This is heartbreaking and frightening. They are forced to kill, come home, and are expected to adjust. Most of the time it just isn't that simple. Here is part of the article. Is quite lengthy.
http://www.indyweek.com/durham/current/cover.htmlSoldier's heart
Thousands of Iraq war veterans will come home to face serious psychological problems-- and a system that's not ready to help them.
B Y D A N F R O S C H
The first time Kristin Peterson's husband hit her, she was asleep in their bed. She awoke that night a split second after Joshua's fist smashed into her face and ran, terrified and crying, to the bathroom to wipe the blood spurting from her nose.
December 15, 2004
C O V E R F E A T U R E
When she stuck her head back into the bedroom, there he was--punching at the air, muttering how she was coming after him and how he was going to kill her. Kristin started yelling but Joshua's eyes were closed. He was still asleep.
The next morning Joshua saw the dried blood on his wife. "Oh God," she recalls him saying. "I did that."
Peterson doesn't remember the night or the nightmares. He also can't remember punching his wife again in his sleep a few weeks later, this time driving her front tooth through her lip, all the while murmuring how he'd never go back.
For six months last year, Peterson helped build an oil pipeline across Iraq as a specialist in the Army's 110th Quartermaster Company. On the same highway where Private Jessica Lynch was ambushed, he saw Iraqi soldiers, dead and rotting, dangling out of their tanks. One time Peterson's truck broke down and he was surrounded by a group of Iraqi children, some throwing rocks, others toting AK-47s. "I kept thinking, 'God, I can't handle this,'" the 24-year-old says with a hollow laugh.
Since Peterson came back to Richmond Hill, Ga., in August 2003, these memories have turned him into a man Kristin often doesn't recognize--a man who lashes out in anger at her and their 21-month-old son, whose awful dreams tell him to beat his wife because, in his sleep, she's an Iraqi.
There are thousands of Operation Iraqi Freedom soldiers across the country like Joshua Peterson. They are coming home with minds twisted by what they've seen and done in Iraq.
A December 2003 Army study published in The New England Journal of Medicine found that approximately 16 percent of soldiers returning from Iraq were suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), a psychologically debilitating condition causing intense nightmares, paranoia and anxiety. But that study is already out of date.
Now, after a particularly bloody summer and fall, many military and mental health experts predict the rate of PTSD will actually run nearly twice what the Army study found, approximately the same level suffered by Vietnam veterans. Others think it could spike even higher and note that rarely before has such a dramatic rate of PTSD manifested so early.
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