Through Veterans' Eyes

by Larry Minear

  “Dad and Me—It’s Good To Be Home!”

  Antonio Ruiz De La Torres (AFC2001/001/31834), Photographs (PH 58), VHP, AFC, LOC. Photograph by Reina Prado.

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  Marine Lance Cpl. Antonio Ruiz De La Torre served with a Marine aircraft group, first in Kuwait during February 2003 and then in Iraq from March to October 2003. His unit, in charge of setting up forward operating bases and supply lines for Huey and Cobra attack helicopters, was later redeployed back to Iraq. Ruiz would have gone had he been required to, but he received an honorable discharge. He now works for a NASA contractor and is studying for an MBA. “I had always wanted an MBA,” he says, and “the Marine Corps provided the organizational skills, the discipline, and the foundation for achieving it.”

  The photograph was taken upon his return from Iraq to Camp Pendleton, California. In addition to his father and mother, the welcome committee included his brother, two cousins, and two aunts. “It was kind of surreal,” says Ruiz, recalling the homecoming scene. “It didn’t really settle in until I was on the way home with my family.” The transition back to the States and eventually to life as a civilian was “really tough,” even though he did not suffer from PTSD or other health issues. His overseas posting had exposed him to some danger, but he was not involved in active combat.

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  For some soldiers and families, the initial days back home were the most difficult. “When I got home from Iraq,” recalled Sgt. Nathan Fegan, who had worked in an Army transportation battalion, “I was kind of ‘weirded out.’ I didn’t want to talk to anybody.” Over time, he came to realize that “my main goal in life was to get an education” and plunged into his studies, assisted by the GI Bill. He found that what he wanted most was “to be nice to everyone and to live a peaceful and happy life.”5

  “I was home for like half an hour,” says Army Sgt. Todd B. Walton of his post-Iraq reunion with his wife, “and finally she said, ‘Do they speak in full sentences where you come from?’ And I had to stop and think about that and said, ‘I don’t know.’”6 During a cross-country drive with his wife shortly after returning from a year in Iraq, the normally outgoing Gen. Carter Ham, Commanding General, U.S. Army Europe, recalled, “I probably said three words.”7 Sgt. Shane Slager, returning with the Nebraska National Guard, told a local newspaper reporter, “I want to go home and not be seen. I’ve been living with 150-some people for over a year and I’m looking forward to some time alone.”8

  “I had expected the man I met at the door to be somehow different from the one who had walked out of it all those months ago,” mused Dana Canedy as she awaited the return of Army 1st Sgt. Charles M. King from Iraq. While he was gone, she had given birth to the couple’s first child, Jordan. Her husband, who had hoped to be present for his son’s birth, had chosen instead to lead his 100-person contingent, hard-pressed by insurgents. “But I had not expected his suffering to show so soon. What he had seen and done over there I could not imagine. But clearly there was no way to emerge from a world in which you are routinely involved in taking and saving lives and not be transformed.”9

  “I was a little different when I got home,” recalls Army Spec. Christopher Gamblin. “A little more on edge, a little testier, a little quick to get angry, until I settled down and unwound. I’ve seen it in a lot of guys. You just get really tightly wound. Somebody will be talking about something stupid that has no significance really—just ordinary talk for most people. When you first get home, it’s just, ‘Why are you talking about that? Shut up. Leave me alone.’ But it got better, probably. It took a few months to settle down to where I wasn’t just abrasive to everybody I talked to, but it’s just a transition thing. It’s kind of hard to relax at first.”10 Recalls Army Capt. Ryan Aument, “The most difficult thing for me was learning to relax again.”11

  In retrospect, Gamblin believes he hurried the psychological reentry process too much. Starting back at work only a week or two after returning, he found himself “getting really pissed off at people and being a huge asshole to all of my friends.” Was there anything he could have done to ease the adjustment? “There’s not really anything to do. It’s not something where you can go talk to a therapist and get a hug and be all better. It’s the transition of life.”12

