Drinking. Brawling. Hurting.

In my own small way, I've seen the price of this negligent government policy, coupled with the military stigma against seeking help for psychological distress. I've sat outside the hospital with Pete's friends as they drank heavily, talked about friends' corpses, compared R.I.P. tattoos and fed their psych meds to the squirrels to pass the slow-drip nights. I've held the forehead of my courageous boyfriend, Robert, as he shivered on the cold tile floor of our hotel room, vomiting Scotch, on our last vacation in January, before his most recent deployment. We laughed at his New Year's resolution -- "Don't get blown up" -- but all the while my brain screamed, "This can't be normal!" because, well, my heart knew it wasn't, and because I sensed the deeper pain his jokes masked.

"You don't get the option to not be scarred by war," he recently wrote me from Iraq. "You don't get to shed your uniform and go home like nothing's different. You forever carry the seeds of violence inside."

Those seeds are sprouting like strangle-weed as the rest of America bustles along, debating the fates of Posh Spice and Harry Potter, as if war were just a pixilated thing that happens to far-away Muggles. Some of these weeds can be uprooted: More than 45,000 vets overcame the stigma of PTSD to seek medical help in the first quarter of 2007, and national legislation such as the Wounded Warriors Act promises to funnel more resources toward vets' mental health, if it ever escapes congressional molasses.

But much of the current wars' noxious overgrowth is proving ineradicable, coiling stealthily around our bars, jails, businesses and private lives.

One damning manifestation is traumatic brain injury (TBI), the unforeseen consequence of modern military technologies and equipment such as Kevlar helmets. Sixty percent of all injured vets entering Walter Reed suffer from TBI as a primary or secondary injury, according to the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center.

Three of the four most notorious troublemakers I've gotten to know at R.J. Bentley's are victims of TBI -- a silent disability that receives little of the public sympathy afforded the war's more visible amputees. And there's no snazzy Web site or government program that will undo cranial nerve damage or recover a personality that has fallen off the tip of its own tongue -- slow to remember, quick to violent outbursts, unrecognizable to loved ones.

On a recent night, I loaded up the car with TBI-afflicted friends, including Pete (who, for the record, is funny and smart and kind), and drove to a happy-go-lucky bar in Adams Morgan in the District, where the drinks come with cheerful pink umbrellas.

Approaching the bar, we saw a blond guy with a cast on his wrist. "Hey, you were in Iraq, too?" asked Pete's friend Zach, tapping the cast. The kid looked befuddled. "No -- I just fell at the pool."

The exchange was a perfect reflection of how the true costs of war have been outsourced to a very few Americans, and a great many Iraqis. But it also reminded me that full-scale containment of the wreckage is impossible -- that, as Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe wrote of imperial ventures in years past, "things fall apart."

sarah.scott.stillman@gmail.com

Sarah Stillman, a 2006 Yale graduate,

is a Marshall Scholar writing a doctoral thesis on gender, violence and the media.