And who is this new me?
—Lieutenant Colonel Bill Russell Edmonds, U.S. Special Forces, following twelve months in Iraq, 2005
As they were shaking a year’s worth of Iraqi dust out of their gear and crating it all up to ship home, the soldiers of Task Force Panther each got an unusual letter from their senior enlisted leader. That was Command Sergeant Major Paul Walker, a short, well-muscled man responsible for looking after all the battalion’s enlisted soldiers. In private life, he is a foreman in the coal mines of southwest Pennsylvania. But in Iraq, Paul Walker was foremost a soldier, the kind of guy who is a stickler for discipline and standards of conduct. Who is passionate about protecting his soldiers—and who would push them forward in combat. He would win a coveted Bronze Star Medal for his performance in Iraq.
His soldiers were exhausted but vibrating with giddy jitters about their imminent flight home. The decibel level of grab-ass around Camp Habbaniyah had risen noticeably. Soldiers going outside the wire were taking extra precautions against snipers and IEDs, reluctant to assume any unnecessary risk on their last missions. In a few hours many of them would gather at the chapel where Chaplain Etter would pass out index cards and stubby pencils. Now, though, they sat and read Walker’s letter.
“The life we left eighteen months ago is the life most are hoping to return to,” he wrote. But, he warned, each soldier has been forever changed by the war; the person who now returns is not the same one who left, and all you about-to-be veterans will have to absorb the good and bad of your war experiences, figure out who you are now, and how your new selves fit into civilian life. All that, the sergeant major wrote, “is something we will all have to take day by day.”
They were about to discover, as many said later, that as they arrived home they would be as vulnerable to sorrow, regret, guilt, grief, and loss as they were in combat. Moral injury often endures long after the WELCOME HOME! banners are faded and torn. More than that, returning troops often suffer additional moral injuries in the bumpy transition back to the civilian world.
No other event in the lives of men and women at war seems to reach a climax as powerful as going home: so hotly anticipated, so quickly accomplished, so unexpectedly difficult. For months it’s all you can dream about, spending hours constructing elaborate plans to indulge in every delicious fantasy denied in a war zone. Sleep. Good food. Sex. Finally it’s time, and there’s the dizzying one-day flight home. Kids and wives and mothers in their holiday finery, many clutching newborns, throng air bases and parking lots to receive the returning troops, and as they arrive, emotions just explode. The first hugs are delicious, the first beers and steaks, the awkward attempts at intimacy—the newness of it all that goes by in a flash.
Then comes what can be a crushing sense of loss. First you notice the s-l-o-w-n-e-s-s of home; its flatness. Nothing to jolt the adrenaline. Life seems to have faded from sharp color to fuzzy gray, so different from war, where life marches to an insistent, purposeful drumbeat, where decisions often hold life-or-death consequences: step here and your legs are blown off; step there and you’re safe for another minute. At home: Froot Loops or Cheerios? And it’s too quiet here: gone is the background rumble of generators, the familiar bellowing of sergeants, the whine and growl of truck engines, rattling gunfire, thudding helicopters. Instead, an empty apartment or a house whose occupants have left for work and school.
Also gone: your stature as a successful warrior. An army sergeant who’s taken his squad to war and brought his soldiers back safe? No civilian can understand the field wisdom, the tactical cunning, that accomplishment demanded; the patience required, the hours waiting sleepless and rigid with worry as a team is late returning from night patrol. The pressure-tested leadership it all took. For some, leadership in wartime, responsibility for a few soldiers or hundreds, is the high point of a lifetime. Yet that skill, and the authority it conferred, seem to belong back there in the war; here at home the sergeant is just another guy nursing a late-night beer, or he’s the unemployed new father trying to juggle rent and car payments, the electric bill and a wife who’s used to operating on her own.
All this can add new bruises to your sense of right and wrong, your image of yourself as a good and deserving person. Being home may reawaken feelings of regret or guilt for having left the family for the adventure of war. Grief for lost friends, deferred while you’re at war, can come flooding back. And being suddenly immersed in a society that’s either given up on the war or is ignoring it can spark feelings of anger and betrayal.
