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.
Step on a journey with American female veterans who experienced the overall hard reality for U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. They give a brave and profound account about their deployment in the war with constant pressure of random attacks and images of death and inability to return to civilian routines. Their journey 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. 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.
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 the next pages you can step on various paths to follow their individual, often traumatic journey to war and back, 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.
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