Female veteran fights an invisible injury

Female veteran fights an invisible injury
Angel Harris returned from Afghanistan eight years ago pregnant and — like thousands of other female veterans — with a case of PTSD, a disorder that took six years to diagnose. The military has only recently begun to offer women the same PTSD benefits as men.

By Faye Fiore, Los Angeles Times
April 9, 2011
Reporting from Williamsport, Pa.— The Bullfrog Brewery is crowded for lunch and tables are scarce, but former Army Sgt. Angel Harris finds one where she can sit with her back to a wall and still see out a window. She isn't sure what she's watching for. A sniper maybe, or an ambush.

This is downtown Williamsport — the Appalachian hamlet where Little League was born — not the sort of place where people wait around for something awful to happen. But that's the way Harris has viewed the world since she returned from Afghanistan eight years ago carrying her unborn son and a case of PTSD.

The baby was easy to figure out. A home pregnancy test administered in a camp latrine saw to that. The post-traumatic stress disorder took more than six years to diagnose. Women are not permitted to serve in direct ground combat in the U.S. armed forces, so by military reasoning, they weren't likely to suffer from combat-related trauma.

Except they do.

"I was one tough broad," says Harris, 34, who did a tour in Kosovo and one in Afghanistan, where she was the first female combat photographer deployed by the Army. "I was a bartender. I bounced people. I had no fear. Now, sometimes I'm afraid to leave my house."

Harris is one of more than 230,000 women to serve in Afghanistan or Iraq since 2001, about 15% of the U.S. forces to be deployed there. More than 750 have been wounded in action and 137 killed. Thousands more — 20% by the military's count — came home with PTSD, a debilitating anxiety disorder that, for female veterans, was at one time almost exclusively caused by sexual assault, not combat.
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Female veteran fights an invisible injury