The Boston Globe
Sunday 06 January 2008
Medical reservists return, changed indelibly by war.
No mortar rounds slam into Kim Luce's two-story house in Central Massachusetts. No medevac helicopters throb outside at 3 a.m. No wounded soldiers moan to get her attention. After a year as a chief ward master for an American military hospital in Iraq, Army Reserve Master Sergeant Luce is back in her spacious Shrewsbury home, where the kitchen smells like cinnamon rolls and her four shih tzus - her "babies," she calls them - follow her wherever she goes.
But rather than bring relief after a year of treating mangled war victims, Luce's quiet suburban life is closing in on her. She barely sleeps. She is afraid to be alone. She misses the adrenaline rush of running a hospital under fire, and the sense of purpose she felt when helicopter rotors whipped the dry desert air, bringing in the wounded.
"The pace we were going over there, and then" - Luce made a sound imitating tires screeching on asphalt - "it's like slamming on your brakes and slamming your face against the windshield."
Luce, 42, is one of about 450 members of the 399th Combat Support Hospital, a Massachusetts-based Army Reserve battalion made up of citizen soldiers who normally serve a weekend every month. In 2006, the 399th was mobilized for a year of full-time duty in Iraq, where the medics often came under mortar and rocket fire as they treated more than 30,000 US and Iraqi forces, contractors, civilians, and detainees.
The 399th returned home Oct. 1. Three months later, the soldiers are resuming civilian jobs, reconnecting with loved ones, and returning to something like their state-side routines. But some have had difficulty readjusting to life after fire.
Instead of embracing the freedom of civilian life, they said they missed the structure of the military. Rather than reuniting with old friends, they have isolated themselves, feeling no connection with those who have not gone to war, and yearned for the camaraderie of the battlefield. Some said their civilian jobs lacked the professional satisfaction of piecing back together Iraqi children mangled by bombs or resuscitating American soldiers shattered by bullets.
"Shutting one life off and turning the other on - that doesn't happen in four weeks," said Luce. It took her seven weeks to pack away her uniforms and boots, which she had originally stacked in the middle of her bedroom floor. In late November, her Army-issue plastic trunk, marked "MSG Luce," still sat between her bed and a cabinet decorated with a collection of dolls and a large red Elmo puppet.
Luce has postponed until late January her return to work at Verizon, where she answers calls from customers with disabilities. She says that job will be too emotionally taxing for her now. Instead, she is using her savings to carry out an elaborate house remodeling project that has made her home look - and sound, when the hammering picks up - like the architectural equivalent of a war zone. She said she rarely rests.
"I'm afraid of being quiet and being still. If I'm in that silence I'm afraid I'd go into a depression," Luce said. "Maybe that's why I'm keeping myself busy."
Before Captain Rebecca Scheible left home for her first day back at her civilian job, she did two important things.
First, she promised her 4-year-old daughter, Emma, that this time, she was not going to Iraq. "She made me promise it wasn't the Army today, that I'm just going to work and back," said Scheible, 29, an intensive care unit nurse at the West Roxbury Veterans Administration Medical Center who had left her children Emma, then 3, and Zachary, then 1, in her mother's care while deployed in Iraq. "Army is a four-letter word in our house."
Second, Scheible made sure she brought along the large, heavy denim diaper bag she found in the closet of her Southbridge house after returning from Iraq.
She has put her planner, makeup, wallet, checkbook, pens, and a winter hat in the bag, to bring its weight up to a familiar load, and slings the bag over her right shoulder. She carries it with her everywhere, she said, "so that I don't miss my M16 so much."
"In Iraq, I'd wake up and have my M16 lying next to my bed. I'd put it on and go to work," Scheible said of the 8.79 pound assault rifle used by most American troops in Iraq. When she returned to the United States, "I said, 'I need to make the mental leap.' So I found this diaper bag - it was the biggest comfort coming back."
Scheible, an eight-year veteran of the reserves, plans to leave the military in February. She wants to spend more time with her children, especially Zachary, who had forgotten who she was while she was deployed. At some point, she hopes to go to graduate school and become a nurse practitioner.
"Maybe later," she said dreamily, shuffling down the hospital hall in her black-and-pink scrubs, "I'll downsize to a smaller purse."
On the first weekend of December, Colonel Joseph Blansfield, deputy commander of the nursing service for the 399th, donned his Army uniform and drove from his home in Sharon to the battalion's base in Taunton.
Blansfield did not have to go. The 399th does not have any drills until next month because of a 90-day post-deployment break the Army Reserves has granted the troops in an effort to help them reconnect with their families and rebuild their civilian life.
But going to Taunton was the only way for Blansfield to see fellow soldiers. Unlike most active duty troops, who continue to see one another daily after they return from deployments because they live on or near their military base, members of the 399th live all over the country, and their civilian lives rarely intersect. After a year of dodging mortars side-by-side and treating the victims of war together, such abrupt separation deprives the reservists of an important support network, Blansfield said.
"Staying connected is, in its own way, a way of re-socializing, so that you don't pull the plug on 16 months of military service cold turkey," said Blansfield, 54, a registered nurse and trauma programs manager at the Boston Medical Center.
Other members of the 399th say they feel the same way. Specialist Alison Yeager, 23, a nurse from Marlborough, N.H., misses being surrounded by military friends and knowing that "everyone was going through the same thing. Everybody's shoulder was fair game to cry on." Sergeant First Class Richard O'Shea, 51, an IV nurse at the Lemuel Shattuck Hospital in Jamaica Plain, often stops to talk about Iraq with another 399th member, Sergeant George Balzano, 45, a registered nurse who works on the same floor.
In Taunton, Blansfield and several of his friends spent the weekend catching up. Many of their conversations, he said, were about Iraq. He expects many more conversations like that.
"There will always be that shared experience, shared misery, and shared success that will provide this unique bond that we will have," he said.
"Not much to it," said O'Shea, pushing before him a cart loaded with vials, needles, catheters, disinfectant wipes, and a colorful chart depicting blood circulation in an arm. "You look at the arm, you find one that's big, and you stick it."
It was a quiet night shift at Lemuel Shattuck, which treats a lot of prisoners. Police officers guarding prisoner patients exchanged spare, whispered conversations in deserted hallways hung with Christmas-themed banners. A nurse typed something on a computer. O'Shea, who works from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m., received only one call, at 6 in the morning, to draw blood from a patient.
For many members of the 399th, the tour in Iraq was a pivotal experience that changed their lives forever. But O'Shea, whose job in Iraq was to monitor calls from medevac crews and coordinate over the radio with helicopters that brought in casualties, said he feels almost as though he had never left. His life was changed much more profoundly by events that took place in the United States during his deployment: his first son, Daniel, was born in September 2006.
"Iraq seems so distant," said O'Shea, who also had been deployed to the Middle East during the first Gulf war, and to Kosovo in 2001. "I know I was there and everything, but it's not like I had horrific experiences. It's just a deployment."
At first glance, their return from Iraq finally brought marital bliss to Alison and Brian Yeager, who spent their first year of marriage in a closet-sized barracks room on a base outside Saddam Hussein's hometown, Tikrit. They met during the 399th predeployment training in February 2006, got married that May, and left New England to deploy to Iraq three weeks later.
When they came home, the Yeagers rented a comfortable one-bedroom apartment on a historic Newburyport street that runs down to the placid expanse of the Merrimack River delta. They bought plush maroon furniture from Bernie & Phyl's, an entertainment system with a large flat-screen TV and surround-sound system, and a new Hyundai sport utility vehicle. They got a black-and-white kitten named Colby that likes to play fetch.
But war found a way of seeping into their idyllic homecoming.
Specialist Alison Yeager, a licensed practical nurse from Marlborough, N.H., who served as an intensive care unit nurse in Iraq, has nightmares about "rooms full of really hurt people whom I can't help." Sergeant Brian Yeager, 29, whose job as an emergency room nurse meant he was the first to assess trauma patients, has dreams of war victims whose flesh has been ripped apart by shrapnel.
Brian suffers from consistent pain after hurting his lower back while unloading a stretcher with a patient from a helicopter in Iraq. Doctors said he will eventually need to undergo back surgery to correct a bulging disk. He wants to apply for disability, but plowing through bureaucracy at the Veterans Affairs Department has been "very tedious, very confusing," and the paperwork is "really complicated." He finds himself annoyed by the process, more irritable than before he went to war.
At the same time, the couple have had a hard time reconnecting with friends they had before the war. "I don't know that I am motivated enough to go and talk to them," said Brian, who will return to Salem State College this month on the GI bill to study geography. "I was telling a cousin of mine, I just need to be alone, figure out stuff.... I kind of closed myself off. I feel like we're blocking people off in a sense."
This self-imposed isolation is bearing down on his wife, who started working as a night nurse at a Hampton, N.H., nursing home last week. She misses being among people who understand the trauma and pain she has seen.
"The typical 23-year-old woman at the mall thinks about shopping and boys and has just gotten out of college," she said. "And I have gotten out of the Army, and I've been to war, and I'm married."
First Sergeant Shirley Martino, an IV nurse, strolled down the pale linoleum tiles of the cardiac floor carrying a plastic container of wonton soup that belonged to the patient in bed 419. She was taking the soup to the nursing station, where she would heat it up in the microwave.
Three months ago, Martino was in Iraq, treating "small children in our hospital with shrapnel in their bodies." There was an American soldier who had survived a roadside bomb, and who clung to Martino's arms, calling: "What happened, first sergeant, what happened?"
"The last thing he remembers he was standing next to his Humvee," Martino, 57, said. "And I look down and see that he has no legs."
On the hushed cardiac floor of the Merrimack Valley Hospital in Haverhill, where she works, "we don't get mangled bodies, generally speaking," Martino said. Most of her patients are in their 70s and 80s. The care they require is a familiar, quiet routine.
Fellow nurses in Haverhill have asked Martino "how I'm going to survive in this docile atmosphere." She shrugged. "It's still nursing, and that's what I do best."
But she does not expect her work here to ever be as satisfying, professionally and emotionally, as what she and her comrades did in Iraq.
"Think of the lives that those young kids [in Iraq] wouldn't have experienced if we didn't save their lives," she said. "How satisfying is that! How much more profound."
As she spoke, the soup container whirled inside the humming microwave.
"And now I'm heating up his wonton soup," Martino said.
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