  Army Spec. Gonzalo (“JD”) Gonzalez had a similar experience. Despite no real down-time during his first ten weeks as a gunner escorting convoys to Fallujah and other hotspots in Iraq, he hadn’t been aware of problems developing. These surfaced as soon as he returned home. In the headlong rush of waiting family members into the arms of returning vets, his niece put on the brakes. “You’re not JD,” she said, and “started crying, turned around, and walked off.” The reception from his nephews was hardly more reassuring. “What’s wrong with you? You look different,” they said. “It was just the impact of everything that had gone on, everything that we’d seen,” Gonzalez recalls. “I guess it just all hit” at that moment.13 While the older members of his family proved more understanding, the transition remained rocky. Marine Corps Lt. Col. Robert C. D’Amico received a similar reception. One of his youngsters didn’t recognize him at first and then didn’t speak to him for a week.14

  Army Sgt. Gregory Mayfield, who had experienced withering violence in Sadr City and Fallujah, encountered major difficulties upon reentry. He slept poorly, a sign, he believes, that he had reached his limit. “You can only live with that adrenaline high for so long, and then you crash. When you crash, it is a bad crash.” Returning home for his mother’s funeral midway through his tour, he had found himself “just so numbed out from the shock of all the combat we’d seen that I couldn’t even cry. That is an emotional hit right there.” At the end of his tour, he realized that the return to normalcy would be a long time coming and warned his wife that he would be hard to live with. “You know, I will never be the same. It feels like I left a little bit of my soul over there.”15

  “The toughest part of fighting a war is coming home,” said Army Capt. Andrew Michael Wells. “People want to know everything you experienced, but they don’t really want to understand—and can’t possibly understand. So it’s kind of an interesting dichotomy to put yourself into that kind of environment.” As “patriotic fervor” wanes and people become less interested in the troops that have returned, Wells has found himself more appreciative of simple thank-you’s than of the occasional probing question.16

  Ceremonies such as the Nebraska one have been replicated across the country. A chaplain in Vermont described his unit as “ecstatically happy to be back.” The welcome received, he pointed out, was significantly different from that accorded U.S. soldiers returning from Vietnam. “Some Vietnam vets made a personal commitment to ensure that our reception was what theirs should have been,” noted Captain Aument. “Folks will disagree with the public policy of the war but have always treated me with respect as a soldier.”17

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  I told my wife a couple of times since I’ve been back that I will never be the same man you knew before I went over there. And she says, “Why not?” “I can’t explain it to you, but I just won’t be. I have seen things that I will never be able to share with her. If I do share them with her, she will not be able to understand them. Because you can’t explain what fresh blood smells like. You can’t explain to someone that constant 24/7 fear. I told a buddy of mine from high school who asked if I was scared, “Yeah, I was scared twenty-four hours a day.” He said, “You weren’t.” “Yeah, I was.” You develop an underlying fear that goes with that underlying alert level and that is the survival mechanism. War is an abnormal environment and you just can’t switch it off. When you get back you expect everything to be normal. I am still not normal.

  —Gregory Mayfield*

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  The nation has indeed learned a lesson from Vietnam, observed Dr. Matthew J. Friedman, executive director of the DVA’s National Center for PTSD: to separate the warriors from the war. Unlike Vietnam, “Americans no longer confuse the
war and the warrior; those returning from Afghanistan and Iraq enjoy national support, despite sharp political disagreement about the war itself.”18 Numerous veterans mention being thanked in airports by total strangers for their service. Yet there were uneasy undercurrents too. “I returned home to the dichotomy of being universally welcomed with open, respectful, grateful arms,” wrote Air Force SSgt. Parker Gyokeres, “by a country that is increasingly against why I was ever in Iraq.”19

  The strains that long absences or deferred returns place on marriages became quickly apparent. Although the troops had been alerted to anticipate reentry problems, many were still unprepared. One Vermont Guardsman described his anguish at the discovery that his wife had taken up with his best friend. Many soldiers experienced difficulties not only reconnecting with spouses, but also in relating to their own children. Karen Cox, wife of New Hampshire Guardsman Lt. Ken Cox, found her husband “changed. His temper is shorter and he sometimes yells at his sons when he doesn’t mean to.”20

