NY Times - The Women's War

March 18, 2007
The Women's War
By SARA CORBETT
On the morning of Monday, Jan. 9, 2006, a 21-year-old Army
specialist named Suzanne Swift went AWOL. Her unit, the 54th
Military Police Company, out of Fort Lewis, Wash., was two days away
from leaving for Iraq. Swift and her platoon had been home less than
a year, having completed one 12-month tour of duty in February 2005,
and now the rumor was that they were headed to Baghdad to run a
detention center. The footlockers were packed. The company's 130
soldiers had been granted a weekend leave in order to go where they
needed to go, to say whatever goodbyes needed saying. When they
reassembled at 7 a.m. that Monday, uniformed and standing in
immaculate rows, Specialist Swift, who during the first deployment
drove a Humvee on combat patrols near Karbala, was not among them.

Swift would later say that she had every intention of going back to
Iraq. But in the weeks leading up to the departure date, she started
to feel increasingly anxious. She was irritable, had trouble
sleeping at night, picked fights with friends, drank heavily. ''I
was having a lot of little freakouts,'' she told me when I went to
visit her in Washington State last summer. ''But I was also ready to
go. I was like, 'O.K., I can do this.'''

The weekend before the deployment was to start, however, Swift drove
south to her hometown, Eugene, Ore., to visit with her mother and
three younger siblings. The decision to flee, she says, happened in
a split second on Sunday night. ''All my stuff was in the car,'' she
recalls. ''My keys were in my hand, and then I looked at my mom and
said: 'I can't do this. I can't go back there.' It wasn't some
rational decision. It was a huge, crazy, heart-pounding thing.''

For two days after she failed to report, Swift watched her cellphone
light up with calls from her commanders. They left concerned
messages and a few angry ones too. She listened to the messages but
did not return the calls. Then rather abruptly, the phone stopped
ringing. The 54th MP Company had left for Iraq. Swift says she
understood then the enormity of what she'd just done.

For the remainder of that winter, Swift hid out in the Oregon
seaside town of Brookings, staying in a friend's home, uncertain
whether the Army was looking for her. ''I got all my money out of
the bank,'' she told me. ''I never used my credit card, in case they
were trying to trace me. It was always hanging over my head.'' At
her mother's urging, she drove back to Eugene every week to see a
therapist. In April of last year, she finally moved back into her
family's home. Then, on the night of June 11, a pair of local police
officers knocked on the door and found Swift inside, painting her
toenails with her 19-year-old sister. She was handcuffed, driven
away and held in the county jail for two nights before being taken
back to Fort Lewis, where military officials threatened to charge
her with being absent without leave. As Army officials pondered her
fate, Swift was assigned a room in the barracks and an undemanding
desk job at Fort Lewis.

Despite the fact that military procedure for dealing with AWOL
soldiers is well established - most are promptly court-martialed
and, if convicted, reduced in rank and jailed in a military prison -
Suzanne Swift's situation raised a seemingly unusual set of issues.
She told Army investigators that the reason she did not report for
deployment was that she had been sexually harassed repeatedly by
three of her supervisors throughout her military service: beginning
in Kuwait; through much of her time in Iraq; and following her
return to Fort Lewis. She claimed too to be suffering from post-
traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, a highly debilitating condition
brought on by an abnormal amount of stress. According to the most
recent edition of The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders, used by mental-health professionals to establish
diagnostic criteria, PTSD symptoms can include, among other things,
depression, insomnia or ''feeling constantly threatened.'' It is
common for those afflicted to ''re-experience'' traumatic moments
through intrusive, graphic memories and nightmares.

Swift's stress came not just from the war and not just from the
supposed harassment, she told the investigators, but from some
combination of the two. In a written statement to investigators,
Swift asserted that her station, Camp Lima, outside Karbala, was hit
by mortar attacks almost nightly for the first two months of her
deployment. She reported working 16-hour shifts, experiencing the
death of a fellow company member in an incident of friendly fire and
having a close friend injured in a car bombing. What Swift said
distressed her most, however, was a situation that involved her
squad leader, the sergeant to whom she directly reported in Iraq.
She claimed that he propositioned her for sex the first day the two
of them arrived in Iraq and that she felt coerced into having a
sexual relationship with him that lasted four months - the
relationship consisting, she said, of his knocking on her door late
at night and demanding intercourse. When she finally ended this
arrangement, Swift told me, the sergeant retaliated by ordering her
to do solitary forced marches from one side of the camp to another
at night in full battle gear and by humiliating her in front of her
fellow soldiers. (The sergeant could not be reached, but according
to an internal Army report, he denied any sexual contact with
Swift.)

As it often is with matters involving sex and power, the lines are a
little blurry. Swift does not say she was raped, exactly, but rather
manipulated into having sex - repeatedly - with a man who was above
her in rank and therefore responsible for her health and safety.
(Some victims' advocates use the term ''command rape'' to describe
such situations.) Swift says that the other two sergeants - one in
Kuwait and one back home in Fort Lewis, both a couple of ranks above
her - made comments like ''You want to [expletive] me, don't you?''
or when Swift asked where she was to report for duty,
responded, ''On my bed, naked.''

In the wake of several sex scandals in the 1990s, the U.S. military
has tried to become more sensitive to the presence of women,
especially now that they fill 15 percent of the ranks worldwide.
There are regular mandated workshops on preventing sexual harassment
and assault. Each battalion has a designated Equal Opportunity
representative trained to field and respond to complaints. Swift
said she initially reported what she characterized as an unwanted
relationship with her squad leader in Iraq to her Equal Opportunity
representative there, who listened - she claims - but did nothing
about it. (According to the internal report, the E.O. representative
told investigators that he asked Swift if she had a complaint to
make but that she declined at the time.)

Swift made it clear that since enlisting in the Army when she was
19, she'd grown accustomed to hearing sexually loaded remarks from
fellow enlisted soldiers. It happened ''all the time,'' she said.
But coming from her superiors, especially far away from the support
systems of home and against a backdrop of mortar attacks and the
general uncertainties of war, the overtones felt more
threatening. ''You can tell another E-4 to go to hell,'' she said,
referring to the rank of specialist. ''But you can't say that to an
E-5,'' she said, referring to a sergeant. ''If your sergeant tells
you to walk over a minefield, you're supposed to do it.''

I went to see Swift last July as I was immersed in a series of
interviews with women who'd gone to Iraq and come home with PTSD. I
was trying to understand how being a woman fit into both the war and
the psychological consequences of war. The story I heard over and
over, the dominant narrative really, followed similar lines to
Swift's: allegations of sexual trauma, often denied or dismissed by
superiors; ensuing demotions or court-martials; and lingering
questions about what actually occurred.

Swift and I - along with her mother, Sara Rich - met at a run-down
sushi place in Tacoma, Wash., not far from Fort Lewis. Swift has
blond hair, milky skin and clear green eyes, which lend her the
vague aspect of a Victorian doll - albeit a very tough one. She
curses freely, smokes Newports and, when she's not in uniform,
favors low-cut shirts that show off an elaborate flower tattoo on
her chest. ''Suzanne is not some passive little lily,'' explained
her mother. ''She's a soldier.''

