump won the 2024 election, the same or another Trump loyalist MAGA member sent me an email or left a comment on one of my blogs warning me to “Leave the Country or Sleep!”

I don’t like to sleep.

Start Reading The Patriot Oath to swear fidelity today!

I took an oath when I joined the US Marines to defend this country against the likes of Trump and MAGA. I’m not leaving. You may understand why if you read the one-star reviews for The Patriot Oath.

Refreshing the Josh Kavanagh Thrillers

UPDATED July 19, 2026: After a day or two and a few hours learning how to talk to an AI, this is the new cover for The Patriot Oath. So new, I haven’t had time to replace the old cover on the book’s Amazon page yet. That will happen later today and take time for Amazon to process before it appears.

ORIGINAL POST STARTS HERE

Here’s the final cover. I had to learn how to talk to an AI first and I’m a slow learner. But I finally got there and haven’t had time to replace the old cover on the books Amazon page yet.

“The primary reason to update a successful thriller series is to drive new sales by aligning the books with evolving design trends and online discovery habits, such as those on social platforms. This ‘rebranding’ strategy expands the target demographic and boosts visual recognition.” SOURCE: Jane Friedman

The Patriot Oath | published July 2, 2021
Never for Glory | June 23, 2023
Fiddling with Death | February 10, 2025

On July 13, 2026, orders for the series reached 7,474 eBooks, 135 print, and 1,592,394 KENP reads

— The Patriot Oath’s future Cover Under Construction —

Earlier this month, my editor for the Josh Kavanagh Thriller series recommended a “new” website called Book Leopard, and I took a look. Impressed with what I learned from what was offered free, I decided to give it a try and paid $49 for one credit.

I think Book Leopard offers a one-stop shop for authors to not only come up with a new book cover working with the site’s AI generator, but to provide a list of benefits that, in the past, took “me” years, months and weeks to learn while using multiple sites and never-ending research to produce.

At this time, my focus is the new covers for all three books in the series, and I’m still learning to work with their AI. The wordless cover above is for The Patriot Oath. The text was there from the beginning, and then I asked the AI to remove the words.

I think asking the AI to do that will make it easier to add a public domain image of George Washington Crossing the Delaware, similar to how it was done on The Patriot Oath’s original cover. Most, who have read the book, may not know the image is there. It’s sort of camouflaged in the background behind the word OATH and my name. For me, that image is symbolic and readers don’t have to know it’s there.

George Washington was the first person to take the presidential oath to protect the Constitution from enemies both foreign and domestic, but he did not write it himself. The specific language of the presidential oath was drafted and proposed during the Constitutional Convention in 1787 by delegates James Madison and George Mason.

As soon as “George Washington Crossing the Delaware” is added to the background near the bottom of the new cover image above, I’ll ask Book Leopard’s AI to put the words listed below back.

A JOSH KAVANAGH THRILLER
THE PATRIOT OATH
&
LLOYD LOFTHOUSE

If that goes smoothly, George Washington will be in his boat, lurking in the shadows behind my name.

Here’s what Book Leopard offers for the price of one credit (at this time $49).

Book Leopard is an interactive site where authors/editors guide the site’s AI to generate most of what’s needed to get an already written novel’s draft ready to publish and promote. Still, their AI cannot do the work alone. The author/editor must be part of the process. I think this AI is going to help authors/editors avoid weeks, months and even years of learning, work and eye strain, and get it done in a very short period of time.

The Price of One Credit Gets All of This for One Book

· For any Genre

· A spectacular cover

· An amazing description

· A great subtitle

· 3 Kindle categories

· 3 Amazon paperback categories

· 3 categories for non-Amazon sites

· 7 search keywords

· Attention-grabbing text for advertising

· 12 Kindle categories for targeting Amazon book ads

· 12 paperback categories for targeting Amazon book ads

· 300+ keywords for targeting Amazon book ads

· 100 ASINs for targeting Amazon book ads

Fiddling with Death is OUT!

Launching Fiddling with Death

My Contribution: there isn’t much I can do at my age to defend the U.S. Constitution against domestic enemies like Donald Trump, his fanatical MAGA cult, and foreign enemies like Putin and that 3rd generation freak in North Korea.

What happened to the ballots for more than 11,000,000 voters in the United States?

How to tell the real heroes from the hero-wannabes.

“Democracy”: A War Hero Who Deserves To be Honored

Like Frankie McGrath, I wasn’t a baby killer

My review of this realistic, historical action suspense thriller will join hundreds of thousands already on Amazon and Goodreads. Still, how many of those ratings and reviews were written by Vietnam combat vets who were there?

Soon after this novel was released, The Women was mentioned in my VA PTSD support group that meets every Wednesday morning. This support group may differ from many since half are women that served in the Air Force, the Navy, with one a Marine, who served in the Middle East. In combat!

Later that day, I saw The Women at Costco and bought a hardcover.

The main character in this novel is a young Army nurse, and the first half of this brutal combat story mostly takes place in Vietnam. Although Frankie McGrath was an Army nurse saving lives in a field medical unit beyond the front lines, and not behind them, she didn’t fight in combat. Yet she was in combat, every moment, awake or asleep. I’m going to explain what I mean soon.

For me, reading this historical fiction became a triggered journey back in time. And I started losing sleep, waking at the slightest sound. Alert, ready to fight.

Remembering!

And by the time I finished reading, I was angry.

My DD214, a form we get when we leave the military and return to civilian life, had one entry that said I’d gone on one major military operation for a few days during 1966. Yet I was in combat almost daily after climbing down that net (like the kind used on D-Day during World War II) on the side of a Navy transport ship, jumping the last few feet into a landing craft that took us Marines ashore. As we landed, fighting was taking place not that far from our location on the beach. And a few hours later, the first night we were there, my company was hit before we’d finished setting up our base camp. We had no wire surrounding us yet, and none of the bunkers had been completed.

All of Southern Vietnam was a war zone. It didn’t matter if you were inside the wire, in a bunker, we were always in the war. No place was safe. We didn’t have to go out on a major field operation to find the war. It found us almost nightly and sometimes in daylight.

Frankie McGraths’ medical unit was inside the wire, protected by bunkers, almost all the time, yet her unit was also under attack, as VC or North Vietnamese mortar rounds dropped in without warning, looking for random kills.

Like me, McGrath has some close calls inside the bunkers and wire. Like me, she lost friends. Like me, she came home to protestors calling her a baby killer. And she shot no one. Instead, she saved lives, even Vietnamese citizens, including children. She was a nurse. Not a US Marine rifleman. Not a grunt like me.

Some protestor in the story spit on her once she returned to the States. I’d heard about that when I came home in December 1966, but being spit on didn’t happen to me.

McGrath suffered from PTSD as I did, and we still do. Yet when she went to the VA for help, she was told no women served in Vietnam and she couldn’t have PTSD. They sent her back home. When she returned to the VA later, after a traumatic episode of PTSD, and tried to join a group of combat vets to share her trauma with, the men told her she couldn’t stay because she couldn’t be a combat vet. No women served in Vietnam. She left again, with no support.

And yet thousands of military women served in Vietnam.

Maybe what happened to McGrath is like what happened to me.

Her being told women didn’t serve in Vietnam reminded me of something someone working in VA-mental health care said to me after 2005. I don’t remember the exact wording but it was something like, Your PTSD can’t be that bad, since you only went on one military operation.

WTF!

Like McGrath, VC mortar shells dropped into my base camp without warning to kill at random. One time, in daylight, a sniper almost took me out. The round grazing my left ear. An inch further to the right, my body might have been shipped home with a Purple Heart my parents could hang on a wall in the same case the folded US flag arrived in.

Then, unlike McGrath, there were the night patrols and ambushes outside the wire that were not part of a major military operation, that were not mentioned on my DD214.

Or that mad dash with sniper rounds snapping past us while we drove at top speed through the jungle, me in an unarmored jeep with no doors on a one lane dirt road to reach a forward artillery base outside the division perimeter that had been hit hard and needed to be resupplied before they got hit again. While I was there, they got hit again, a rain of mortar shells and rockets, when one Marine lost his life, decapitated by a rocket.

I recommend reading The Women for the reality it paints and when you finish the story, read the author’s notes, to learn that about 10,000 women served in Vietnam, many just like McGrath.

Lloyd Lofthouse is the author of military action suspense thrillers: The Patriot Oath, Never for Glory, and Running with the Enemy, a novel placed in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War.

Who started the most recent war in Gaza?

“The mind boggling, Orwellian universe where murder becomes a justified act of resistance, where killers are victims of oppression, and rapists are freedom fighters.”

Stuck Between All Sides: A Young Woman Reflects on the War in Gaza

I have been disappointed and angered at most of what I’ve read in the traditional western media about this latest war in Gaza, that should be called propoganda supporting Hamas.

I’m thinking this way because most of what I read is blaming Israel for the suffering and deaths of Palestinians. Seldom if ever is there any mention of who started this slaughter, Hamas, who is using the deaths of Palestinians for propoganda purposes, Hamas, who dug their tunnels under hospitals and schools, Hamas, and then fought from nearby or from inside those hospitals and schools to draw fire from the IDF, during battles. Hamas.

Recently, as soon as the last cease fire and hostage exchange ended, I read about one Hamas missile battery, those boxy structures on the flatbed of a truck that can be easily moved.

I read that Hamas missile battery fired from inside a Palestinian refugee camp in south Gaza, drawing return fire from IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) who have the technology to determine almost instantly the moment the missiles were fired, where they came from.