The jagged emotional transition from war to home is often accompanied by the dull ache of sorrow. At war, you rely on intimate companions for guidance, support, understanding, comic relief, and, literally, your life. And you give it back. Merry Christmas, Doss! That’s suddenly gone, a loss especially painful for those like Darren Doss who leave military service behind and for the National Guard and reserve troops, like Jake Sexton, who scatter individually to their small towns and urban neighborhoods rather than returning home together to Fort Bragg or Camp Lejeune. The abrupt disappearance of beloved comrades can cause lasting grief whose source, for tough-guy combat veterans, can be hard to identify aloud. Then there’s the guilt of explaining why even the most loving and sensitive partner or spouse cannot fill the role of combat buddies. As an army lieutenant, Brandon Friedman commanded infantrymen in Afghanistan and Iraq on long combat tours. When he came home, he found it difficult to sleep when he wasn’t in a roomful of men for company. Try explaining that to a girlfriend, he told me with a sheepish grin.
Families mirror these experiences. Homecoming is desperately anticipated, but in the days and weeks afterward, many families struggle to accommodate the new person who’s come to live with them, incapable of really understanding what he or she has been through and unable to describe their less dramatic but still difficult and lonely lives at home. The clash of needs can be emotionally painful, and rebuilding relationships an added challenge.
The short distance from dusty battlefield back into the civilian world of clean pavement, unthreatening crowds, green lawns, ATMs, and air-conditioning can be disorienting, which the marines of One-Six learned quickly as they finished their commitment to the Marine Corps after they returned from Afghanistan in the summer of 2010. “You get a sheet of paper and go around and get things checked off, you turn in your weapons and stuff, they print off your DD214 [discharge record]. I came back to the barracks, packed up, and drove home with my sister,” Doss told me. “Two weeks before, I’m in Afghanistan. Now I’m at a keg party. Absolutely insane.”
But the exhilaration wears off. “I was so happy to be out, to be alive, and then you start to miss it. Little things, how simple it all was. My friends at home had no idea what I did.” Doss paused, and the rest came out in a rush. “For me, it was Afghanistan on my mind all the time, and I did want to talk about it, but the few times I tried to tell them stories that happened, it would be really awkward and they wouldn’t know what to say. Like my friend getting his legs blown off. What do you say to that? It made me not want to talk about it, ever. And that sucks.”
Doss told me that while he was in Afghanistan, all his friends back home in Schenectady got into heroin, and when Doss came home he got into it, too, and did heroin for three years before he was able to quit. “I went to rehab twice and to detox five times and every time I relapsed the first day out,” he said. Finally, he said, the VA put him on a heavy regime of Suboxone, an opioid medication designed to treat addiction, and he’s been clean for three years. But not out of trouble. In April 2015, almost five years after returning from the war, he hit a bad patch. “I was in bed with a girl and I got up to look at my phone and there on Facebook was a picture of our [Afghan] interpreter who got shot in the face. That pushed me over the edge. I’m just real sensitive about death since losing my dad. I know that pain. I know that ache. There was a little entrance hole in his cheek and I didn’t want to see the exit hole, it would be bad… after that I kind of lost it.” Doss ended up in an inpatient VA program for PTSD for several weeks. “It was a lockdown,” he said. “They take away your shoelaces.”
I had seen it over and over again: people who performed not just well but extraordinarily well in wartime military service, who came home, got out of the military—and just floundered. Some were able to find their footing in a new life and move on; others were not. One of these was Rosendo DeLeon, the marine gunnery sergeant from One-Six who befriended and watched over me in Afghanistan in 2008. DeLeon was a big man, his round face almost always split into a grin, always ready with a word of encouragement when I started to droop after hours on the move. At war he was indefatigable, his good humor and sunny disposition unquenchable. He came back from Afghanistan, got out of the marines, acquired a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, and grew an immense black beard. I didn’t know it at the time, but he was carrying a heavy load of guilt and sorrow for marines killed in action, young men he thought of as his sons whom he felt he should somehow have protected.
Gunny DeLeon, which is how I think of him, grew up in Kingsville in South Texas. His family fondly called him Gordie, short for gordito, “chubby,” but he wasn’t fat, just big. He ran cross-country and won scholarships to college but joined the marines instead, thinking he wasn’t college material. He did well in the marines; he especially loved training and mentoring young marines. But in 2008 he told me he was getting tired, and in 2011 he retired as a master sergeant. Then things slowly fell apart. He got work as a civilian contractor at Camp Lejeune, but for someone who’d reveled in the position of a senior enlisted leader of marines, it wasn’t the same. He felt his experience and talents were being wasted. At one point he got word that a marine buddy had been killed, sending him into a black depression. He felt he was trying to come up for air and kept getting pushed back down. He started running with a motorcycle gang. People close to him noticed the sparkle had gone out of his soul; his eyes looked empty. It looked like he was trying to hide himself behind that big black beard.