By midsummer of last year, the two women had settled into a ritual:
once a week Rich would pick up her daughter at the base and take her
out for a meal, and then the two would check into a nearby Holiday
Inn, talking and watching television and finally going to sleep. At
6:30 the following morning, Swift would put on her uniform and Rich
would drive her back to Fort

Lewis in time to report for work. Rich, who is 41, is a social
worker who specializes in family therapy and operates with a certain
type of mama-bear verve. She was in frequent touch last summer with
her daughter's Chicago-based lawyers, who were then negotiating with
the Army to get Swift medically discharged for her PTSD so that she
could avoid being court-martialed and convicted for going AWOL. In
the six weeks since Swift's arrest, Rich marshaled both legal funds
and public sympathy for her daughter's defense, largely by tapping
into the outrage fulminating inside the antiwar movement. One of
Rich's friends from Eugene built a Web site devoted to Suzanne,
taking both donations and online signatures for a petition to have
her released from the Army without punishment. Someone else started
selling T-shirts, tote bags and teddy bears that read ''Free
Suzanne'' and ''Suzanne's My Hero'' to benefit the cause.

At that point, the hullabaloo was doing little good. A week before I
arrived in Washington, the Army's investigation determined that
Swift's charges against two of her higher-ups, including the one
Swift said demanded sex from her, could not be substantiated because
of a lack of evidence. (Both men denied Swift's allegations. By the
time the investigation began, in June 2006, her squad leader had
already finished his military service, which put him beyond the
reach of punishment by the military anyway.) There was a third
sergeant against whom Swift filed a formal harassment complaint in
the spring of 2005, nearly a year before she went AWOL. In it she
maintained that immediately following her unit's return from Iraq,
he began making frequent suggestive remarks to her and at one point,
during the course of a normal workday, ''grinded'' his body against
hers in an inappropriate way. That man received a stridently worded
letter of reprimand on May 25, 2005, from a lieutenant colonel and
was transferred away from Fort Lewis.

What still remained to be determined was whether Swift would be held
accountable for going AWOL or whether the Army would accept the idea
that her failure to report was, as she saw it, an instinctive act of
psychological self-preservation. Whatever the case, Swift was
quickly becoming a symbol - though of what it was hard to say. Among
the antiwar crowd, thanks in part to the fiery speeches Swift's
mother was delivering at local rallies and antiwar gatherings, she
was being painted as a martyr, a rebel and a victim all at once.
Meanwhile, others deemed her a traitor, a fraud or simply a whiny
female soldier who'd been too lazy or too selfish to return to war.

Swift herself seemed stunned by the attention. ''Look at me, a
poster child,'' she told me wryly, making it clear that she was not
enjoying it. She did not make the kind of grandiose anti-military
statements her mother did but rather seemed to be trying to shrug
off what happened to her. She told me she was having nightmares and
was sometimes waylaid by fits of hysterical crying. But she
described these flatly, seeming almost unwilling or unable to
express anger or hurt. Overall, she seemed strikingly detached.

I had read enough about PTSD to know that ''emotional numbing'' is
one of the disorder's primary symptoms, but it made understanding
Swift and what she'd been through a more difficult
task. ''Avoidance'' is another commonly recognized symptom in people
with PTSD, especially avoidance of those things that bring reminders
of the original trauma. If the Iraq war and the men she encountered
there and afterward traumatized Swift, then perhaps going AWOL could
be seen as a sort of meta-avoidance of all that plagued her.

That night after dinner, Swift lay on her hotel bed with her shoes
kicked off, staring blankly at the ceiling. She was thoughtful and
willing to answer questions. A few times, describing her deployment,
she hovered close to tears but then seemed promptly to swallow them.
She told me that she came home from Iraq feeling demoralized and
depressed. She resumed her stateside duties with the Army for the 11
months between deployments and in general ''just tried to deal.''

She was not, however, formally given a diagnosis of PTSD until after
she went AWOL - first by a civilian psychiatrist within days of her
failure to report for deployment and later, Swift says, through the
Army's mental-health division at Fort Lewis. (The Army could not
confirm this, citing privacy issues.) The timing raised a serious
question: Was the PTSD a legitimate disability or a hastily crafted
excuse for skipping out on the war? Nobody, perhaps not even Swift,
could say for sure.

II. The 'Double Whammy'

No matter how you look at it, Iraq is a chaotic war in which an
unprecedented number of women have been exposed to high levels of
stress. So far, more than 160,000 female soldiers have been deployed
to Iraq and Afghanistan, as compared with the 7,500 who served in
Vietnam and the 41,000 who were dispatched to the gulf war in the
early '90s. Today one of every 10 U.S. soldiers in Iraq is female.

Despite the fact that women are generally limited to combat-support
roles in the war, they are arguably witnessing a historic amount of
violence. With its baffling sand swirl of roadside bombs and blind
ambushes, its civilians who look like insurgents and insurgents who
look like civilians, the Iraq war has virtually eliminated the
distinction between combat units and support units in the
military. ''Frankly one of the most dangerous things you can do in
Iraq is drive a truck, and that's considered a combat-support
role,'' says Matthew Friedman, executive director of the National
Center for PTSD, a research-and-education program financed by the
Department of Veterans Affairs. ''You've got women that are in
harm's way right up there with the men.''

There have been few large-scale studies done on the particular
psychiatric effects of combat on female soldiers in the United
States, mostly because the sample size has heretofore been small.
More than one-quarter of female veterans of Vietnam developed PTSD
at some point in their lives, according to the National Vietnam
Veterans Readjustment Survey conducted in the mid-'80s, which
included 432 women, most of whom were nurses. (The PTSD rate for
women was 4 percent below that of the men.) Two years after
deployment to the gulf war, where combat exposure was relatively
low, Army data showed that 16 percent of a sample of female soldiers
studied met diagnostic criteria for PTSD, as opposed to 8 percent of
their male counterparts. The data reflect a larger finding,
supported by other research, that women are more likely to be given
diagnoses of PTSD, in some cases at twice the rate of men.

Experts are hard pressed to account for the disparity. Is it that
women have stronger reactions to trauma? Do they do a better job of
describing their symptoms and are therefore given diagnoses more
often? Or do men and women tend to experience different types of
trauma? Friedman points out that some traumatic experiences have
been shown to be more psychologically ''toxic'' than others. Rape,
in particular, is thought to be the most likely to lead to PTSD in
women (and in men, in the rarer times it occurs). Participation in
combat, though, he says, is not far behind.

Much of what we know about trauma comes primarily from research on
two distinct populations - civilian women who have been raped and
male combat veterans. But taking into account the large number of
women serving in dangerous conditions in Iraq and reports suggesting
that women in the military bear a higher risk than civilian women of
having been sexually assaulted either before or during their
service, it's conceivable that this war may well generate an
unfortunate new group to study - women who have experienced sexual
assault and combat, many of them before they turn 25.

A 2003 report financed by the Department of Defense revealed that
nearly one-third of a nationwide sample of female veterans seeking
health care through the V.A. said they experienced rape or attempted
rape during their service. Of that group, 37 percent said they were
raped multiple times, and 14 percent reported they were gang-raped.
Perhaps even more tellingly, a small study financed by the V.A.
following the gulf war suggests that rates of both sexual harassment
and assault rise during wartime. The researchers who carried out
this study also looked at the prevalence of PTSD symptoms -
including flashbacks, nightmares, emotional numbing and round-the-
clock anxiety - and found that women who endured sexual assault were
more likely to develop PTSD than those who were exposed to combat.

