Women face emotional war trauma
(AP)Updated: 2006-12-04 14:09
The death of a beloved cousin sent her into a tailspin; one day she found it difficult to breathe, and she checked herself into a hospital for exhaustion and stress.
More than a year later, Urban says she's much better. She's in college, studying for a master's degree in accounting, working as a detention officer at a police department and thinking about an FBI career.
"When you're busy," she says, "you don't have a lot of time to sit around and think about things."
Urban's bumpy road back isn't unusual.
Some women veterans - including those without psychological problems - say it takes time to decompress and switch gears from hard-nosed soldier to nurturing mother.
Darcie Greuel, a VA nurse in Milwaukee, spent nearly a year at the 452nd Combat Support Hospital in Afghanistan, then rejoined her husband and their three children.
"I was trying to get back into being a wife and a mother," she says. "But it was 'Wow, they survived without me.' ... I really didn't know where my place was. I had to be really careful. I didn't want my husband to think I was not appreciative of what he did. I didn't want to come back and say, 'It's all going to be my way.' "
Greuel, now 40, also had to settle back into her job. She returned to nursing but missed the adrenaline rush. She became irritated when colleagues griped about being overworked and sensed that people no longer wanted to listen to - or would understand - her war stories.
Greuel now gets together with military friends a few times a year, and has decided to return to college to complete her bachelor's degree in nursing.
Greuel found her way back into her family and work life without professional help.
But mental health experts say women veterans who do need counseling tend to respond well to treatment - perhaps even better than men - because they're more open about their emotions.
The problem is many women - just like men - are reluctant to take that first step.
Some are so determined to re-establish that bond with their children that they'll ignore their own problems, says Katherine Dong, women veterans program manager at the North Chicago VA Medical Center.
"They want to make it up to their family for being gone, yet they have all these symptoms and all these thoughts that are still haunting them," she says. "Women tend to put their families' needs above their own. They're trying to push their bad stuff aside and focus on their families and unfortunately, it's not always successful."
Keri Christensen was one of those veterans who did turn to the VA for help after serving with the Wisconsin National Guard in Iraq.
She had agonized leaving behind two small daughters - the younger less than a year old. "There were very guilty feelings ... that I was just neglecting my children," she says. "I was a stay-at-home mom ... but it was my call to duty and I felt I needed to do that."
She tried to stay connected to her girls, ordering books online, having them shipped to her in the war zone, recording them and sending the tapes back home. Her husband, Brian, tried to fill the void, joining his elder daughter's Brownie troop and attending meetings with her.
But when Christensen returned last winter, she had a hard time negotiating her domestic life, she says, because she was so depressed.
One of her wartime duties had been working next to the mortuary in Kuwait where she routinely saw flag-draped coffins of dead soldiers. "You'd see their possessions in a packet, their date of birth," she says. "They were kids - 19, 20, 21 - that was hard."
"They send you home and expect you to live your life normally," she adds. "You can't. Well, maybe some people can. I wasn't able to."
Christensen says she had panic attacks and hated driving, fearing she'd run red lights - something done in convoys she was on in Iraq - with her daughters in the car.
"I just don't like to go places," she says. "I'd rather stay in my own house, which I know is safe."
Alicia Flores, meanwhile, is thinking of leaving her home in Chicago, where she has been working as dental assistant and living with her mother, biding her time in the two years since she left the Army but failed to leave Iraq behind.
She has joined the Army Reserve and may return to the war zone.
"I feel restless, just not secure," she says, "like I'm waiting for something."
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