It’s impossible to untangle the emotional strands of a worsening situation like this. But from what I could piece together, it appears that Gunny DeLeon gradually grew apart from his wife and two teenage children. He had been diagnosed with PTSD and was seeing a counselor once or twice a week, but he hated going and hated taking the medication they gave him. I don’t know if Gunny DeLeon had PTSD or not, but the VA’s therapy and pills didn’t seem to help with the moral injury that wore him down: his grief and guilt over the deaths of his buddies, his deep sense of regret and loss for having quit the corps, and his shame at having to take the medication.
Around Christmas of 2014, something set him off into a violent frenzy that brought the MPs to his house in Jacksonville. But then DeLeon seemed to pull himself together. He got into a program for struggling marine veterans. When he came back, friends showed up to offer help and support. He told a cousin he hadn’t realized how many people cared about him and how many people’s lives he had touched. He shaved off his beard.
One rainy night in May 2015, he was riding in Jacksonville, just outside Camp Lejeune. According to the Jacksonville police, just after midnight he drove his motorcycle at fifty-five miles per hour through a red light and into an intersection, where he struck an SUV. He died five days later. Whether he crashed on purpose or not can’t be known. But one thing is certain. In the end, one family member said, “he was so broken that nobody knew how to help him.”
Over dinner one night, the man who commanded the 1st Battalion of the 110th Infantry, Pennsylvania National Guard—Sergeant Major Walker’s outfit—tried to explain what it’s like to return home. It was five years after the battalion flew back from Iraq, and Loris Lepri was able to step back and look at it dispassionately. For outsiders to understand, he said, you have to know what came before, what you are returning home from.
Loris Lepri takes his names from his English mother, Anne Loris, and his Italian father, Luciano. When Loris took the battalion to western Iraq in June 2005, into the bloody heart of the Sunni insurgency, Anne and Luciano, who owned an Italian restaurant near Scranton, were frantic with worry. Luciano’s friend and family doctor always inquired whether Loris was okay out there in all that fighting in Iraq. Each time he asked, Luciano would burst into tears. After a while, the doctor learned to stop asking.
Luciano Lepri was right to worry. His son’s battalion, after a year of combat, soon would be burning their regrets and sorrows. From the outset, the sudden violence of Iraq was nightmarish. Loris Lepri lost his first soldier barely two weeks after the battalion commenced combat operations out of Camp Habbaniyah, just off the main road between the hotly contested cities of Falluja and Ramadi. Staff Sergeant Ryan Ostrom, a crewman on an M1A1 tank, was shot and killed by a sniper on that main road, designated Main Supply Route (MSR) Michigan. Ostrom was the son of a highly respected senior Pennsylvania National Guard NCO who had retired a few months earlier. Ryan was twenty-five, a junior in college, a chemistry major. Chaplain Doug Etter held the dying soldier in his arms and administered last rites. The battalion was protected by a marine bomb-disposal team, and in September an IED blast killed one of them, Marine Sergeant Brian Dunlop. In early November the popular and charismatic Marine Gunnery Sergeant Darrell Boatman, also a bomb-disposal tech, died of injuries sustained in a bomb blast two days earlier.
“We were taking two or three IEDs a day,” Lepri told me. “Between small-arms fire and IEDs, it was waking up every day and thinking, God, please, don’t let anything happen to any of my guys today.” Apart from soldiers killed, the battalion’s troops collected more than sixty Purple Hearts for battle wounds. Lepri held ultimate responsibility for his soldiers. When he took over from the battalion that Task Force Panther replaced, “It was like Wow! This is my responsibility now.” Like most combat commanders, he found he was short of manpower to do the job he was assigned. The previous unit was short of troops, and Lepri had even fewer than that. He had one hundred square miles to cover and not enough soldiers to do it. Not enough to protect local civilians. Not enough to keep his own guys safe.