Patricia Resick, director of the Women's Health Sciences Division of
the National Center for PTSD at the Boston V.A. facility, says she
worries that the conflict in Iraq is leaving large numbers of women
potentially vulnerable to this ''double whammy'' of military sexual
trauma and combat exposure. ''Many of these women,'' she
says, ''will have both.'' She notes that though both men and women
who join the military have been shown to have higher rates of sexual
and physical abuse in their backgrounds than the general population,
women entering the military tend to have more traumas accumulated
than men. One way to conceptualize this is to imagine that each one
of us has a psychic reservoir for holding life's traumas, but by
some indeterminate combination of genetics and socioeconomic
factors, some of us appear to have bigger reservoirs than others,
making us more resilient. Women entering the military with abuse in
their backgrounds, Resick says, ''may be more likely to have that
reservoir half full.''

Over the last few years, I've spoken at length with more than a
dozen trauma specialists, questioning them about the effect this war
will have on the psyches of the women who have fought in it. The
prevailing answer is ''We just don't know yet.'' The early reports
for both sexes, though, are troubling. The V.A. notes that as of
last November, more than one-third of the veterans of Iraq and
Afghanistan treated at its facilities were given diagnoses of a
mental-health disorder, with PTSD being the most common. So far, the
V.A. has diagnosed possible PTSD in some 34,000 Iraq and Afghanistan
veterans; nearly 3,800 of them are women. Given that PTSD sometimes
takes years to surface in a veteran, these numbers are almost
assuredly going to grow. With regard to women, nearly every expert I
interviewed mentioned the reportedly high rates of sexual harassment
and assault in the military as a particular concern.

The Department of Defense in recent years has made policy changes
designed to address these issues. In 2005 it established a formal
Sexual Assault Prevention and Response program, and trains ''Victim
Advocates'' on major military installations. The rules have also
been rewritten so that victims are now able to report sexual
assaults confidentially in ''restricted reports'' that give them
access to medical treatment and counseling without setting off an
official investigation. The results could be viewed as both
encouraging and disturbing: comparing figures from 2005, when the
restricted reporting began, to those of 2004, the number of reported
assaults across the military jumped 40 percent, to 2,374. While
victims may be feeling more empowered to report sexual assault, it
appears that the number of assaults are not diminishing.

If Suzanne Swift's why-bother approach to telling her superiors
about the harassment in Iraq initially struck me as curious, it
began to make more sense as I spoke with a number of other female
Iraq veterans. There was a pervasive sense among them that reporting
a sexual crime was seldom worthwhile. Department of Defense
statistics seem to bear this out: of the 3,038 investigations of
military sexual assault charges completed in 2004 and 2005, only
329 - about one-tenth - of them resulted in a court-martial of the
perpetrator. More than half were dismissed for lack of evidence or
because an offender could not be identified, and another 617 were
resolved through milder administrative punishments, like demotions,
transfers and letters of admonishment.

Unaware of the actual numbers, many of the women I talked to seemed,
in any event, to have soaked up a larger message about the male-
dominated military culture. ''Saying something was looked down
upon,'' says Amorita Randall, who served in Iraq in 2004 with the
Navy, explaining why she did not report what she says was a rape by
a petty officer at a naval base on Guam shortly before she was
deployed to Iraq. ''I don't know how to explain it. You just don't
expect anything to be done about it anyway, so why even try?''

III. The Pressure of Being a Woman

Many of the women I spoke with said they felt the burden of having
to represent their sex - to defy stereotypes about women somehow
being too weak for military duty in a war zone by displaying more
resiliency and showing less emotion than they otherwise might. There
appears to have been little, too, in the way of female bonding in
the war zone: most reported that they avoided friendships with other
women during the deployment, in part because of the fact that there
were fewer women to choose from and in part because of the ridicule
that came with having a close friend. ''You're one of three things
in the military - a bitch, a whore or a dyke,'' says Abbie Pickett,
who is 24 and a combat-support specialist with the Wisconsin Army
National Guard. ''As a female, you get classified pretty quickly.''

Many women mentioned being the subject of crass jokes told by male
soldiers. Some said that they used sarcasm to deflect the attention
but that privately the ridicule wore them down. Others described
warding off sexual advances again and again. ''They basically assume
that because you're a girl in the Army, you're obligated to have sex
with them,'' Suzanne Swift told me at one point.

There were women, it should be noted, who spoke of feeling at ease
among the men in their platoons, who said their male peers treated
them respectfully. Anecdotally, this seemed most common among
reserve and medical units, where the sex ratios tended to be more
even. Several women credited their commanders for establishing and
enforcing a more egalitarian climate, where sexual remarks were not
tolerated.

This was not the case for Pickett, who arrived in Iraq early in
2003, having been sexually assaulted, she said, during a
humanitarian deployment to Nicaragua less than two years earlier,
when she was just 19. When I spoke to her by phone in December, she
recalled being too afraid to report the incident, particularly given
the fact that the supposed perpetrator was an officer who ranked
above her. During her 11-month stint in Iraq, stationed mostly
outside Tikrit in a company of 19 women and 140 men, Pickett claimed
her male peers thought nothing of commenting on her breast size or
making sexual jokes about her. She regularly encountered porn
magazines sitting in the latrines and in common areas. None of this
behavior was particularly new to her; it was life as she knew it in
the military. Yet in a war zone the effect seemed more
corrosive. ''The real difference is that over there, there's never a
break from it,'' Pickett told me. ''At home, you can go out with
your girlfriends and get a beer and talk about the idiots who were
cracking jokes. Over there, you're a minority 24 hours a day, seven
days a week. You never get that 10 minutes to relax or even cry.
Sometimes you just need to let it all out.''

One night in the fall of 2003, Pickett recalled, her unit endured a
mortar attack. Trained as a combat lifesaver, she spent part of the
night tending to bleeding soldiers by flashlight in a field tent.
Once the experience was over, the memory kept replaying in her
mind. ''For a long time, I wished I had died that night,'' Pickett
told me, adding that she returned to her home in Wisconsin and
was ''barely functioning''- unable to sleep or concentrate. She
spent days alone inside her apartment, not talking to anyone. ''I
was draining everyone around me,'' she says. A year after her
deployment, a V.A. clinician formally diagnosed PTSD, which Pickett
says she thinks stems from the stress of combat, harassment and the
earlier sexual assault. If Vietnam became notorious as a war that
combined violence and sex, with Southeast Asian brothels being the
destination of choice for soldiers on temporary leave from the war,
the sexual politics of the Iraq war are, as of yet, unclear.

Joane Nagel, a sociology professor at the University of Kansas, is
studying sex and the military as it pertains to the Iraq war. What
she has found, she told me recently, is that ''when you take young
women and drop them into that hypermasculine environment, the sex
stuff just explodes. Some have willing sex. Some get coerced into
it. Women are vulnerable sexually.'' The specter of childhood abuse
in military men and women potentially adds another layer of
combustibility to gender relations. Tina Lee, a psychiatrist at the
V.A. Palo Alto Health Care System in California, works with both
male and female PTSD patients. She points out that traumatic
experiences in childhood may increase the risk of developing PTSD
when exposed to another trauma in adulthood. Experiencing childhood
trauma can also produce opposing behaviors in adult men and women.
Male survivors of childhood abuse are more likely to act
aggressively and angrily, while some women appear to lose their self-
protective instincts. A female patient, she says, once offered up an
apt description of this tendency to end up in hurtful situations,
saying that her ''people picker'' had been broken.

