By Kai Ma Illustration by Eunice Choi
During his one-year deployment in Iraq, Sgt. Joseph Chang knew exactly how to handle a mortar attack. When the shrill siren warned of incoming rounds, he would dart to the ground to minimize potential injuries. Even when the mortar landed a mile away, Chang could hear the loud, piercing boom. The ground would shake.
After his first couple weeks, however, Chang would hear the siren and laugh. He, along with the other soldiers, realized that it didn’t matter how they reacted; they had no idea where the mortar was going to land. According to them, survival was often based on sheer, dumb luck.
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“So I thought, ‘Forget it, I’m tired of this,’” he says. “If we keep feeling the fear of getting killed, we can’t carry on. By instinct, we suppress. So, by nature, after a few months, you feel nothing. You’re emotionless. A zombie.”
Starting in 2005, Chang was stationed in Baqubah, a small town 30 miles north of Baghdad, as an Army Postal Operations Sergeant and squad leader. He was 31 years old.
It was a place both foreign and familiar. The palm trees reminded him of California, where he’d lived after emigrating from Seoul as a teenager. The kids running and playing on the streets mirrored Korea in the ‘70s. Nearby was a small body of water, a vegetable farm, and a large mosque. “You’d see a tire shop, a goat sitting in front of the yard,” recalls Chang. “Then you leave town, and it’s a desert. Dirt and dust, everywhere.”
Despite the constant threat, he never witnessed bloodshed; and, he was never shot at, nor did he kill. “I prayed so hard for that,” he says. Still, he’d heard the stories: tankers hit by rocket launchers, horrible massacres. Then, there were the close calls: the car bombing by his gate, or when mortar fire blasted the front of the housing unit where he was drinking coffee with a friend.
Chang returned to Hacienda Heights, California, on October 24, 2006. His daughter Hana, who was born during his deployment, was almost a year old. Now home, he noticed a hypersensitivity to sound, especially sharp ones, such as raised voices or tires popping on the road. The freeways appeared violent and dangerous – the speeding vehicles, how drivers cut each other off.
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His wife told him he was different. “I don’t understand totally what he went through,” says Yeri Chang. “He came back and had a baby to take care of, had to find a job and go to school. It was hard for him to adjust. He’s not the same person that I married.”
“And I was different,” Joseph acknowledges. “I had become more spiritual and had more respect for life. But I used to be more compassionate. I used to be patient.”
Now, anger came easily. News reports on the war would agitate him. Chang would feel paralyzed, unable to focus.
Then, there was the lethargy. “When I was there, I had a sense of purpose. I had soldiers to lead, a mission to accomplish, a job to do,” says Chang, who re-enrolled as a student at California State University, Fullerton upon his return. “Back here, I was in civilian clothes and a backpack, walking around campus. I felt numb and anonymous.”
Last year, a RAND Corp. study found that nearly 20 percent of military service members who have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan (one in five veterans) reported symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder or depression. In 2007, the Pentagon reported that there was a 50 percent rise in PTSD cases compared with the previous year.
PTSD, an anxiety disorder that involves mental and emotional stress or a dulled response to others and the outside world, is a condition that can occur after injury, severe psychological shock, or a life-threatening event.
“It happened to me,” says Chang matter-of-factly. “It happened to all of us.”
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Last month, the number of U.S. service member fatalities in Iraq and Afghanistan reached 4,924 (4,253 lives claimed by Operation Iraqi Freedom; 671 by Operation Enduring Freedom). Tens of thousands have been wounded.
But what is much more complex to understand is how these wars have affected soldiers beyond the physical injuries. And it is equally difficult to treat these unseen wounds. Though many suffer from anxiety, depression and isolation after returning to civilian life, only half who report symptoms of PTSD seek treatment, according to the RAND study.
Meanwhile, the suicide rate among young male veterans who served during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan reached a record high in 2006, according to data released by the Department of Veterans Affairs. Furthermore, the economic downturn is hitting Iraq and Afghanistan veterans hard. One in nine are now out of work, and the 11.2 percent jobless rate for these veterans rose 4 percentage points in the past year, according to news reports.
When Chang came home in 2006, he felt like there was nothing waiting for soldiers like him.
