"No choice to get out"

Now she is sitting at a U.S. Vets center for homeless veterans, telling about her journey through the crisis zones as a chaplain’s assistant. The strain of the past years is still showing in her appearance. She has to look for words to articulate the memories that exhausted her.

Whanja’s first duty station was Camp Spicher in Tikrit, Northern Iraq in 2007. It was to be a very different world from her past life. Even the terrain, to her, resembled another planet. She remembers the bare soil, with nothing green to be seen. “It was a barren place, lifeless,” she recalls. It felt like a fitting description for her life in general for a year to come.

Whanja’s job was to assist the chaplain in providing spiritual support for thousands of soldiers in what she describes as “a monstrously large brigade”. She enjoyed her work.

“We may go to the airfield and speak to the Apache pilots and shoot the breeze: 'Hey how are you doing? Everything ok?' The type of work they do can definitely mess with your head, because they have the power to take or save a life,” she says.

The soldiers would tell Whanja about their troubles. Relationship problems were a major issue. “We get home for 15 days. If you are in a serious relationship, you are grateful for those days, but it is still difficult. Many people, who were married, if they had not already got a divorce, they were planning on it. It is very sad.”

Although northern Iraq had fewer deadly attacks compared to Baghdad, the pressure of random attacks was continual. Soldiers were vulnerable to attacks anywhere, even in their beds. Fear and anxiety about deaths around her started to take their toll.

“I lost three friends in Iraq. One of them was a chaplain’s assistant, who I worked with. The other one lived two doors from me. Another one was blown up in a convoy in the infantry division, and that makes everything worse,” she sighs.

Then she got her own hair badly burned. This led to a breakdown. “It literally silenced me for two weeks. My hair has always been significant for me. I have always taken pride in my appearance. It crushed my self-esteem.”

The burden of fear and change she had opted for to ensure her financial survival finally started to weigh on her. Whanja started to feel emotional. She would burst into tears in the office. She would become fearful of flying to other bases where her job was to listen to other soldiers’ distress. If a bomb exploded in a place she had just visited, she would think: “It could have been me.” She kept her sanity by praying. She looked for help from an army doctor in between her postings, but he would not diagnose her condition. “I knew I had PTSD,” Whanja says.

She was not expecting to be redeployed, but surprisingly she was called to Afghanistan. She had been happy with her unit in Kansas, but now she was deployed with another unit from Texas. Whanja says the new unit had a different working culture. She found the circumstances shockingly different from Iraq.

Whanja felt the commanders did not pay attention to soldiers’ wellbeing. “All they cared for was that you do your job. They didn’t give a damn about you. I could not trust them.” she says.

Whanja is clear about her view on the issues that affect soldiers' minds in the war zone: “One of the main reasons why it was so stressful and why people get PTSD is because you have to work seven days a week there. They will tell you they don’t owe you a day off. After my first five months, I was able to get a day off for training sometimes. That can mess with people’s minds, because we are not robots. If you say you are too tired, you will get in trouble.”

Whanja’s eyes fill with tears again, when she remembers her emotions during deployment. Although serving in the military is voluntary, a soldier cannot resign, if deployed. “You don’t have a choice to get out of there,” she says.