''So you have young women joining the military who have the profile
of being victimized, who don't have boundaries sometimes,'' Lee went
on to say. ''And then you have a male population that fits a
perpetrator profile. They are mostly under 25, often developmentally
adolescent, and you put them together. What do you think will
happen? The men do the damage, and the women get damaged.''

Being sexually assaulted by a fellow soldier may prove extra-
traumatic, as it represents a breach in the hallowed code of
military cohesion - a concept that most enlistees have drilled into
them from the first day of boot camp. ''It's very disconcerting to
have somebody who is supposed to save your life, who has your back,
turn on you and do something like that,'' says Susan Avila-Smith,
the director of Women Organizing Women, an advocacy program designed
to help traumatized women navigate the vast V.A. health-care and
benefits system. ''You don't want to believe it's real. You don't
want to have to deal with it. The family doesn't want to deal with
it. Society doesn't want to deal with it.''

Pickett, who since returning from Iraq has become active in Iraq and
Afghanistan Veterans of America, a nonpartisan advocacy group, says
she believes that the stress of just worrying about this puts a
woman in danger. ''When I joined the military, a lot of people at
home said things like, 'Oh, are you really going to be able to
handle it?''' she said. ''So then you're in Iraq, driving down
Highway 1 with an M-16 in your hand. You have those doubts people
had about you in the back of your head. You're thinking 5,000 things
at once, trying to be everything everybody wants you to be. And you
still have to take the crap from the men. You're 20 years old and
growing into your own body, having an actual sex drive. But you've
got 30 horny guys propositioning you and being really disgusting
about it.'' She added: ''Women are set up to fail in a very real
way, in an area where they could get killed. If your mind isn't 100
percent on the battlefield, you could die. That's the bottom line.''

IV. Flickers of a Larger Fire

Three years ago, while researching an article for this magazine on
injured soldiers who fought in Iraq, I happened to have a phone
conversation with a woman from Michigan who served as a reservist in
the gulf war. Like many people, she'd been watching coverage of the
war in Iraq with concern. At the time, I was focused on the early
waves of soldiers returning home with horrendous, debilitating
injuries - the amputees, the paraplegics, the brain-injured - but
she was worried about something entirely different, equally
devastating but far less visible.

She used her own story as an example: While serving in a mostly male
reserve unit in Kuwait, she told me, she was sexually assaulted.
After returning home to Michigan, she began exhibiting symptoms of
PTSD - jumpiness, intrusive thoughts and nightmares - and promptly
went to her local V.A. hospital for help. She was then put into
group therapy - which has long been shown to be an economical and
reasonably effective way of helping trauma survivors process their
experiences - but her ''group'' was made up entirely of male Vietnam
vets, some of whom were trying to work through sex crimes they
committed during military service. Others came home from war and
beat their wives. ''I freaked out,'' the female reservist told
me. ''It sent me into a complete tailspin.''

She began to drink heavily. She lost her job, moved away from her
family and toyed with the idea of suicide. Few PTSD stories are
happy stories, but this one eventually took a positive turn: a
therapist at her local V.A. hospital finally referred her to a 10-
bed residential program for women with PTSD located in Menlo Park,
Calif. Desperate for help, she spent a number of weeks there,
receiving daily therapy and learning coping skills in the company of
a small group of other female veterans and a staff of mostly female
therapists. The experience, she told me, saved her life.

Following the early coverage of the Iraq war, however, she was
feeling her PTSD begin to stir again. Jessica Lynch - who, it was
reported, might have been sexually assaulted as a prisoner of war in
the first weeks after the invasion - was being celebrated as a hero.
TV news reports showed female soldiers bidding farewell to their
spouses and children. All this woman in Michigan could think about,
though, was what things would look like on the other side, whether
the V.A. would know what to do with these women if they later turned
up needing help - whether, in particular, sexual-assault victims
would be retraumatized trying to find their way in a system that was
built almost entirely around the needs of men.

Thomas Berger, national chairman of Vietnam Veterans of America's
PTSD-and-substance-abuse committee, told me recently: ''I think
women are more likely to fall through the cracks. The fact is, if a
woman veteran comes in from Iraq who's been in a combat situation
and has also been raped, there are very few clinicians in the V.A.
who have been trained to treat her specific needs.''

As the Iraq war creates tens of thousands of female war veterans,
surely we will begin to know more about the impact of PTSD on the
life of a military woman. Female soldiers have flown fighter jets,
commanded battalions, lost limbs, survived stints as P.O.W.'s,
killed insurgents and also come home in flag-covered caskets. And
many, too, have begun to experience the psychic fallout of war, a
concept made famous post-Vietnam by a generation of now middle-aged
men. ''We're much more willing to acknowledge what guys do in
combat - both the negative and the heroic,'' says Erin Solaro,
author of the 2006 book ''Women in the Line of Fire.'' ''But as a
culture, we're not yet willing to do that for women. Female combat
vets tend to be very lonely people.''

Sexual trauma by itself or in combination with combat stands to
isolate a female vet further, says Avila-Smith, the veterans'
advocate. ''If you're in combat, you can talk about it in group
therapy,'' she told me. ''You can say, 'Yeah, I was in this battle
and I saw my friends blown up,''' she says. ''But nobody raises
their hand and yells out in the middle of the V.A.: 'Yeah, I was
raped in the military, was anybody else? Do we have something in
common?''' Avila-Smith herself says she was sexually assaulted while
stationed in Texas in 1992 and developed PTSD as a result. For a
long time, everyday functioning was a challenge. ''For two years I
had a list on my bathroom mirror to brush my teeth, brush my hair,
wash my face,'' she said as we sat at a sunny picnic table outside a
V.A. hospital in Seattle. ''Every morning it was like waking up in a
new world. How did I get here? What's going on? Why is my brain not
working?''

This kind of bewilderment is something I encountered again and
again, talking to more than 30 military women who struggle with
PTSD. Whether they had just returned from Iraq or were 25 years past
their service, whether they'd been sexually assaulted, seen combat
or both, most reported feeling forgetful and unfocused, alienated
from their own minds.

Keli Frasier, an Army reservist living in Clifton, Colo., who said
she did not experience sexual assault, told me that because of some
combination of anxiety and memory loss, she'd been fired from three
low-wage jobs and dropped out of college since returning from Iraq
in May 2004. Like a few of the others I met, Frasier always kept a
notebook close by to jot down things she was afraid she'd
forget. ''Half the time,'' she said, sounding genuinely
confused, ''I don't understand why I lose the jobs.'' According to
her account, while driving a fuel truck in Iraq, she watched her
squad leader die in a roadside ambush and another peer have his leg
blown off with a grenade. ''In all those situations, your mind just
goes on autopilot, and you just do what you're trained to do,'' she
said, sitting on a couch in a warmly decorated trailer she and her
husband own. She bounced her 8-month-old son on one knee as she
talked. ''I didn't really start having any mental issues until we
got home,'' she said, adding that it was four or five months before
PTSD was diagnosed by a V.A. counselor.

Research has shown that exposure to trauma has the potential to
alter brain chemistry, affecting among other things the way memories
are processed and stored. To vastly simplify a complex bit of
neurology: If the brain can't make sense of a traumatic experience,
it may be unable to process it and experience it as a long-term
memory. Traumas tend to persist as emotional - or unconscious -
memories, encoded by the amygdala, the brain's fear center. A trauma
can then resurface unexpectedly when triggered by a sensory cue. The
cerebral cortex, where rational thought takes place, is not in
control. The fear center rules; the brain is overwhelmed. Small
tasks - tooth-brushing, grocery-shopping, feeding your children -
start to feel monumental, even frightening.

