shrapnel near Fallujah, then catapulted by a car bomb along her
convoy route and finally struck by pieces of a collapsing mosque hit
by a grenade, the former Army gunner now had one working arm, a
bad leg and a brain that didn’t work too fast. Thirty-four years old,
she rarely left her house near Fort Bragg. “It sucks to think that’s the
way life is going to be, stuck in a rut,” she said. “It seems like a life
sentence.”
Petite with smooth skin, and a friendly, wide mouth, Herrera also
told us that she now had trouble making friends, and on top of that,
she had some serious hair issues. “I used to have long hair but can’t
figure out how to do it with one arm,” she said. “I used to sit on my
hair like Medea. I’m not that girly, but to have it stripped away from
you is hard. I don’t want to go to family weddings because I can’t
look pretty.”
Partridge, the group leader, gave Herrera her marching orders:
“Find someone to bond with. This is your unit now.”
In the days following, more details of their battered lives would
come out during processing, in one-on-one talks or in small groups.
As a general rule, the younger women had seen combat, even though
technically they weren’t supposed to be in combat roles at the time.
That was a central irony of serving in recent wars, and yet, because
they were women, it was often harder for them than for men to get
diagnosed as having combat-related PTSD. Many of the older women
were here because they suffered military sexual trauma (MST). One
was gang-raped by eight men, including her commanding officers,
while stationed in Okinawa; another was attacked in the Navy by her
master-at-arms. Another was assaulted by a civilian while on leave in
Europe. In only one instance did the perpetrators meet justice, and
that was the civilian.
In both types of PTSD, the consequences are similar: life-altering
social, professional and psychological impairments.