“If I uphold the honor of taking care of soldiers, I expect the same from our government,” he says, adding after a pause, “The government failed to do that. And I had to learn to deal.” During his senior year, his frustration was channeled into action – resulting in a discussion support group formed for veterans. The network turned into an official organization: the Student Veterans Association. Then, just before Chang graduated, Cal State Fullerton offered him a fulltime job as the university’s first Veteran Student Services Coordinator.
From his on-campus office, decorated with awards and photos of his unit in camo, the 34-year-old assists the roughly 300 veterans enrolled at the university with readjusting to their new lives as civilians. He’s trying to give soldiers the support he had wanted when he came home from the battlefield, along with a place to seek information on finances, scholarships, financial aid, counseling, academic support, and help with relationship or family issues. But most importantly, he wants to provide opportunities for camaraderie among veterans, like for the three Korean Americans who shared their war stories at a restaurant near campus on a recent April evening.
Suzy Choi, Edward Kim and Willis Lee have all served in Iraq or Afghanistan, and are current or former students of Cal State Fullerton. Similar to Chang, Choi and Kim have both been diagnosed with PTSD. Lee, though he has received no official diagnosis, says, “Everyone is affected.”
Lee, 30, is a sergeant of the U.S. Army. In 2006, he was sent to Baghdad to work as a senior intelligence collector. He came home in 2007 and obtained a degree from Cal State Fullerton – but it is likely he will be deployed again, this time to Afghanistan.
Kim, 26, enlisted before the current conflicts. He joined the military when he was 17. The next year, as an aviation warfare specialist of the U.S. Navy, he was sent abroad one month after 9/11 and spent his entire tour in a plane covering “every square inch of Afghanistan, over and over.” As a Korean among mostly-white service members, he “stuck out like a sore thumb,” he says. (One white American soldier who’d served in Korea even called him a “gook.”)
In total, Kim has been deployed three times: two tours in Afghanistan and one in Iraq. “The more I went out, the more numb I became,” he says. “I’d come back and feel like a shell.” It became increasingly more difficult to relate to his peers. “I didn’t know how things worked because I’d left so early [in life]. I went so quickly, so far away.”
After completing his third tour, he attended a transitional assistance program that helped returning soldiers adjust from the military to civilian life. For three days, he was bombarded with informational resources. “Then, it’s out you go, good luck,” he says. “There should’ve been more counseling, help with setting up the transition process. But I was just out on my own, and I thought, ‘Shoot, now what do I do?’ It hits you like a brick wall.”
In 2005, more than a year after he completed his last tour, Kim was diagnosed with PTSD. At that point, he was a “wreck.” He couldn’t sleep until locking all the doors and windows and looking outside to make sure he wasn’t in danger. And when he did sleep, he’d wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night. Classrooms felt claustrophobic. Anxiety and panic attacks were frequent.
When Choi returned from Iraq in 2006, she suffered from similar attacks. She ducked when she heard a noise. She distanced herself from family and friends. “My own mother will never know the extent of what I went through,” says Choi, 31. She began college courses two days after coming home, but was soon failing all her classes. “I couldn’t study or function.”
Then, the nightmares and insomnia began.
Choi, who was born in Seoul, served as a flight clinical coordinator for the U.S. airforce. One day, a civilian plane carrying base employees, crashed. All the passengers on board – a total of 45 – perished. “Everyone came in body bags, and we had to sort them out,” she recalls. ‘Some had legs only, some had parts thrown all over.”
Back home, this catastrophe would visit Choi in her dreams. “There was this one mangled body, a female,” she recalls. “No head, no leg. That image stuck with me because I identified with her. Her nails were done, a French manicure; she had on a bracelet. She was petite.” Choi dreamt of this woman every few nights.
The image haunted Choi, so much that she began hyperventilating in class. Then two months after her service ended, she broke down during a routine evaluation, and was diagnosed with PTSD.
Choi began talking to a therapist. The sessions helped, and almost two months later, her nightmares ended. “In my last dream, the lady came and looked at me,” she says. “I don’t know if there was a face or not. She walked away, and I had a pleasant, peaceful feeling. After that, the dreams never returned.”
