“ 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. 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 whole paragraph can be described as a Categorical Claim. The author uses different woman’s experiences with dealing with their loved ones’ PTSD episodes and the failure to receive help from the VA to show that the institution has many flaws and can’t help everyone.

“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.”

This sentence shows a causal claim, it explains that the phone never stops ringing inferring that Brannan is very busy with her work with people who suffer from PTSD. It also can show that Brannon is determined to help in any way she can when it says she writes an email when the phone isn’t ringing.

“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. ”

This quote can show an Attributive Claim, the authors didn’t verify or say if Brannon was truly helping through her work with the VA however, from the quote received from Caleb it can be inferred that even if it’s just a little bit she is helping people suffering from PTSD.   

““Breathe,” Brannan says to nearly every woman who calls, though when I ask her if she follows her own advice, she says no. “If I stopped, and started breathing,” she says, “I would be too sad.””

The quote above shows a Casual Claim. Although Brannon tries to help every woman who calls, she can’t, and it is stated that their stories do make her sad and if she stopped to think about all of them it would hurt a lot.

“If she’s not saving lives on the phone or blogging, she’s offering support via Facebook, where thousands of Families of a Vet user and nearly 500 FOV volunteers congregate and commiserate.” 

This quote could be a numerical or quantitative claim. It gives us numeral values on how many people are on her Facebook page who need help or who are offering advice.

“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 quote shows a Factual and categorical claim. When the author describes the reasons Kateri started crying at olive garden shows the factual claim that secondhand PTSD is a very real thing and does make people suffer. The categorical claim comes from the explanation of what living with someone’s PTSD is like because it is categorizing the effects of her husband’s PTSD.   

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

This quote is a Casual and comparative claim. It shows the cause and effects of being a young child living with a family member who suffers from PTSD. It isn’t the job of an 8-year-old to know how to get out of any new place they visit also the author uses the last part of the sentence to compare the 8-year-old’s mind to that of his fathers.