As battalion commander, Lepri didn’t draw up the operations plans; his lieutenants and captains did that. But he scrutinized them and approved them, and he knew which areas were the most dangerous and which soldiers were assigned to patrol down those streets and alleys. “It was difficult watching them go out the gate, difficult when the radios would light up in the tactical operations center and [the patrols] would start calling stuff in, and that was the most hair-raising thing,” he said. Casualties were identified by each soldier’s identification number, and the numbers would come in over the radios, and Lepri would look up to see who it was, which soldier he’d sent out who wouldn’t be coming back. The battalion log recorded the grim details. November 2, Specialist Tim Brown was killed when an IED exploded beneath his Humvee on MSR Michigan. November 10, Michael C. Parrott was killed by a sniper while riding on a tank. The battalion’s quick-reaction force (QRF) responded; in the subsequent melee, Sergeant Joshua Terando, twenty-seven, was shot in the mouth and killed instantly. Several weeks later, a convoy of four Humvees was returning to Camp Habbaniyah; there was an argument about the safest route to take, and the lead Humvee mistakenly swung onto a road that hadn’t been cleared by the bomb-disposal guys. An IED and fireball erupted beneath the convoy’s last Humvee. The turret gunner, Specialist John Dearing, was killed instantly; four others rolled out of the wreckage on fire. Chaplain Etter arrived to administer last rites and comfort the survivors. The four badly burned soldiers were medevaced to the burn unit at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio and, one by one, succumbed to their wounds: Spencer Akers, Joshua Youmans, Matthew Webber, and, finally, Duane Dreasky, who had lived on for eight months.
As the casualties mounted, Loris Lepri said, “it becomes more difficult because you don’t want to be sending missions out where they’re likely to have guys killed, so you—there’s this balancing of what you really need to do and also how to safeguard your people.” Sleep—any kind of rest, really—came hard for Lepri and other commanders. You had to be constantly on alert. “They’re always seeding IEDs while you’re not watching,” he once said of the insurgents.
Then, suddenly, Loris Lepri was home. The battalion flew back to the United States on a Wednesday in June 2006; after paperwork, medical exams, and other chores, they were home the following Tuesday. “It was like ‘Okay, here are your papers, grab your stuff and get on the bus and go home,’” he said. “I was sitting there with my duffel bag, thinking that yesterday I was a battalion commander. Now I’m just another joe on the bus.”
In late 2007, a year after Loris Lepri’s battalion came home, army colonel David Sutherland was finishing up a fifteen-month deployment in Iraq as commander of an army brigade task force of twelve thousand troops. It had been an extremely dangerous and difficult time, and coming home was a gut-wrenching emotional plunge. One day recently he sat over lunch to explain. “What keeps us alive on the battlefield is anger, paranoia, hypervigilance, sleeplessness,” he said. “And the sleeplessness, paranoia, hypervigilance, being aggressive, doesn’t just turn off when you get off a bus and walk across a parade field and link up with your family. It takes time. That’s peanut sauce there for the calamari.”
Chewing appreciatively, he went on. “The bonds that exist on the battlefield are unlike any bonds most people can ever imagine, bonds of trust, honesty, candor, humor. Then you come home with those who are closest to you from these horrendous and vile experiences, and those meaningful relationships are ripped apart. Ripped apart. And you no longer have that support network, and your family may not relate to what you’ve been through.”
Once, after he’d been home for a couple of years, Sutherland and his wife, Bonnie, went to an event at a place in downtown Washington, D.C. It was small, packed wall to wall with people. “You couldn’t even move,” Sutherland said. “Afterward I was so high-strung, it’s the first fight she and I had in probably two and a half, three years, and it was all my fault because I was aggressive. I didn’t feel comfortable. Because the last time I was in a setting like that a suicide bomber detonated his vest killing twenty-four and wounding thirty-six.” His reaction to that stress was powerful and real, but it wasn’t PTSD and it wasn’t mental illness. It was a normal and understandable, if unfortunate, reaction, a strand of the moral injury Sutherland brought back from combat.
I interrupted: “Who wouldn’t have felt that way?” and Sutherland shot back, “Fuck yeah!”
For a few months after he got back home to Pennsylvania, Loris Lepri didn’t talk much about the war, the killing and dying, about his inability to protect his own soldiers let alone the local Iraqi civilians who needed protection. Or about his late-night nerves as he sat in the tactical operations center and waited for patrols to call in with casualty reports. He was aloof. Finally his wife got fed up. “I think she was afraid to ask me,” he said. “But she finally kind of tore me a new one, and that made me snap out of it. After that I started to open up a little.”
But it wasn’t until their son, Loris Lepri II, graduated from West Point and went on to serve in Afghanistan that Loris really got it, understood what the wives and families go through and how communicating and sharing really is key to reentry into normal life. Now it was the former battalion commander who worried constantly about his son in combat. In fact he was terrified that one day would come a knock on the door, and there would be Chaplain Etter in his Class As, the army’s jacket-and-tie uniform, to deliver the news that his son was a battle casualty.
The role reversal—now he was the one waiting at home with a loved one at war—made him realize he’d been “kind of selfish. I realized I’d been so focused on what I was doing in Iraq that I hadn’t given my wife much time. It was a stunning realization… Boy! She was really going through a lot. Now I know what it’s like. I needed to be a friend and be more open.”
One of Loris Lepri’s young captains in Iraq was Brad Ruther. A West Point graduate, class of 1998, he’d become disillusioned with the army and eventually resigned his commission to work in commercial real estate in Ohio. Ruther was a member of the Individual Ready Reserve (IRR), those former soldiers who are unpaid and do not drill or train and are the last category to be summoned back to active duty. But one day his father called to say a letter had come from the army. Read it to me, Brad said, and after listening for a few seconds protested, “Don’t be funny!” It was no joke, and he was soon on his way to Iraq with the 1st Battalion, 110th Infantry, Pennsylvania National Guard, where he commanded the battalion’s quick-reaction force and the base protection force.
Those were jobs that tested him in every way. Camp Habbaniyah was often under attack by small arms or mortars or rockets, and his teams would leap to the defense in case it was a major assault. The QRF routinely went out with the bomb-disposal guys in response to IEDs and also was the emergency rescue force when troops got in trouble. For the soldiers and for Ruther himself, it was constant stress.
The death of Sergeant Joshua Terando, who served on the QRF, hit him especially hard. Like Ruther, Terando was recalled from the IRR and reported for a war tour when his country needed him. When a loader on one of the battalion’s tanks was shot in the head and killed instantly, the battalion launched the QRF to find and kill the sniper. Ruther disagreed sharply with this decision, as his previous training as an infantry officer taught him that the proper tactic in reacting to a sniper was never to break contact—especially in cases like this when the location of the sniper was unknown. The soldiers at the scene should handle it, he thought. Ruther immediately called the battalion headquarters, protesting the decision to send out the QRF and asking for them to be recalled—arguing that searching for a sniper in an unknown location was a bad idea for many reasons. But his protest fell on deaf ears—his guys were already on their way, Terando among them. Ruther deployed with the second QRF platoon and sped to the area of contact. By the time he got there, Terando, who had climbed into the building they called the Old Potato Factory to hunt down the sniper, was shot in the mouth.
That evening at Camp Habbaniyah, Ruther sat down and wrote a letter to Terando’s dad. This wasn’t something that had been taught at West Point. Ruther did the best he could, praising Terando as a model soldier and leader. But he included his personal e-mail address, and Terando’s dad, a retired soldier, wrote back to demand details about how his son had died. “I sent him a lot of stuff that was probably classified,” Ruther told me. “But I didn’t care. The guy lost his son!” When the battalion returned from Iraq, Ruther called the Terando family and even attended a Terando-family wedding in Chicago—a relationship he nurtured as much for his sake as for theirs. “I had a lot of guilt for a long time,” he told me. If he had argued harder against sending out the QRF, he felt, Terando might still be alive. He wondered over and over, Did I screw up?
Ruther had been back from Iraq two years or so when he began jerking awake when his watch alarm mysteriously went off every night around the same time. It was the watch he’d used in Iraq, but he hadn’t set the alarm. “Finally I was like When did Josh get killed? And holy shit! Even with the time difference, my watch was going off within fifteen minutes of when Joshua got killed.” When he told his wife, she suggested he call and check in with Terando’s dad. The next day Ruther called, and they talked. After that the alarm stopped going off.
“But there are some things that just don’t go away,” Ruther told me. Guilt and sorrow cut deep. And while we might often tell Brad Ruther that he shouldn’t feel guilty, that he did nothing wrong, and that death in war is inevitable, his sorrow and guilt are a lasting moral injury.
“My hardest month is November because there are anniversary dates in there,” he said. “I tend to be more isolated, I won’t really want to work, I tend to drink more, and the demons come back and I’m always in my dreams fighting. Why the fuck am I dealing with this shit ten years later? I have dreams now that I haven’t had in a long time, with all this stuff about ISIS.”
Even though he hasn’t been diagnosed with PTSD, Ruther has done a twelve-week outpatient PTSD program at the VA and found it helped him think more rationally about the war. “I wish I’d gone earlier,” he said. “I’d encourage anyone to go get counseling for this stuff.”
He still goes to the VA for therapy. “What we did out there was just not normal,” he said. “I don’t think it will ever get better. You’ve just got to live with it.
“The good thing is, pretty much everybody I know has issues. The guys that don’t have issues are the scary ones.”