War Came Home to Families

It doesn't matter which war they came home from. The truth is, the whole family is part of all of it. My daughter was raised knowing what PTSD is and it was still hard on her. This is a powerful reminder whenever you read stories here, there are usually a lot more people involved in the story you never hear enough about.

When veterans return, their children also deal with invisible wounds of war
Washington Post
By Emily Wax-Thibodeaux
April 16, 2015

In Atlanta, Christian Aguilar, 10, has watched his father, an Iraq Army veteran, be loaded into an ambulance more than a dozen times. He hugs his teachers so often — sometimes 17 times a day — that he’s now receiving therapy for “secondary PTSD,” a common diagnosis for the children of veterans.

Retired Marine Cpl. Donny Daughenbaugh, who suffers from memory loss, stands with daughter Gabby, 11.
(Matt McClain/The Washington Post)

HARTFORD, Conn. — Twice a day, Koen Hughes’s medicine alarm beeps and sputters. He yells out across the kitchen to his father, retired Army Staff Sgt. Jonah Hughes, an Iraq war veteran, who suffers from such a severe brain injury that it’s hard for him to remember things like whether he showered, and sometimes how to shower.

Koen is always there, reminding him to take his anti-seizure pills, nervously double-checking his medicine box and squinting as he monitors his father’s behavior.

Koen is 10.

“Daaad! Your medicine!” pants a frantic Koen, who has a mop of light-brown hair and loves geography, Legos and Indiana Jones.

His burly 38-year-old father wears a black Wounded Warriors T-shirt and pocket pants, and speaks slowly, softly, searching for words his brain has lost.

“Got it,” he answers.

He’s what Koen calls a “wounded parent.” And, the boy says, lowering his blue eyes to the ground, “It’s different than having other kinds of parents.”

In households nationwide, hundreds of thousands of wounded parents have come home from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their children are struggling to navigate the invisible wounds — traumatic brain injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder, which together afflict an estimated 30 percent of the 2.7 million former troops.
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