''I was not scared a single day I was in Iraq; that's what baffles
me most,'' Kate Bulson, a 24-year-old former Army sergeant, told me
by phone not long ago from her home in Muskegon, Mich. She developed
PTSD after completing the first of two tours in Iraq, she said,
adding that she had not experienced sexual trauma. ''I did
everything the male soldiers did: I kicked in doors, searched people
and cars, ran patrols on dangerous highways,'' she said. ''Over
there, I would hear an explosion at night and sleep through it. Now
I hear the slightest sound and I wake up.''

Just last month, The Journal of the American Medical Association
published the results of a study sponsored by the V.A., which
endorsed the use of ''prolonged exposure therapy'' in treating
female veterans with PTSD. The process calls for a patient to visit
and revisit traumatic memories in order to lessen their power over
the mind. ''It becomes an organized story rather than a fragmented
story,'' says Edna Foa, who directs the Center for the Treatment and
Study of Anxiety at the University of Pennsylvania and is considered
a pioneer in trauma treatment. ''They are able to put things
together. They find all kinds of new perspectives to look at what
happened to them.''

Across the V.A., there appears to be an earnest recognition of the
need for stepping up these innovative programs for veterans of both
sexes. V.A.-financed researchers are working on everything from
testing a drug normally used to treat tuberculosis on PTSD patients
to developing virtual-reality war simulations that are meant to give
veterans more emotional control over their traumatic memories. Of
the some 1,400 V.A. hospitals and clinics, currently only 27 house
inpatient PTSD programs, and of these, just 2 serve women
exclusively. According to the V.A., several more women's residential
treatment programs are in the planning stages.

Despite fighting wars in two far-off countries, the Bush
administration recently announced that while it will increase V.A.
health-care financing by 9 percent for 2008, it has proposed
consecutive cuts of about $1.8 billion for 2009 and 2010. Moreover,
as recent revelations of poor patient care at the military's
flagship facility, Walter Reed Army Medical Center, have
demonstrated, a federal health-care system built to serve soldiers
and veterans is sagging under the load of those who fought in Iraq
and Afghanistan, a significant number of whom struggle with mental-
health issues. The V.A. currently has a reported backlog of 400,000
benefits claims, which can in turn lead to long waits for
appointments or for approval for medications. When I met her in
January, Keli Frasier, the Army reservist, described herself
as ''really having a hard time'' but had been waiting two months to
get an appointment to have an expired antidepressant prescription
renewed.

It's possible, too, that female veterans suffer from more
invisibility. Patricia Resick, at the Boston V.A. hospital, says she
feels that women may perhaps take longer than men to recognize their
symptoms and find their way into treatment. ''They're more likely to
have a primary parenting role,'' she told me. ''When they get home,
they're going to be trying to get back into their families, to re-
establish their relationships.'' Lee, the psychiatrist in Palo Alto,
says that in her experience, men are more likely to have been
encouraged to seek help, usually by their spouses. ''You don't hear
as much about husbands saying, 'Honey, why don't you go into
residential treatment for two months?''' she says. And those who
feel shame following a sexual trauma, Lee went on to say, may keep
it hidden from their health-care providers anyway.

The larger question is: How will this new crop of female war
veterans respond, recover or act out the traumas of their military
experience? While it is still too early to know, paying attention to
small stories, usually tucked inside local newspapers, may indicate
the early flickers of a larger fire. There is the story of Tina
Priest, a 21-year-old soldier who, according to Army investigation
records, shot herself with an M-16 rifle in Iraq last March, two
weeks after filing a rape charge against a fellow soldier and days
after being given a diagnosis of ''acute stress disorder consistent
with rape trauma.'' (The Army says that a subsequent investigation
failed to substantiate the rape claim.)

There is the story of Linda Michel, a 33-year-old Navy medic who
served under stressful conditions at a U.S.-run prison near Baghdad
and was given Paxil for depression during the deployment. Returning
home last October, she struggled to fit back into her life as a
suburban mother of three in a quiet housing development outside of
Albany. She shot and killed herself within three weeks of the
homecoming. Her husband, also an Iraq veteran, wondered aloud to a
reporter with The Albany Times-Union: ''Why wasn't she sent to a
facility to resolve the issues?''

More recently, there's Jessica Rich, a 24-year-old former Army
reservist who one night early last month climbed drunk into her
Volkswagen Jetta and drove south on a northbound interstate outside
of Denver. She slammed head-on into a sport-utility vehicle, killing
herself and slightly injuring four others. After a nine-month tour
of Iraq in 2003 - and according to former soldiers who'd been in
group therapy with her, having been raped during her service - PTSD
was diagnosed. Her friends say she never got past those
experiences. ''She was having nightmares still, up until this point -
flashbacks and anxiety and everything,'' one told The Denver
Post. ''She said it was really hard to get over because she couldn't
get any help from anybody.''

V. 'What's Wrong With Me?'

Earlier this winter, hoping to understand more about PTSD and its
effects, I visited a couple of female Iraq vets who felt their
postwar lives had been shaped - if not temporarily ruined - by
the ''double whammy'' of combat and sexual stress. Both happened to
live in Colorado, though each had deployed to war through units
located in other states. I met Keri Christensen one morning at her
home in a tidy subdivision outside of Denver, where she recently
relocated from Wisconsin with her husband and two daughters. She had
just taken her daughters to school, and her husband was away on a
business trip.

Christensen is 33, blue-eyed and outwardly perky, with an easy
smile. By the time she was deployed to war in 2004, she had finished
13 years of part-time service in the Wisconsin Army National Guard
as a heavy-equipment transporter. Prior to her deployment in Iraq,
she loved her role in the military. ''Before we were married, my
husband was in awe of it,'' she said, laughing. ''He was like, 'I
met this girl and she hauls tanks!''' She added that she was good at
what she did, receiving several awards over the years. Beyond
commitment to the Guard of one weekend a month and two weeks'
training each summer, Christensen spent the previous six years as a
stay-at-home mom. Her life, she said, had been a generally happy one.

But the stresses of deployment were surprisingly manifest: she
agonized over leaving her daughters, who were then 6 and 2 years
old. Stationed in Kuwait, Christensen's unit ran convoys of
equipment back and forth from the port to inside Iraq. ''It was
really scary,'' she said, explaining that her convoy had been
mortared during an early mission. ''But it was like, Hey cool, we're
on a mission.'' Then one day in February 2005, Christensen was
accidentally dragged beneath a truck trailer and run over, breaking
a number of bones in her foot and injuring her knee and back. She
was assigned to a desk job in a tent in Kuwait, mostly working the
night shift. It was there, she said, that a sergeant above her in
her command - a man she'd known for 10 years - began making comments
about her breasts and at one point baldly propositioned her for sex.

Something inside of her broke, she said. Christensen claims that she
was punished for even mentioning the situation to her company
commanders - written up for minor infractions; accused, she says
falsely, of being intoxicated (for which she was demoted); and
reassigned for duty to an airfield near a mortuary, where she
occasionally helped load coffins of dead soldiers onto planes bound
for the U.S. (The Wisconsin Army National Guard denied that
Christensen was punished for making a sexual-harassment claim and
stated that the claim was investigated and dismissed for lack of
evidence.) Christensen says that a combination of war stress,
harassment and the reprisals that followed were so upsetting and
demoralizing that she considered suicide on several occasions. Her
military records show that during her deployment, she was given a
diagnosis of depression and PTSD.

