Safe at Home, Ill at Ease

In the Seattle armory on a recent Saturday morning, several dozen spouses and parents of National Guard soldiers stationed in Iraq listen to a briefing by Guard and Veterans Affairs staff on what to expect when their loved ones return and how to deal with it. There's a recently returned soldier in the room, too, and he's exuding a serious intensity and nodding his head as such issues as scream-inducing nightmares and emotional numbness arise. He's in the room as a media handler, not a participant, but the discussion strikes such a painful chord that he raises his hand.

"It's kind of difficult for me sitting here listening to this," says 48-year-old Sgt. 1st Class Jack Martin, adding that he might have to leave. Martin served nine months in Iraq with the Guard's 81st Brigade Combat Team and returned early, shortly before Thanksgiving, because of back problems aggravated by war. "Every day for three months, we got mortared and rocketed," he relates, referring to attacks on his base near Balad, about 50 miles north of Baghdad. The experience has left him so jittery, he says, that when he heard someone humming upstairs in the armory, he thought an alarm was going off and nearly jumped out of his seat. Sleeplessness is a chronic problem. "Last night, I went to sleep at 5 o'clock," he says. "My alarm went off at 5:30."

Soldiers like Martin are beginning to come back from the war. Several Washington state units have completed their tours, including a 4,000-strong Army Stryker Brigade and two Guard units of a little over 100 soldiers each. The largest group of Guard returnees, the 3,200 Washington soldiers of the 81st Brigade, is arriving home now, in phases. Unlike earlier waves of returnees, the 81st Brigade—part of the "weekend warrior" force that the war has employed in unprecedented numbers—has witnessed some of the deadliest fighting in Iraq and has lost nine members.

Those already home are trying to process what they've experienced and re-enter society. Preliminary information suggests that these soldiers, encountering a kind of guerrilla, on-the-ground combat that American troops haven't seen since Vietnam, are having significant mental-health issues. Last July, a New England Journal of Medicine study sent a lightning bolt through the medical establishment in reporting that up to 17 percent of soldiers surveyed met the criteria for major depression, anxiety, or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In part because the soldiers surveyed were in Iraq before the insurgency grew more intense, that is widely considered to be too low a figure to describe the troops serving there now.

As federal, local, and private agencies gear up to receive these soldiers, everybody is trying to avoid the mistakes of Vietnam, when traumatized soldiers returned to a hostile or disinterested homeland and little government support. "We, as a country, screwed it up about as bad as it could be screwed up," says John Lee, deputy director of the state Department of Veterans Affairs. Today, in many ways, Washington is leading the way in services for Iraq veterans. At the same time, the scarcity of new funding for such services calls into question the government's ability to handle the influx of soldiers yet to arrive. "I don't think we're ready to deal with who's coming home," says U.S. Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Seattle, a former Navy psychiatrist.

Some soldiers now back home seem to be adjusting well. "I went out and played in the desert," is how 22-year-old Ben Nyquist talks about the 14 months he spent on active duty with a Seattle-based Reserve unit known as the 70th Regional Readiness Command. Uninvolved in direct combat, he came home in May and immediately resumed his part-time job as a barista in a Factoria Starbucks and his place at Bellevue Community College, studying computer engineering. "I picked up my life where it left off," he says.

Probably more typical is Michael Kunzelman, who served in Iraq for 15 months with the Guard's 1161st Transportation Company. Hauling supplies around Iraq, Kunzelman once had his truck blown three feet off the ground by a roadside bomb. His truck landed in one piece, and he just kept driving. For the most part, the 39-year-old Burien resident is functioning normally, having taken a new job upon his return for a company that rebuilds railroad tracks. But he has his moments, like on a business trip when he awoke in a motel at 3 in the morning, on the floor, with his blankets spread from one side of the room to the other. The weirdest thing, as he told his dad, was that he remembered nothing of the tortured night. "I know," said his dad, a Vietnam vet.

Many of these soldiers, coming from the Guard and Reserves, are older than those who fought in previous wars, so they are returning to lives in progress, lives that often include families. The stress placed on those families has been one hallmark of the war so far. "Extreme increase in divorces," reads a slide presented at the recent armory event.

"They're not the same people that left," says Sheila Kelly, who is married to a soldier in the 1161st. "They have this life we'll never know—they'll never talk about it." She says her husband is "just quiet and pulled back, like he's scared to open up. Even if things happen at work now, he doesn't talk about it much." Their three kids, ages 10, 12, and 18, notice it, too. "They kept asking what was wrong with Dad. Is he OK? All I can say is, 'Give Dad time.'"