Women at Arms After Combat, Anguish

Women at Arms
After Combat, Anguish

By DAMIEN CAVE
Published: October 31, 2009
For Vivienne Pacquette, being a combat veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder means avoiding phone calls to her sons, dinner out with her husband and therapy sessions that make her talk about seeing the reds and whites of her friends’ insides after a mortar attack in 2004.


As with other women in her position, hiding seems to make sense. Post-traumatic stress disorder distorts personalities: some veterans who have it fight in their sleep; others feel paranoid around children. And as women return to a society unfamiliar with their wartime roles, they often choose isolation over embarrassment.

Many spend months or years as virtual shut-ins, missing the camaraderie of Iraq or Afghanistan, while racked with guilt over who they have become.

“After all, I’m a soldier, I’m an NCO, I’m a problem solver,” said Mrs. Pacquette, 52, a retired noncommissioned officer who served two tours in Iraq and more than 20 years in the Army. “What’s it going to look like if I can’t get things straight in my head?”

Some psychiatrists say that women do better in therapy because they are more comfortable talking through their emotions, but it typically takes years for them to seek help. In interviews, female veterans with post-traumatic stress said they did not always feel their problems were justified, or would be treated as valid by a military system that defines combat as an all-male activity.

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After Combat, Anguish New York Times

No normal rules of engagement apply in Iraq or Afghanistan. No safe zones or safe jobs to do. Any day on any road a bomb could blow up anywhere. If this was not bad enough, women in the military have to worry about something more. Sexual abuse and sexual assaults. Even if they were not a victim of this, the chances are, they're well aware of some other woman it happened to.

Last year I did a radio program with two female veterans. During the discussion, the fact that many deployed female soldiers were avoiding drinking anything after noon so they would not have to use the latrine at night, showed how deep this fear is.

If you cannot understand how this can happen then think of your own life. When you read about a robbery in your neighborhood, you are more apt to be very vigilant with your own security even though nothing happened to you. You may spend the next days or weeks startled by the sound of a barking dog in the middle of the night with apprehension taking control of your thoughts as you picture hooded thugs lurking around your house trying to get in. You timidly look out of your window only to discover the barking dog is not trying to warn you but simply barking at a cat roaming around. It is the same when you are placed into harms way as it is and then discover someone just like you was victimized by people she was supposed to be able to trust.

When they come home, who can they trust? They feel they cannot trust the government since they are made to fight for whatever they get from the DOD or the VA. They feel they cannot trust friends or family members with what's going on inside of them and then they try to hide it all. They cannot hide the changes. They can only hide the reasons why they changed.

The truly depressing thing in all of this is that this is just the beginning of what is coming as more and more discover they cannot heal on their own and they cannot "get over it" unless they are helped to do it. First they need to be able to trust someone and that is often the hardest thing to do when they feel betrayed by people they trusted already.