Picking Up The Pieces

Raquel is a young veteran who returned from Afghanistan and found herself homeless, she was sleeping in her car, she suffered also from road rage and alcohol abuse, triggered by Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. 
Whanja only thought about joining the military when her partner left her deeply into debt. Now she has to relearn the basics of civilian life. 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. They feared that their depressed armed fellow soldiers would go on a rampage at 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. The war followed home in flashbacks about danger of suicide bombers, leading a veteran speeding hundred miles per hour on Californian freeway. 

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.