Women Return From War
Picking Up The Pieces
Women Veterans Battle To Mend Themselves
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.
"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.
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.
In this story seven female veterans tell about their journey to the military which led them to personal struggle with PTSD, after serving in Afghanistan or Iraq in recent years. They describe the experience of war from the female perspective: being a minority in the combat zone, but also about war and its consequences from the point of view of a female combatant. The women come from various backgrounds, but the war left them feeling surprisingly the same. They witness a very profound and honest tale about the overall hard reality for U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. They tell about the constant pressure and fear of random attacks, loneliness and trauma that breaks the souls of possibly hundreds of thousands of American soldiers. 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.
In this story seven female veterans tell about their journey to the military which led them to personal struggle with PTSD, after serving in Afghanistan or Iraq in recent years. They describe the experience of war from the female perspective: being a minority in the combat zone, but also about war and its consequences from the point of view of a female combatant. The women come from various backgrounds, but the war left them feeling surprisingly the same. They witness a very profound and honest tale about the overall hard reality for U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. They tell about the constant pressure and fear of random attacks, loneliness and trauma that breaks the souls of possibly hundreds of thousands of American soldiers. 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.
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