Robert Gil couldn’t stop his hands from shaking.

In every other respect, he was the tough sergeant in his platoon everyone turned to for strength. “Shake it off,” he told soldiers who came to him for help for combat stress. “You’re going to be alright. It’s not that serious.” But toward the end of his second deployment to Iraq his body began to betray him. It started with hands that trembled so much he accidently ignited a flare inside a Humvee and set the vehicle on fire.

“Take the day off. Get some rest,” his superior advised.

But time-off couldn’t fix this.

For months Robert had played the role of macho soldier. When a suicide bomber’s disembodied hand struck his face, he laughed it off. When the bullets and bombs began flying (a daily occurrence in 2006), Robert was the first to fire back so his soldiers wouldn’t carry the burden of killing someone. At night, when they weren’t under mortar attack, soldiers in his platoon would scream and cry in their sleep. Not Robert.

“I knew something inside me had changed. I felt very cold inside,” he says.

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As an Army intelligence officer stationed in Baghdad, Tenay Guvendiren was never in direct combat, but she was still making life and death decisions. She spent 12 to 14 hour shifts poring over enemy activity, “trying to identify potential kill zones, so our guys can plan their routes effectively and be ready to engage the enemy if necessary. But if I mess up my analysis, soldiers die. Civilians die. Children die.” The weight of those decisions took a toll on her mind, but that wasn’t all.

Tenay was privy to haunting pictures of pregnant women slaughtered by insurgents, horrific debriefings from soldiers who were forced to kill, images of overflowing morgues, and grotesquely burned children.

Through two deployments, Tenay never lost a soldier’s life to enemy fire. But by the end of her second deployment she often found herself locked in a bathroom stall to “cry it out.” As the pressure mounted, she finally snapped:

“I can’t take it anymore!” She screamed as she poured a mountain of pills and reports from her psychiatrist on top of her company commander’s desk. “I’ve done everything I know to do! They keep changing my medication, increasing my dosage, and nothing is working.”

Her doctor agreed and had ordered Tenay to be medevaced in 24 hours. However, Tenay’s commander rejected the medical assessment. He harbored unwarranted suspicions of some illicit activity on her part; instead of approving the evacuation, he initiated an adultery investigation. Tenay was placed on suicide watch and confined to a hospital for five days until her lawyer intervened. Tenay was flown home 12 hours later, but the investigation continued for the next two months. It came back clean.

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In November 2006, Angie Peacock made a call for help.

At this point in her life, the Army veteran had been raped by a fellow service member, served in a combat zone, stripped of her career, and divorced. Multiple suicide attempts had failed; prescription pain pills could no longer numb her pain. So she picked up the phone and called her TriCare health insurance provider.

“I need help. I’m going to kill myself. I can’t stop it,” she says.

Their response: “I’m sorry ma’am. We don’t have a crisis line. It’s Saturday, you’ll have to call back Monday.”

She called a civilian hotline for psychiatric services.

Their response: “I’m sorry ma’am. You’re a veteran. You have to call the VA.”

Angie didn’t want to go to the VA. As a victim of military sexual trauma (MST), she experienced panic attacks when she came in close contact with men in a military atmosphere. But she needed help: “I had to get in there or I was going to die.”

On Monday, she swallowed her fear and got in to see a VA psychiatrist. He immediately acknowledged that Angie’s 17 prescribed medications were too many and found her a bed in the treatment center.

“It was the first time somebody saw I was suffering and actually cared,” Angie recalls.

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The lives of Pam and Mike Estes revolve around the needs of their 27-year-old son Jason. Literally. There is no going out, spur-of-the-moment, for a loaf of bread. A trip to the movies must be carefully planned.

“You can’t even do anything spontaneous in the house,” says Pam. “If he needs to go to the bathroom, I have to drop what I’m doing because he can’t always control it,” she concludes.

This is the reality of caring for a Wounded Warrior living with a severe traumatic brain injury (TBI), both for the present and foreseeable future. Two years after Jason came home from the hospital, he still cannot walk; he cannot shower by himself; he can’t remember what he ate for breakfast. But he’s making progress through therapy and that’s something his parents can cling to.

“We’re hoping he can eventually live on his own,” Pam says, but that’s a goal still years away. Right now, Jason needs maintenance therapy just to prevent him from regressing.

This is the Estes family in 2013. Nine years ago, they were celebrating their only son’s graduation from high school. Both parents tried to talk Jason out of joining the Army because they knew he would deploy quickly, but Jason was adamant.

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“When I saw Pat in the ICU, my heart sank,” says Patty Horan.

Her husband Pat, serving as a Stryker Brigade platoon leader in Iraq, had been deployed for more than a year. Now she stood by his bedside at National Naval Medical Center (Bethesda Naval), trying to be strong for him.

Pat was shot in the left side of his head. Neurosurgeons in Balad were able to remove half his skull and some of the bullet fragments from Pat’s brain, but the injury left him completely disabled. He couldn’t walk. He had total weakness on the right side of his body and lost the right visual field in both eyes. He couldn’t read or speak or even understand language. And there was a very real possibility Pat’s memory loss would be so profound he wouldn’t ever recognize his family.

“I hadn’t seen my husband in … months. I knew our lives were now forever changed. Between gasps and sobs, I wondered how we would travel this dark road of healing alone,” Patty says.

“We were going to meet this injury head on, though,” she explained, “it became my mission to find the best rehabilitation environments and programs for him.”

Only later did it become clear that Pat’s Army career would be cut short by a medical retirement. While Pat received great care, though, the couple experienced “a complete disconnect” between the military’s clinical side and the administrative demands of Pat’s Warrior Transition Brigade (WTB).

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