  Problems of communication between spouses were commonplace, but often not for lack of effort by both parties. “After War, Love Can Be a Battlefield,” read one newspaper headline in April 2008. “Wives want to talk about what happened in Iraq. Their husbands don’t.”21 Randi Moriarty, the wife of the New Hampshire Guardsman, took a dim view of how much could be shared. “He so badly wants me to understand what he went through,” she acknowledged. “I will never understand, just as he will never understand what I went through.”22 Explained Samuel Main, “There’s stuff I still don’t want to talk about. I’m not going to talk about it. I’m going to keep it to myself, probably forever, if I can. Other stuff is kind of neat for people to know.”23

  “I don’t really tell a whole lot of people about my experience because they don’t understand,” explains a female National Guard soldier. “Until you actually smell and feel the environment, you don’t understand what it is like.”24 On returning from her year in Iraq, Colorado’s Dougherty found that “you stop talking to people”—even to friends who might be expected to want to know what the war was like. “It was hard to relate to people that I’d been through such a huge experience, and it had a huge effect on thousands of lives instantly and so many more through the association. I didn’t understand why everyone didn’t care about this war.”25

  At a time when communication was as difficult as it was necessary, some veterans found it easier to speak with fellow veterans than with next of kin. Sgt. E-5 Dax Carpenter, a Marine who returned from duty in Afghanistan and Iraq with serious physical and psychological wounds, found that “the biggest gratification is being able to talk to other people who have lived the same style, not necessarily the same combat situation. That’s something you’re not going to get with a spouse. That’s something you’re not gonna get with some shrink or doctor. It’s only something that can be produced healing-wise through talking with other veterans.”26 Carpenter, like many other veterans, believes that people who haven’t lived through such an intense experience will never have a sense of what it was like.

  Yet not everyone struggled upon returning. “After exchanging the required hugs and kisses” with his wife, recalls Jeffrey D. Barnett, who returned from Fallujah to a storybook welcome at Camp Pendleton, California, “I thought, ‘What do I do now?’ I thought for a moment and offered the suggestion, ‘Let’s go home.’ And that’s what we did. At T plus four [hours] from setting foot in the continental United States, it was as if I was just coming home from another day of work.”27 Judging from their comments, few veterans managed this kind of nonchalance.

  A “NEW NORMAL”

  In returning to the States—whether to home towns in the case of National Guard personnel and reservists or to military bases in the case of active-duty soldiers—veterans sought to reestablish familiar ways of functioning. In the wake of their overseas experience, what they put in place over time was, in effect, a set of post-deployment routines, a “new normal.” Making the transition from abroad to home, they were confronted with the need to unlearn skills that had been essential in Afghanistan and Iraq and to relearn skills necessary to function back in the States. The skill sets, it turned out, were quite different, sometimes even diametrically opposed.

  Army Sgt. Abbie Pickett, whose first encounter with the carnage of battle had been so traumatic, had difficulty reorienting herself to day-today life in Wisconsin. “Things that make me abnormal here,” she found, “make me a better soldier there. Over there, the whole heightened sense of alert: hearing a really big bang and throwing somebody on the ground is O.K. Hearing a big bang and throwing your roommate on the ground—it’s not so socially accepted here.”28 Replacing the heightened sense of suspicion and distrust, the greater watchfulness and defensiveness that had been so essential in-theater with the qualities needed for the home scene did not come easily for many.

  “Combat has taught them to make life-or-death decisions within seconds,” noted one observer, “and some have trouble changing that behavior when they come home. Their tempers are shorter; they drive faster and make decisions without consulting spouses. Sometimes they spend money impulsively.”29 When soldiers are in the line of battle, New Hampshire’s Sgt. Shelton said, “you can’t let your emotions make decisions for you. You have to deal with your emotions later.”30 When soldiers returned to their states and communities, “later” had become “now.”

