Homecoming nightmares.

Hart Viges, thirty, served with the U.S. Army's 82nd Airborne Division in Iraq. "Anyone who thinks they are going to be treated as heroes or valuable people in the military, they're wrong," he says. "They're property. You're property of the United States government."

Even though Hart came home to Texas in January 2004, he still hasn't totally left Iraq.

"I don't know how many civilians we killed, I don't know how many enemy we killed," says Hart, remembering when he and fellow soldiers were ordered to fire on all taxicabs in Samawa. "I just don't know. I just don't know."

But at a water treatment plant outside Baghdad, Hart caught a man carrying explosives.

"I look into his eyes and his face," he says. "He's not a boogeyman, not a monster. He's scared and confused but recruited like me."

The man escaped from Hart. During the Americans' hunt for him, an Iraqi told them that his neighbors said something bad about Americans. They went to the hut and searched everything. All they found, Hart said, was a family and a small .22 caliber pistol. They arrested two young men.

"The mother was trying to kiss my feet, my cheek, crying," Hart recalls. "I just stood there paralyzed. I just couldn't console her. I told my sergeant, 'These aren't the guys.' He said, 'Don't worry. They're all bad guys.'"

After Hart came home from Iraq in 2004, he had an emotional explosion and finally told his platoon sergeant, "I can't pull the trigger." His sergeant sent him to a chaplain who told him about conscientious objection. Hart applied. He was approved later that year and honorably discharged.

Hart now works in Texas as a waiter and peace activist with Iraq Veterans Against the War. But Iraq has still found him in his Austin home.

Everyday noises, sights, and smells are now deadly threats. The sound of a nail gun makes Hart jump behind trash cans for cover. Headlights flashing in his rearview mirror suddenly become flares from a roadside bomb.

Abbie Pickett, twenty-three, a National Guard soldier and sophomore at Edgewood College, sees the same bombs and enemy fire in her home in Madison, Wisconsin. Abbie signed up for the National Guard when she was seventeen.

Before deploying to Iraq, she worked teaching three-year-olds. Her affection for children was viewed by some as a potential liability in a combat zone.

"Shortly before we left [for Iraq] there were two other refuelers in my unit. One of them sat me down and said, 'We've been talking, and we don't think if it came down to it, you'd be able to kill a kid,'" Abbie recalls, explaining that the soldiers had heard kids sometimes jump in front of convoys. "'Will you be able to shoot a kid if you ever have to?' I didn't even know what to say."

In addition to the usual marks of war--bombings, death, and tedium--Abbie says she also had to contend with corrupt leadership and rampant sexual harassment. She was introduced to the military's misogyny as a nineteen-year-old, when she says she was sexually assaulted by an officer on a two-week training. She never reported it.

But in Iraq Abbie did speak out--and faced the consequences. Her officers punished her by sending her out on unnecessary and dangerous missions, she says. Eventually, her superiors were investigated and relieved of their command, she says.

"There was a good old boys' club that ran so deep," she says. "They thought I was incapable of doing things purely because I'm a woman. You get used to guys degrading you."

Lieutenant Colonel Tim Donovan, director of public affairs at the Wisconsin Army and Air National Guard, issued the following statement: "When the 229th Engineer Company returned in from an overseas deployment to Iraq, several serious allegations were made about the conduct of some of the unit leaders, NCOs, and soldiers. Such allegations are taken seriously by the Wisconsin National Guard, so an investigation was ordered to determine whether allegations of leadership lapses or misconduct were well-founded. Based on a review of the investigation, appropriate corrective actions were taken. The Wisconsin National Guard has a zero tolerance policy for sexual harassment or sexual misconduct of any kind. We also hold our officer and NCO leaders to high standards of personal and professional conduct and, when the confidence we have in our leaders is betrayed by their misconduct or poor performance, we replace them."

The culmination of abuse, war, and isolation left Abbie with all the classic symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

"When I came home, I knew I was screwed up," she says. "I didn't have the damnedest idea how to make small talk. When I did talk about stuff, it was pretty morbid. It would have to do with death, destruction, Iraq, war, people losing limbs."

At her worst, she thought about suicide thirty to forty times a day, she says. The most routine activities triggered such thoughts: "Everything from having a bus pass me, and thinking I should step out in front of it," she says, "or picking up a knife in the kitchen to slice a cucumber, and thinking about slicing myself, to just driving my car, and thinking about how easy it would be to drive it off the bridge."

She tried to get psychological help through the military but found it was more of a battle. The phone numbers she was given for doctors were disconnected, she says. For months, she couldn't find a psychiatrist. Finally, Abbie decided to see a therapist at her school but still gets her medications through Veterans Affairs.

Abbie says she considers herself more of a veterans' advocate than an anti-war soldier. And while no one could have dissuaded her from enlisting, she advises young people to get their college education before signing up.

"This is really difficult for me right now, trying to deal with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and go to school," she says. "It's ten times harder than it was before I left."

Illustration by Douglas Fraser

Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg is the editor of "10 Excellent Reasons Not to Join the Military," published by The New Press (10reasonsbook.com). She is also the co-publisher of a new independent New Jersey magazine called City Belt (citybelt.org).