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Home but Still Haunted
Trinette Johnson of Clinton, who has post-traumatic stress disorder, served in Iraq with the D.C. National Guard: "It's almost like I'm there but I'm not there sometimes."
(Andrea Bruce - The Washington Post)
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But the enemy was elusive. She never fired her M-16.
Unexpectedly, in January 2004, she was shipped home three months early, sidelined with severe kidney stones. Later, at Walter Reed, the dreams started: violent dreams, with exploding mortars and hordes of barking dogs. She mentioned them to a doctor.
This was while she was living on the hospital grounds, seeing specialists and worrying about whether anyone in her unit had been injured or killed. She called her unit in Iraq every day. But she had not seen her kids.
A counselor prodded her to visit them -- three were being cared for by Johnson's sister in Falls Church, and one was in Richmond with the child's paternal grandmother. None of the children lived with their fathers.
"Mommy! Mommy!" her youngest daughter, then 2, shrieked during a visit in Falls Church, climbing all over her.
Johnson had been a mother since she had her son at age 14. Now she felt overwhelmed. She rose to leave.
"I can't do this," she told her sister.
In her car, she sobbed, wondering how she could feel so disconnected. "I realized that I just walked out on my babies."
* * *
In nearly 3 1/2 years of war, more than 137,000 female troops have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, some exposed to the most profound stresses of combat: ambushes, mortars, bombs, fallen comrades. They have fired M-16s and grenade launchers, killed people and been shot at.
As these women have returned home, Army researchers studying the psychological fallout of Iraq have noted a surprising trend in early studies: Women appear to be showing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental health troubles at roughly the same rates as men.