  Indeed, many veterans describe returning with a residue of unprocessed experiences and emotions. Army Spec. Tina Garnanez, the medical technician with outspokenly critical views about the military’s mission in Iraq, found her life upon returning to the States totally consumed with the transition. “There’s so much inside, so much pain and anger and suffering,” she told an interviewer. “It never goes away. Most of my day is spent just dealing with myself.”31

  Veterans who had managed their fears and insecurities in Afghanistan and Iraq by ignoring or denying them had a backlog of sorting out to do. Responding to a standard interview question about coping with stress, Army Sgt. E-5 Nicole Ferretti said, “I just blocked it off, tried to forget it. We had long days and we didn’t really get to stop and discuss our emotional issues, so I went into a state of denial.”32 Demond Mullins reflected, “I wouldn’t think about what I was doing while I was doing it or else I wouldn’t be able to do it.”33 Army Lt. Col. Rick Mayes’s approach in Iraq had been “to minimize down-time.” Sometimes he even refused to take “down-time” because “you want to keep your mind occupied.”34 The strategy for dealing with stress employed by Sgt. Cindy Clemence of the Vermont National Guard was straightforward. “Suck it up and move on,” she said. “If you stew too much, it might eat you up.”35

  Dax Carpenter, a Marine diagnosed with PTSD and TBI from tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, held himself to “Marine standards” of toughness. “How do you deal with difficult emotions such as anger and sadness?” an interviewer asked. “I ‘locked and loaded.’” he replied. “You shouldn’t need to talk to somebody while you’re in a combat situation. You suck it up, you deal with it. However, coming out of such a situation, coming out of the military, you should have that chance. You don’t go up to a football player five minutes before the game and say, ‘Where do you hurt?’ Their job is to feel invincible; so is ours, but in a whole ’nother degree.”36

  Some sought to relieve the day-to-day tensions of deployment by calling or writing family and friends. “Being able to communicate with people back home,” says Marine Sgt. E-5 Travis Fisher, was “a big stress reliever.”37 Christopher Gamblin “read a lot of books while I was over there.” Sometimes, he recalled, “we’d sit around and play poker. Video games, watch movies. I had my laptop and a pretty extensive DVD collection from shopping at the PX. Pretty much anything to waste time. Anything that was available to just go numb for a while and let time slip by.”38 Sergeant May-field puzzled over the popularity of a video shooting game called Halo. “You were in a live firefight today and now you’re down here playing Halo,”
he said to one of his cohorts. “But that’s how they relaxed. We each had our different ways.”39

  For many soldiers, much that had been swept under the rug would now need revisiting. “You can’t store anything inside you,” said Specialist Gonzalez, he of the painful airport encounter with his niece, “because sooner or later the jar is going to burst. And if it bursts, there’s pretty much one emotion that comes out, and that’s anger.”40 Army Capt. Andrew M. Wells grew concerned about one of the gunners in his unit who was troubled by nightmares and arranged stress counseling for him. In one of the dreams that was holding him hostage, the gunner would be sleeping in bed at home with his wife. However, when he turned his mate over, it turned out to be a dead Iraqi.41

  Teresa Little, the young Army specialist who described her effort to “hold inside” the emotions generated by having seen a dead body hanging out of an incinerated vehicle in Iraq, described how important it was for her—but also how difficult—to get everything out of her system. “If they don’t talk about it,” she said, “they’re just bottling everything up, like I did. I think it’s good to get it all out,” even the “really harsh things I wouldn’t talk about, because you feel relieved.” The psychologist she consulted upon returning provided some help, although she remained haunted by nightmares.42

  For some, the “new normal” involves ready access to good food and drink and clean surroundings. Veterans speak of their great pleasure in pulling a beer out of the fridge, wandering through well-stocked supermarkets, patronizing fast food restaurants, and simply bathing and shaving whenever they feel the urge. Dax Carpenter, who had had only eight showers during his eight months in Iraq, recalls, “When I came home from Iraq, I flushed the toilet twenty times just to watch the little water swirl. I was so proud. It beat sand coming up my ass while trying to use the restroom in the middle of the desert during a sandstorm.”43