Picking Up The Pieces

Raquel Ramirez, a young veteran who returned from deployment with the U.S. Army in Kabul, Afghanistan, could not adjust to living back at home. She ended up homeless, sleeping in her car, suffering from anxiety, anger, road rage and drinking heavily. She didn't know her problems were triggered by post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD, a common condition affecting war veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, struggling with change and past trauma.

"I knew what the normal was in Afghanistan. I knew what to look for. But for some reason those things were abnormal over here," she says, describing how her mind worked when she was speeding on a Californian freeway, having flashbacks about explosions.

Whanja Brown only thought about joining the military when her partner left her deeply into debt. Now she has to relearn the basics of civilian life. Sue Max, Gwen Chiaramonte and Mary-Ann Rich were sent to Iraq as reservists, deployed for the first time in a war zone just before retirement age.

Join American female veterans on a journey where they give a brave and profound account of their deployment in the war in Afghanistan and Iraq with constant pressure of random attacks and inability to return to civilian routines. Their journey led them to personal struggles with PTSD. 

They describe the experience of war from the female perspective: being a minority in the combat zone, but also about war and its consequences.  They tell about the loneliness and trauma that breaks the souls of possibly hundreds of thousands of American soldiers. They feared that their depressed fellow soldiers would go on an armed rampage on the base. They talk about lack of support by commanders, bullying and isolation in the ranks under pressure. At home, they could not share their experiences with loved ones or neighbors who are far removed from their anguish. The war is imprinted in their nightmares about black trash bags where they collected body parts of the wounded in a hospital or which could be filled with explosives on roads in the crisis zone. 

One in five new military recruits are women. Over 220, 000 American women have served in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. Until recently, they were not regarded as having been in combat, although in contemporary war zones the front line is everywhere.

All of them tell a story that cries out for individualized support for returning combat veterans over a long period of time. The veterans did not recognize their PTSD symptoms when they returned home, only much later.  

In this page you can take various paths to follow the veterans' individual, often harrowing journeys to war and personal struggles with PTSD, or navigate thematically through specific parts of their journey: before the military, during deployment, traumatic return and solutions they have found to adjust back to civilian life.