After combat, new challenge in driver's seat

After combat, new challenge in driver's seat

By James Dao
New York Times
Posted: 01/10/2012 05:47:32 PM PST

PALO ALTO -- Before going to war, Susan Max loved tooling around Northern California in her maroon Mustang. A combat tour in Iraq changed all that.

Back home, Max, an Army reservist, found herself avoiding cramped parking lots without obvious escape routes. She straddled the middle line, as if bombs might be buried in the curbs. Gray sport-utility vehicles came to remind her of the unarmored vehicles she rode nervously through Baghdad in 2007, a record year for U.S. fatalities in Iraq.

"My whole driving behavior changed," Max, 63, said. "I live in a state of anxiety when I'm driving."

For thousands of combat veterans, driving has become an ordeal. Once their problems were viewed mainly as a form of road rage or thrill seeking. But increasingly, erratic driving by returning troops is being identified as a symptom of traumatic brain injury or post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD -- and coming under greater scrutiny amid concerns about higher accident rates among veterans.

The insurance industry has taken notice. In a review of driving records for tens of thousands of troops before and after deployments, USAA, a leading insurer of active-duty troops, discovered that auto accidents in which the service members were at fault went up by 13 percent after deployments. Accidents were particularly common in the six months after an overseas tour, according to the review, which covered the years 2007-10.
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