Rebuilding their lives

It was October 2005. Nearly a year had passed while they were abroad. The men would need a break, a chance to do nothing. But so would the women. They had been dealing with babies and budgets and busted pipes all on their own.

What's more, the veterans were apt to exhibit symptoms of post-combat stress, including fits of anger and anxiety. That was natural. But if it persisted, it could become a problem.

"You've all changed," said David R. Hulteen of the Army Career and Alumni Program, a bald Vietnam-era veteran with a flowing white beard. "And so has your family. So has everything."

The veterans of the Philadelphia-based National Guard unit looked sleepy and bored as they slumped on hard chairs in the old base chapel. Here they were in South Jersey, an hour's drive from home, maybe less. The autumn landscape beckoned, but they had to sit and listen, during days of debriefings, as one speaker after another told them how hard being a civilian again was going to be.

"It's sometimes just as tough to be back home," said Bonnie Reed of Army Community Services.

Tough? No one wanted to hear it.

"I just wanted to go home," said Sgt. Lorenzo Martinez.

Martinez, like others, could not visualize the road ahead. He could not know that, months later, flashing back to a sniper incident in Iraq, he would find home to be a deeply threatening place.

"I dreamt of this place," Staff Sgt. David Jock said.

Nine days before his first Christmas home, the Alpha Company medic was nursing a beer at a bar in tiny Oxford, Chester County. It was where Jock felt most at home since coming back.

He had survived the Aug. 9, 2005, attack in which four men had been killed, and his left shoulder still hurt where the ligaments had been torn when his humvee rolled into a bomb crater.

A slight man with sinewy muscles, Jock said he was dealing with guilt - guilt that he had made it, guilt that he had felt "glad it wasn't me."

He had not felt able to return to his civilian job as a paramedic. After seeing so much blood in Iraq, he didn't think he could handle the flashbacks he was sure the work would bring. Feeling bad was weighing him down.

He and his wife, Susan, shared a twin house with her disabled grandmother up the street from the tavern. They were having a hard time.

They had been married only a year before he was called up, and they had spent their first anniversary packing his uniforms and toiletries for Iraq. Then he had been away almost 18 months.

Susan, now pregnant, thought Jock was drinking too much.

"We need helmets when we clash," he said.

Several other Alpha Company veterans had returned to find their marriages over. Some marriages that had been weak to start had not stood up to the stresses of the long separation.