Still, the Hamas terrorists that manned that missile battery probably had time to escape the IDF return fire. Those brutal murderers may have also driven off in that truck so they could fill the battery with more missiles and drive to another location near a concentration of Palestinian refugees.

I looked in the western media for reports of that incident, and what I read all used the word “alleged” when mentioning that Hamas missile battery being located inside a South Gaza Palestinian refugee camp, but those news reports did not use the word “alleged” when mentioning the IDF’s return fire. That made it sound like the IDF fired on a defenseless Palestinian refugee camp and not returning fire on a location where Hamas missiles had been fired at Israel first.

It’s easy to slip bias into a news report without lying. In this case the bias is glaringly obvious. Hamas did no wrong. Israel is guilty.

I know who is guilty for every life lost in this latest war against Israel. Hamas.

When the IDF invited reporters into the ruins of schools and hospitals to show them the entrances to tunnels that had been discovered, Tunnels that led deep underground the language in the news reports was biased, casting doubt that Hamas would do something like that. Making it sound that the IDF was lying.

The only recently discovered tunnel that led sixty feet deep to the main tunnel that was big enough to drive a car or truck through, that didn’t have the biased language in those news reports, casting doubt, was the tunnel entrance found outside of the Gaza city near the Gaza border with Israel, a large tunnel leading under the border into Israel. The reporter in that news report was from the AP. Outside the entrance at ground level, no sign of houses or buildings anywhere close to it. Still that tunnel led back toward Gaza city.

War is HELL – People DIE!

I know a combat artist who served two tours in Vietnam. He carried a camera, a sketch pad, and a rifle. I remember him telling us that not too many combat artists in his unit made it back alive from Vietnam. He was there to document the war for the U.S. Army and he spent a lot of time in combat with front line units exposed to enemy fire doing his job because he was taking photographs and sketching U.S. troops in combat, who were being shot at and shooting back, while he was doing his job.

That’s about the same as a combat journalist. They are paid to go where the fighting is taking place.

Since 1990, 2658 journalists have been killed.

“Over 50% of journalists were killed in the ten most dangerous top spots featuring countries which suffered war violence, crime and corruption as well a catastrophic breakdown of law and order. Iraq (339 killed) came top followed by Mexico (175), Philippines (159), Pakistan (138), India (116), Russian Federation (110), Algeria (106), Syria (96)Somalia (93) and Afghanistan (93).”https://www.ifj.org/fileadmin/user_upload/IFJ_white_book__part_1.pdf

“24 hours ago (from the date this post was published) — 63 journalists and media workers were confirmed dead (covering the war in Gaza): 56 Palestinian, 4 Israeli, and 3 Lebanese.”

World War II was the largest and most violent military conflict in human history. Official casualty sources estimate battle deaths at nearly 15 million military personnel and civilian deaths at over 38 million.

The Korean War lasted for three years and claimed the lives of over 800,000 military personnel and around one and a half million civilians.

In 1995 Vietnam released its official estimate of the number of people killed during the Vietnam War: as many as 2,000,000 civilians on both sides and some 1,100,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters. The U.S. military has estimated that between 200,000 and 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers died.

In Afghanistan more than 432,000 civilians have been killed in the fighting since 2001, and even with our troops gone, they are still dying, being murdered by the Taliban because Traitor Trump gave the country back to them when he made a secret agreement to end that war without approval from Congress.

I am a combat vet. I am a former U.S. Marine. I served and fought in Vietnam in 1966. During the time my unit served in Vietnam, 50% of the Marines that served in the 1st Marine Division, 1st tank battalion were casualties.

I could not have kept count of the number of times I was fired at and my unit and division returned fire. War is hell! People get killed and wounded in war. Civilians of all ages, journalists, and troops.

And the evidence is mounting that Hamas, a brutal, ruthless terrorist organization, is deliberately using Palestinian civilians as defenseless human targets, forcing the IDF to kill civilians when having a shootout with terrorists, who do not value life, even their own. It doesn’t matter if those Palestinian civilians are in hospitals or schools. Hamas wants the IDF to kill as many Palestinian civilians as possible because it looks bad for Israel in headlines around the world. When Hamas fires rockets into Israel from Gaza, those rocket launchers are always surrounded by civilians with no place to run, when Israel fires back with rockets and bombs to destroy those Hamas missile launchers and the terrorists that man them.

International rules and laws that say troops shouldn’t kill civilians during a war, never work. NEVER! Bullets and bombs can’t tell the difference between the troops and civilians. If you are in the military in combat and your unit is fired on, you fire back. And while you are shooting to defend yourself and your buddies in uniform, you think, “FUCK THOSE DAMN RULES!”

In Vietnam we had the same rules Israel is expected to fight by, while the world’s media doesn’t condemn Hamas for ignoring those rules and deliberately getting Palestinian civilians killed.