Yet Choi still harbors resentment toward her military higher-ups for not taking care of the soldiers in their time of need. After the crash, “we didn’t have enough time to debrief. I was angry; I was suffering. We were simply told that if we needed [counseling], to go see someone. But it should’ve been mandatory.”
Critical testimonials from veterans, backed by alarming statistics on suicide, PTSD, divorce, alcohol and drug abuse among service members, have led to congressional hearings on these issues and some government initiatives, including the creation in 2007 of the Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury. The Defense Centers, which partners with the Department of Defense and Department of Veterans Affairs, recently launched a campaign to remove the stigma of seeking mental health support among military personnel and also established a 24-hour outreach center for veterans.
Since 2002, roughly 93,000 veterans of Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom have received a “possible diagnosis” of PTSD, says Laurie Tranter, a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. She said the VA continues to add more mental health staff, with 4,200 new hires in this area in the last four years.
The initiatives sound well-intentioned, but it’s questionable whether they are reaching veterans on the ground level.
Further, what troubles Chang is that he returned from the Iraq war — one of the longest and most divisive conflicts in U.S. history — without a sense of honor.
“I would do my duty, beginning to end, as a soldier, it’s an honor to participate so I was glad for that,” he says. “However, I do not believe what our government says. … Osama bin Laden, 9/11, yes, but the war should not be about occupying Iraq and oil, and personal interests there, leading to so many deaths of our young soldiers. This anger really, really hurts me.
“I’m still struggling with the justification of this war. World War II was an honorable war. [The soldiers] were heroes who freed people from evil hands. Yet, what is this — here, right now, in Iraq? What are we perceived as? How do our soldiers within the system perceive themselves? Or perceive this war? It’s not positive. Many of our soldiers get out, and there’s no sense of honor.”
Although the other veterans interviewed for this story did not want to delve into the politics of the Iraq war, most agreed U.S. soldiers will likely be stationed there for the long term, despite President Obama’s vow to withdraw all troops by the end of 2011.
“I didn’t know it was going to be this long,” says Choi. “I thought we’d go in and come back. Two years into it, I realized this might be another Korea.”
“We started something that’s hard to finish,” says Chang. “We’ve made some enemies out there.”
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These days, Chang and his peers with the veterans association are spending their time organizing for Veterans’ Appreciation Night at Cal State Fullerton. The celebratory event recognizes the veteran graduates of 2009 and those who will deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan this year.
Chang understands just how profound an accomplishment it is for a returning soldier to complete a degree, much less re-engage in academic life.
Chang enlisted in 1997, when he was 22 years old and a student at Los Angeles Community College. He joined the Airborne Infantry as a private because he “didn’t want no sissy jobs.” He was then stationed as an American soldier in South Korea, at the Demilitarized Zone.
When he returned from Korea, he enrolled at Cal State Fullerton and continued to serve in the Army Reserves. Then in April of 2005, four months before the end of his eight-year contract, he got the call: he was being sent to Iraq.
Both training and deployment had resulted in a nearly two-year absence. He hadn’t read many books, and was worried about his reading, writing and academic skills.
Turns out, one of the most difficult tasks for the veterans on campus is studying. “The military didn’t teach them how to read and write,” says Chang. “They’re not taught the survival tools needed at home. Once you’re shipped overseas to serve as a soldier, you’re on a war mission, carrying weapons in a bulletproof vest, 24-7.
“Then, you return. And it’s shocking.”
That jolt has diminished for Edward Kim, and he credits the conversations and socializing with fellow veterans for his progress. “That’s my support system,” says Kim, who now serves as the vice president of the Student Veterans Association that Chang started.
“[Adjusting] took a lot of hard work and patience. It caused so much heartache,” he says. But last winter, “there was a turning point, and I began to feel better. More hope. I want to move on.”
By next spring, Kim, currently interning for the university’s Veteran Student Services Department, will complete his degree in human services with an emphasis in mental health. He is pursuing a career as a counselor for veterans.
“They’ve served the country for years – doing what others did not have the courage to do,” says Chang, referring to 24.9 million military veterans in the United States.
“Instead of bashing the government and its policies, I’m grateful I was able to use this anger and energy and move it into a positive and productive area where, instead, I am helping returning soldiers. They deserve more than no attention.”