After Christensen's experiences in Kuwait, she allowed her military
enlistment to expire, which given that she was six years short of
receiving military retirement benefits, only added to her
pain. ''That was my career, and they stole it from me,'' she said,
sitting on an overstuffed couch in the family room of her home, idly
fiddling with one of her children's stuffed animals as she
spoke. ''They make you feel like you're crazy. And I'm not just the
only one. There's other women out there this has happened to. Why is
the attitude always 'Just shut up and leave it alone'?''

Christensen had been home from war then for just over a year, having
returned to her life as a stay-at-home mother, yet she could not
shake what the deployment had done to her - the accident, the
confusion and shame of her sexual harassment, and then what she felt
was an ignominious demotion and marginalization after reporting the
incidents. And while there are those whose image of PTSD is still
tied to Vietnam War movies - the province of men who earned their
affliction only after having their best buddies die in their arms in
a gush of blood - Christensen shares the same diagnosis. That is to
say that no matter what constituted her war experience, the
aftermath was much the same. She suffered from severe headaches and
forgetfulness. ''I feel like I'm always forgetting something,'' she
said. ''I leave the house and I don't know if I've left something
on - the stove or a candle. I can't trust my memory.'' She told me
that her 8-year-old, Madison, recently had to tell her the family's
new phone number. She'd lost friends and had ''rough spots'' with
her husband. Afraid of crowds, she started grocery shopping at 6 in
the morning and was having her mother buy clothes for her children.
Driving, too, made her fearful, since she felt ''foggy'' and more
than once ran a stop sign or a red light with her kids in the car.
Though she went for counseling and medical treatment at a local V.A.
while living in Illinois after she returned from Iraq, Christensen
had not yet found her way to the Denver V.A. for treatment. The
thought of getting in her car and making the 20-minute drive
petrified her.

Describing it, Christensen began to cry, wringing the stuffed animal
in her hands. ''What's wrong with me?'' she said, more to herself
than to me. ''I have nightmares of being trapped underneath a
trailer with body parts falling on me.'' Her body heaved with sobs
as she continued: ''Once when my kids were sleeping with me, I woke
up suddenly, thinking it was an Iraqi person, and I almost tossed my
kid across the room.''

VI. 'Nothing Is Ever Clear'

Amorita Randall lives across the state from Christensen, in a small
town outside of Grand Junction. She is 27, a former naval
construction worker who served in Iraq in 2004. Over the course of
several phone conversations before visiting her in January, I grew
accustomed to the way Randall coexisted with her memories. Mostly
she inched up to them. On days she was feeling stable, she would
want to talk, calling me up and abruptly jumping into stories about
her six years in the Navy, describing how she was raped twice - the
second rape supposedly taking place just a matter of weeks before
she arrived in Iraq. Her experience in Iraq, she said, included one
notable combat incident, in which her Humvee was hit by an I.E.D.,
killing the soldier who was driving and leaving her with a brain
injury. ''I don't remember all of it,'' she told me when I met her
in the sparsely furnished apartment she shares with her fiance?. ''I
don't know if I passed out or what, but it was pretty gruesome.''

According to the Navy, however, no after-action report exists to
back up Randall's claims of combat exposure or injury. A Navy
spokesman reports that her commander says that his unit was never
involved in combat during her tour. And yet, while we were
discussing the supposed I.E.D. attack, Randall appeared to recall it
in exacting detail - the smells, the sounds, the impact of the
explosion. As she spoke, her body seemed to seize up; her speech
became slurred as she slipped into a flashback. It was difficult to
know what had traumatized Randall: whether she had in fact been in
combat or whether she was reacting to some more generalized
recollection of powerlessness.

Either way, the effects seemed to be crippling. She lost at least
one job and was, like a number of the women I spoke to, living on
monthly disability payments from the V.A. Her fiance, an earnest
construction worker named Greg Lund, at one point discovered her
hidden in a closet in the apartment they share, curled in the fetal
position, appearing frozen. ''It scared the hell out of me,'' he
said. ''I'm like, am I in over my head here?''' On another occasion,
shopping with Randall at Lowe's, he had to pull her away from a
Hispanic man she mistook for an Iraqi. ''She was going to attack
him,'' Lund said. ''She was calling him 'the enemy' and stuff like
that.'' The biggest tragedy for her was that her daughter, Anne, who
is 4, was taken from her custody by the Colorado child-welfare
authorities after she was found playing in the road unsupervised one
day last June. At the time, Randall and her daughter were living
with another family in a halfway house. Randall was inside folding
laundry, believing - she said - that Anne was being watched by older
children in the other family.

There were days when Randall couldn't remember things, telling me
her mind felt fuzzy. Accordingly, when she broached a subject that
was difficult, her speech would slow down markedly and sometimes
stop altogether. ''Nothing is ever clear,'' she
explained. ''Sometimes I'll just have feelings. Sometimes I'll have
pictures. Sometimes it'll be both.'' Her confusion could be both
literal and moral. She blamed herself, in part, for the rapes,
saying she felt peer pressure to drink heavily in the Navy, which
made her more vulnerable.

Randall's life story was a sad one, though according to the V.A.
psychologists I spoke with, it was not atypical. Growing up in
Florida, she said, she was physically and sexually abused by two
relatives - a condition that has been shown to make a woman more
prone to suffer assault as an adult. Eventually she landed in foster
care. She told me she joined the Navy at 20 precisely because she
was raised in an environment where ''girls were worthless.'' The
stability and merit structure of the military appealed to her.
Stationed in Mississippi in early 2002, Randall said, she was raped
one night in her barracks after being at a bar with a group of
servicemen. The details are unclear to her, but Randall says she
believes that someone drugged her drink.

A couple of months later, she discovered she was pregnant. In
November 2002, she gave birth to her daughter. Less than a year
later, Randall's unit was deployed to the war, stopping first for
several months on Guam. She put Anne in the care of a cousin in
Florida. The second rape happened after another night of
drinking. ''I couldn't fight him off,'' Randall says. ''I remember
there were other guys in the room too. Somebody told me they took
pictures of it and put them on the Internet.'' Randall says she has
blocked out most of the details of the second rape - something else
experts say is a common self-protective measure taken by the brain
in response to violent trauma - and that she left for Iraq ''in a
daze.''

Given her low self-esteem and her tendency, as a trauma victim, to
suffer from fractured memory, someone like Randall would make an
admittedly poor witness in court. Randall claims that after
returning from war, she told her commanders about the second rape
but says she was told ''not to make such a big deal about it.'' (The
Navy says it knows of no internal records indicating that she had
reported a sexual assault.) Since her daughter was removed from her
custody last summer, she had been going for weekly hourlong therapy
sessions with a civilian social worker, paid for by the V.A. She was
also taking parenting classes at a social-services agency and
petitioning to have the child returned to her care. Overall, she was
feeling optimistic that through therapy, her PTSD was beginning
slowly to subside. But she also felt it was a case of too little,
too late, saying that before losing her daughter, she was receiving
what for many women is considered to be a standard course of mental-
health treatment in a V.A. system strapped for resources - a 60-
minute counseling session held every month. Randall shrugged,
describing it. ''We never got very far with anything,'' she
said, ''The guy would just ask me, 'So, how are you doing?' And I'd
look at him and say, 'Well ? I guess I'm fine.'''

