AP: Women Face Emotional Wounds Of War

[Hissyspit]

http://my.earthlink.net/article/nat?guid=20061203/457259d0_3ca6_1552620061203-569254187

Women Face Emotional Wounds of War
By SHARON COHEN (AP National Writer)
From Associated Press
December 03, 2006 3:54 PM EST

CHICAGO - The nightmares didn't start until months after Alicia Flores returned home. The images were stark and disturbing: In one dream, a dying Iraqi man desperately grabbed her arm. In another, she was lost in a blinding sandstorm.

Sometimes, Flores awakened to discover her mouth was dust-dry - as if she were really stumbling through the scorching, 120-degree desert.

The nightmares bring Flores back to Iraq, and her service in the Army's 92nd Chemical Company. She was just 19 when her unit arrived there. Now 23, she's left with memories of women and children being killed, of hauling bodies, of shooting a teenage Iraqi fighter. ("It was him or me," she says.)

- snip -

But when Christensen returned last winter, she had a hard time negotiating her domestic life, she says, because she was so depressed.

One of her wartime duties had been working next to the mortuary in Kuwait where she routinely saw flag-draped coffins of dead soldiers. "You'd see their possessions in a packet, their date of birth," she says. "They were kids - 19, 20, 21 - that was hard. They send you home and expect you to live your life normally," she adds. "You can't. Well, maybe some people can. I wasn't able to."

Christensen says she had panic attacks and hated driving, fearing she'd run red lights - something done in convoys she was on in Iraq - with her daughters in the car.

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[Hissyspit]

1. .

[cynatnite]

2. Damn...

I hate this fucking war. :cry: