Yes he was a truck driver, but he was still over there and remember Truck Drivers were driving convoys which was incredibly stressfull.
As for the PTSD, I don't think its overwork thats causing the issues I believe
1) When you have a 14 year war your deployed longer and more often especially if you choose to stay in the military. I know a few Canadian guys who did more then three trips to Afghanistan and that's hard on a person and hard on the family
2) These are different types of wars that we're fighting (That's changing again), but your not fighting a defined enemy, your fighting an undefined enemy that you might not think is a threat and two minutes later they're trying to blow your heads off. It was probably easier for me when I was training and other stuff because you knew pretty much who the enemy was.
3) While Canada did a great job and won over a lot of people in Afghanistan, you weren't there as liberators you were there as occupiers and you probably dealt with hatred and mistrust and all of that stuff, I imagine it was 100x worse for the average American Soldier in Iraq.
4) This one too me is the Vietnam factor. Deployed soldiers are incredibly young now, and maybe not mentally mature enough to deal with conflict. Its no secret that PTSD or Battle fatigue or shell shock cases dramatically increased in Vietnam. Now part of that came from it becoming an actual condition that was tracked and studied. But in WW2 and Korea you would have soldiers in their 20's and 30s making up the back bone of your non commissioned core. Now we're basically sending 18 year old kids right out of boot onto a plane or a ship going into a asymmetrical battlefield, and I'm convinced that even though you train them hard, that lack of mental maturity is a huge factor.
I don't think the work load is any harder, in fact I would argue that their work load is probably easier then it was in Vietnam or Korea or WW2 or even the first Desert Storm. Its certainly lighter weight and far more mobile and automated, on top of that there is way more sleep enforcement and on site monitoring of soldiers then there was back then.
Just my 2 cents though
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