VII. ''It Just Kept Building Up and Building Up ... ''

The Women's Trauma Recovery Program is tucked into a small adobe-
style building on one corner of a sprawling V.A. health-care campus
in Menlo Park, Calif., about 20 miles south of San Francisco.
Outside there is a sunny courtyard, where residents often gather to
smoke and talk. Inside there are five dorm-style bedrooms, each with
a pair of twin beds. The feeling is something less than homey but
something more than institutional. Next door there is a larger and
more established 45-bed program for male active-duty soldiers and
veterans with PTSD.

When I arranged to visit the women's program for a couple of days
last July, it was unclear whether any of the six female patients
then in residence would speak to me. According to Darrah Westrup,
the psychologist who leads the program, this group had only just
begun its 60-to-90-day treatment program, which was devoted both to
learning coping skills and to gradually doing exposure therapy for
their traumas. For many of the patients, entry in the program -
gained through a referral from a mental-health specialist and then a
fairly intensive application process - felt like a last resort.
Privacy, too, was paramount: some of these women had isolated
themselves for years and, working with the program's therapists,
were just beginning to rebuild some confidence, Westrup said.

So it came as a surprise when, one by one, each one surfaced at
Westrup's office, ready to talk to me. (They requested that I
protect their privacy by not using their full names.) Each asked too
that Westrup be present for the interview, and I soon understood
why: despite the fact that conversation revolved mostly around the
impact of living with PTSD rather than the traumatic events that
caused it, the danger of a flashback always lurked. ''Are you
here?'' Westrup would ask gently when somebody appeared momentarily
glazed or her speech slowed down. ''Do you feel your feet on the
ground?''

Some of the women served in previous decades and were only now
dealing fully with their PTSD. They recognized themselves as
harbingers, as cautionary tales of how bad it could get for those of
the current generation of female soldiers if they left their PTSD
untreated. And they repeated that sentiment again and again. ''I'm
only talking to you,'' one said, ''because I want other sisters to
know they're not alone.''

I met six women, two of whom served in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Most
hadn't seen combat, though three of them said they were raped by
fellow soldiers during deployments in Germany, in Japan, in Qatar.
The women - Johnnie, Kathy, Kathleen, Ann, Michelle and Sara - had
served in the Army, the Navy or the Air Force. What ran through
nearly every woman's story was a sense of things left unresolved.
Nobody mentioned perpetrators being punished. Nearly everyone
expressed having gone through relentless self-questioning: ''What if
I hadn't accepted that ride?'' one wondered aloud. ''What if I
hadn't drank so much?'' asked another.

According to Patricia Resick of the National Center for PTSD, being
able to process trauma is the key to recovering from it. Those
people who cannot make sense of what happened to them are more
likely to continue reliving it through flashbacks and intrusive
memories. ''It's like a record that keeps getting stuck,'' she
said. ''They can't accept that it happened because of the
implications of accepting it. It means that bad things - horrible
things, really - can happen to good people.''

The women in Menlo Park described, vividly, the aftermath of living
with unresolved military trauma: Kathy was arrested more than once
for drunken driving. Michelle tried to kill herself three times.
Sara was put into a military psychiatric hospital. Ann raised
children and had a successful career, but said that inside her home
in rural Northern California, she was often so paralyzed by fear
that she hid in the closet any time the phone rang.

The program required that the women spend time writing down their
thoughts and then analyzing them on paper, rooting out
the ''distorted thinking'' - things like feeling unworthy or guilty -
and then reinterpreting them in a more healthful way. While each
woman acknowledged that the work was painful, there seemed to be a
kind of summer-camp camaraderie growing among them. Yet there was
always the notion looming that at some point they, and their
symptoms, would need to return home.

One of the two vets of the Iraq war on the V.A. campus was Kathleen,
a 37-year-old Army nurse with dark hair and fair skin. She arrived
at Menlo Park courtesy of a program sponsored by the Department of
Defense, in which active-duty soldiers with severe PTSD are granted
leave and financing to pursue residential treatment through the V.A.
This is part of a larger effort across the military to find and
address soldiers' mental-health issues as quickly as possible.
Kathleen was a first lieutenant and a registered nurse based at Fort
Sill, Okla. She was medevacked out of Baghdad less than three months
earlier.

Sitting in a chair in Westrup's office, dressed in a pastel T-shirt
and jeans, Kathleen knit her fingers together anxiously. Despite
appearing nervous, she seemed eager to talk. For better or worse,
Kathleen's trauma was still fresh. She was also one of the few
female veterans I spoke with who were suffering from PTSD who did
not mention experiencing sexual harassment or assault in the
military, though she did allude to ''a bad childhood.''

Speaking in a soft drawl, she described being stationed at a combat
support hospital inside Baghdad's Green Zone, working 15-hour shifts
in the intensive-care unit, often tending to burn patients who were
helicoptered in from southern Iraq. ''I expected some death,'' she
said. ''I was realistic. What I didn't expect was that we would be
taking care of so many civilians, and those civilians would be
children.'' She paused to add that she had five children of her own -
all daughters, ages 9 to 18, who were back in Oklahoma with her
husband, himself an Army man who'd been deployed to Iraq twice
already.

In Baghdad, the stressors piled up quickly: helicopters kept
arriving from the south, burn patients howled, children sometimes
died. Lying in bed at night, Kathleen listened to mortars exploding
and stray gunfire outside the Green Zone. ''It just builds up and
wears down on you,'' she said. ''You're always in a heightened
adrenaline rush.''

Her hands started to tremble then. She mentioned a young boy named
Mohammed who died in the Green Zone hospital early on in her time in
Iraq, saying only that she felt responsible for his death. ''I can't
say more about that,'' she said, shaking her head. She then
described caring for another young Iraqi who'd lost his legs because
of complications from a gunshot wound. She started to understand
that he might not survive outside the hospital. She described a
creeping feeling of powerlessness. ''You get to a point when you
can't take care of everybody,'' Kathleen said, her voice
quavering. ''It's really tough.'' She knotted and unknotted her
hands, appearing somewhat blank.

Westrup interjected softly, ''Kathleen, are you here?''

''I'm here,'' she said. Then she continued: ''It got to a point that
I was having panic attacks all the time because we'd get a patient
in, and I'd be thinking, Oh, my God, they're not going to survive,
and how can I help them stop screaming and not be in pain? It just
kept building up and building up. ...''

Then one day Kathleen's superiors barred her from visiting the young
man who'd had his legs amputated, suggesting that she was becoming
too emotional. Since the death of the boy named Mohammed, she had
been taking Paxil for depression, and about the same time, she said,
an Army doctor took her off the medication.

''I went crazy,'' she said plainly. ''I had a major panic attack. I
felt like I couldn't get enough air.'' On the night it happened, she
climbed the stairs to the hospital's rooftop, which overlooked the
Green Zone. ''We sat up there millions of times, smoking our
cigarettes or just shooting the breeze and watching the helicopters
coming in and going out. It felt like a safe place.'' But when a
hospital doctor turned up on the roof, startling her as she gasped
for air, Kathleen began to cry. The doctor fetched the senior nurse
on call. Believing that Kathleen was contemplating suicide, the
nurse had her evacuated first from the roof, Kathleen said, and then
from Baghdad altogether.

