Journey home not always an easy trip.

Byline: Susan Palmer The Register-Guard

Andrea Westfall came home from Iraq ready to take back her life as a surgical technician, but the war isn't quite done with her yet.

Westfall, who served with the Oregon National Guard as a flight medic ferrying soldiers from the thick of battle, has been back in Eugene for almost two years.

A 36-year-old with big brown eyes, a generous smile and a thoughtful way about her, Westfall turned out a week ago at the Eugene Armory to welcome the soldiers of the 2nd Battalion, 162nd Infantry Regiment home.

When the troops formally demobilized from active duty status last week, Westfall was there again, among the thousands of others, to pay her respects.

"I'm glad these guys are back," she said. "I won't be as alone as I've felt the last two years."

She knows better than most what they went through and what the coming months may hold.

For Westfall, readjustment has been a painful and slow process.

"I spent almost a year in misery and hell," she said.

Oregon National Guard administrators are aware of the challenges that face the men and women coming off the battlefield. It's one of the reasons the military eases them slowly back to civilian life, said Lt. Kevin Ressel, who heads the newly formed reintegration team charged with making the transition smoother for war-weary troops.

The 700 soldiers of the 2nd 162nd spent a couple of weeks of down time in Kuwait after leaving Iraq, followed by a week of debriefing at Fort Lewis and another four days in Salem before being released from active-duty status.

Besides the bureaucratic paperwork of shifting to reserve status, signing up for interim health benefits and registering with Veterans Affairs, the soldiers spent several hours with employment counselors and chaplains discussing what the future holds, Ressel said.

Just over 50 percent of the returning troops are unemployed, either by choice or through layoffs or businesses that folded while they were overseas. Many of them will be looking for work or going back to school.

The adrenaline-laced work of war will give way to more mundane chores: cooking meals, mowing lawns, doing laundry, paying bills.

Westfall knows the drill. She served in Kuwait from August 2002 to May 2003, when President Bush declared the war over.

Westfall worked as a flight medic with the Salem-based 1042nd Medical Company transporting injured soldiers and Iraqi civilians from the war to a hospital ship off the coast. Her unit flew almost 200 missions, 150 of them from March to May during the initial phase of the war.

She came home grateful to have survived and expecting to pick up her life where she'd left off, maybe go back to school and study to become a doctor.

But like thousands of soldiers before her, Westfall learned that you don't just walk away from war.

It's a message Guard Chaplain John Dinsmore shared last week with the troops.

"Every soldier who's returning is going to have baggage," said Dinsmore, who serves with 2nd 162nd.

Westfall brought the war home with her. Living in the vibrant green of Eugene, the brown of the desert still engulfed her, she said.

"I had all of these memories that kept me awake at night. I didn't sleep basically for the first year I was home," she said.

She saw the faces of the injured soldiers she transported. "Some of them, they have that 1,000-yard stare," she said. "Others, it's hard to tell what they look like because their faces are blown off or burned beyond recognition."

Those memories isolated her when she got home. She felt like nobody really understood where she'd been or what had happened to her. Most of the 1042nd medics lived in Salem so she rarely saw them.

People would ask what seemed like silly questions: Are you glad you're home? Is your family glad you're home?

Her job at Sacred Heart Medical Center assisting in surgery lost its allure, and despite understanding colleagues, she found it hard to go to work.

Civilian life seemed mundane in comparison to the intensive life-and-death struggle on the medical evacuation flights.

"You live off the adrenaline," she said. "That's what allows you to work for 20 hours a day and sleep for two. You're living in the moment. When you come back, everyday stuff just doesn't do it for you anymore."

The trauma of war-zone living also made her hypervigilant. Loud noises alarmed her.

Visiting friends in Junction City one day, she was startled when the town's fire siren went off calling in the volunteer firefighters. It sounded just like the SCUD missile alarms that went off at her Kuwait base sending everyone scurrying for gas masks and bunkers.

The second time she heard that siren, while in a church in Junction City, she jumped up, knocked her chair over and then burst into tears.

She stays away from Junction City now. It's just too disturbing.

The symptoms are all too familiar to the counselors at the Eugene Vet Center.

Soldiers in combat are on hyperalert, said Ken Dube, an office manager at the Vet Center.

"You need that in a combat situation. You need that to survive," he said. