Gripping her steering wheel and driving at high speeds with knuckles clenched so tight that the circulation of blood to her hands was cut short, Diana Rider, 33, glanced down and noticed her fists were white and numb.
The U.S. Army veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom later realized that her intense panic response was caused by the dead animal she passed on the street while driving.
Rider has experienced many violent flashbacks since she returned from the war front, causing her to relive multiple traumatic events she bore witness to in Iraq.
She served in Iraq at the start of the war in 2003 for 14 months and was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder following her service, and still suffers when subtle reminders at home pull her back into the battleground.
“I was almost killed many times ““ in a lifetime, people do not have to deal with death in their face multiple times,” Rider said. “I was in the middle of a riot where groups of people were attacking me trying to steal my weapon, and another time a bomb exploded only 50 yards away from me.”
The intense stress of multiple traumas and near-death experiences are trademarks of PTSD, a stress disorder that follows an experience in which one believes that they may be killed, said Judith Broder, psychiatrist and founder of the Soldiers Project, a volunteer group of mental health professionals who treat combat veterans free of charge.
“It becomes complicated since troops are deployed and placed in potentially life threatening situations all the time, putting them in a state of hyper-vigilance,” Broder said. “When they come home from battle, they realize something is wrong and what was normal in danger becomes pathological at home.”
Many soldiers who are currently serving in Iraq say that the transition back to home after months of intensity is difficult.
“The reason PTSD is rising is not only due to more awareness about the issues, but due to the longer and multiple separations from the community which are protective against PTSD,” Broder said. “The normal human connection is necessary.”
John Woo, 26 and a UCLA alumnus of 2004, is currently serving in Iraq. Woo said that being deployed for a year or more at a time is an intense experience for all soldiers, especially those who have families at home, and adjusting back home is hard.
“It can be hard to talk about the types of experiences you have in a war, but that social support is important,” Woo said.
Social support has been shown to act as a buffer against PTSD, helping people overcome difficulty and trauma, said Raphael Rose, assistant professor of clinical psychology at UCLA.
“PTSD is one of the only psychiatric disorders where we actually know one of the causes is a traumatic event,” Rose said. “It comes down to the frequency and intensity of the trauma, and the military is a group always being exposed to danger.”
There have also been reports in recent months that may give PTSD more of a biological, rather than psychological, component.
David Hovda, director of the Brain Injury Research Center at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine, said that traumatic brain injuries are very prevalent in returning war veterans from Iraq, the long-term effects of which are just beginning to be assessed.
Congress gave $300 million last year for research into traumatic brain injury and PTSD to understand what has been happening when soldiers return home.
Hovda said that thousands of service members could potentially be returning home with long-lasting problems, ranging from debilitating cognitive deficits to severe headaches and depression, to subtler personality changes and memory deficits.
“The military became interested because we developed an approach that found the cells after brain injury and those that survive become more vulnerable to more injury,” Hovda said.
“They want to understand the effects of blast injury so they know how to better explain the problems soldiers experience when they get home.”
It is the fear of sharing their experiences that many military men and women feel when they return, Broder said.
Broder has sat down with many returning veterans, and has found that most just need someone to share their experiences with, but they cannot because they fear that their family will not understand.
“The most heart-wrenching to me is that they feel bad and monstrous, but we show them slowly that their deeds were the normal duties of a soldier,” Broder said.
Many of the traumas have been events like seeing a close friend be severely mutilated or having to kill children or civilians.
Those are some of the common and repeated stories, Broder said, and are forever haunting returning soldiers.
Reminders at home can be as simple as a barbecue, setting off a cascade of cues and memories of the explosions and deaths they saw.
For Rider, who was in charge of maintaining accountability for prisoners of war that were kept in American-run Iraqi prisons, her situation in Iraq became unbearable.
One of the prisons she worked in toward the end of her deployment was Abu Ghraib, an Iraqi prison Rider said was under enemy fire and danger every night.
“It was nerve-racking to be in an environment where you are constantly on guard and under attack, I couldn’t take anymore,” Rider said.
It was the advice her mother sent her in a letter that Rider said got her through, and is the advice she gives all those that are either dealing with their problems on the war front or at home.
“Take things day by day, if that doesn’t work, take it hour by hour, minute by minute, then second by second,” Rider said.