When I asked if she considered suicide during her deployment,
Kathleen answered: ''Oh, several times, but I was able to contain
those thoughts. What kept me going was the thought of my children,
and them not being taken care of if I killed myself.'' She did,
however, rehearse some thoughts about what would happen if she
wandered outside of the Green Zone and deliberately into enemy
fire. ''I was worried about how children of parents who commit
suicide have a higher rate of suicide themselves. I have three
teenagers, and I'm thinking, I can't do that. But if I died because
of the enemy, then that would be acceptable. They would be sad, but
they could hold their heads high and say, 'Yes, my mom served - she
gave to this country.'''

Everything that happened to Kathleen - her feelings of compassion
for her Iraqi patients, the powerlessness she felt in trying to save
them, the depression, Paxil and ultimate breakdown - all very easily
could have happened to one of her male colleagues. Indeed, she told
me she was not the only soldier feeling great stress in the
hospital: ''We were all facing these struggles,'' she said. ''There
were people that were breaking down crying, nobody was sleeping
well. There were a lot of nightmares.'' And yet it was Kathleen who
was helicoptered out of the war on a stretcher on April 29 last year
and returned to Oklahoma, to her three-acre property, her five girls
and her husband.

Leaving Iraq and returning home to Oklahoma, Kathleen felt an
instant change in her relationship with her daughters. ''It was very
difficult for me to see them,'' she told me. ''I thought I would be
excited and run to them and tell them I loved them, but instead I
was scared. I was scared for them to hold me, to touch me. I don't
know why, because I wanted to really bad. I was afraid for them to
see me shake or stutter, not being able to communicate.'' She
mentioned, with no small amount of heartbreak, that it was hard to
reconnect with one particular daughter, who has dark hair and brown
eyes, because ''she looks like she could be Iraqi.''

Two weeks after arriving in Menlo Park, she was still baffled by how
excruciating family life had become. When her 9-year-old daughter
had started shouting playfully while being chased by her 11-year-old
in the yard outside, her mind flashed instantly to Iraq. Kathleen
said: ''It just goes through me and brings me right back. I have a
lot of flashbacks. And then I'd have nightmares, afraid that they'd
hear me talk in my sleep or yell out, moaning.'' She added, ''Me and
their dad have had nothing but conflict after conflict, because he
wants me to be a certain way, and I can't.'' Her children, she said,
had begun avoiding her in order not to upset her, asking their
father to drive them places, speaking quietly in her presence.

Kathleen started seeing an Army psychologist daily, something she
found to be extremely helpful. A social worker at Fort Sill
introduced the idea that she might be further helped by the women's
residential program in Menlo Park. Yet having already left her
children for most of the last year, Kathleen was resistant to going.

And then came a turning point. One day, when her husband was not
around to do the driving, she had the girls in the car on their way
to somebody's team practice, when her 13-year-old daughter tried to
offer some encouragement. ''She said, 'Mama, you can get through
this; it's not like you killed anybody,''' Kathleen recalled. ''I
started crying, and she goes, 'Oh, my God, you killed somebody!' I
went into another panic attack right in front of my kids.'' She
welled up at the memory, saying: ''That was enough for me. I was
like, I'm ready to go. I'm getting through this.''

So far, however, treatment had been a mixed bag for Kathleen, mostly
because she was homesick and afraid. She had, however, fostered a
great deal of empathy and respect for the other women she'd met,
understanding that some had lived with debilitating PTSD for 20
years.

''I came close to leaving here the other day,'' she told me. ''But
the girls just surrounded me. They were like, 'Don't leave.''' The
women then went on to describe how they lived before treatment - one
with security cameras and a security fence at her house, another
locked away in her apartment, several having lost their marriages
and distanced themselves from their kids. ''They said: 'You don't
want this life. I would give anything to go back to when my trauma
was new and to get help with it,''' Kathleen recalled. ''And I could
see myself 20 years down the road; I would be them. And I don't want
that,'' she said. ''I love these girls, but I don't want that.''

VIII. What the Future Holds

Six weeks later, I flew back to California to attend the Women's
Trauma Recovery Program graduation. It was held on a Thursday
morning in a wide recreation room on the building's ground floor.
Someone had moved the Ping-Pong table to one side and dragged a
number of chairs into neat rows. A modest buffet lunch was laid out
along the room's back wall.

The residents took their seats at the front of the room, having
clearly primped for the occasion. They then read poems, held hands,
made grateful speeches to the staff and, at the end, played some
pensive music on a boombox and bowed their heads, many of them
weeping. It was, of course, impossible to know what was in store for
any of them. Clearly, they had benefited from the cohesiveness of
the group, having met others who were wrestling with the same demons.

There was one notable absence - Kathleen, who, it turned out, left
treatment not long after I met her, presumably to return home to her
family and military life in Oklahoma. Over the next few months I
sent several letters to Kathleen, hoping to speak with her, but got
no response. Finally, a couple of weeks ago, she called me,
apologizing for her silence. She'd only just received a medical
discharge from the Army and felt comfortable talking. She had mixed
feelings about leaving the military, since she loved her work as an
Army nurse, but felt that the PTSD symptoms kept interfering. She'd
spent much of the fall giving vaccinations to soldiers, but after a
soldier passed out one day, causing her to panic, she realized she
was a long way from being able to handle an urgent medical crisis.

Kathleen also told me that she left Menlo Park last summer after one
of her daughters was involved in a minor car accident. ''I left
treatment because my children were more important than my needs,''
she said.

What struck me again and again, meeting and talking to female Iraq
veterans grappling with PTSD, was their isolation. So many, like
Kathleen, seemed uncertain of what to do next. It was as if their
mistrust of the world had led them to mistrust themselves. Most were
on antidepressants and were receiving some counseling through the
V.A., but few had a sense that their symptoms were going away. In
Colorado, Amorita Randall was working to regain custody of her
daughter - a process that she found discouraging. ''Just because I'm
disabled doesn't mean I can't care for my daughter,'' she told me.
Recently, after months of waiting, Keli Frasier, the mother in
Colorado who had been struggling with depression, finally managed to
schedule an appointment with a V.A. psychiatrist to obtain new
antidepressants. Across the state in Denver, Keri Christensen said
she was still haunted by nightmares and unnerved by driving.

And finally, there was Suzanne Swift, who in early December was
given a summary court-martial at Fort Lewis, a hearing normally used
for minor offenses. As part of a plea bargain, she pled guilty
to ''missing movement'' and being absent without leave. Her rank was
reduced to private, and she spent the next 21 days, including
Christmas, in a military prison in Washington State. The Army ruled
that in order to receive an honorable discharge, Swift was dutybound
to complete her five-year enlistment, which ends in early 2009.
After finishing her stint in prison in January, Swift says she
checked herself into the inpatient psych ward at Fort Lewis's
hospital for a few days but ultimately was released back to duty.
She told me she was trying generally to ignore the PTSD but had
taken to drinking a lot in order to get by. ''I kind of liked the
Army before all that stuff happened,'' she said in early February,
on the phone from her barracks at Fort Lewis. ''I was good at my
job. I did what I was supposed to do. And then in Iraq, I got
disillusioned. All of a sudden this Army you care so much about is
like, well, all you're good for is to have sex with and that's it.''
She added, ''I really, really, really, don't want to be here.''

The Army had issued an order for Swift to be transferred to a base
in California later this spring. Swift was unhappy about the change,
because it would take her farther from her family in Oregon, but she
was also considering other plans. ''Did you know,'' she said, ''that
there's some program near San Francisco that's just for women who
have PTSD?'' She paused for a moment, surrounded by the silence in
the barracks at Fort Lewis, then said, ''I'm thinking about trying
to get in there.''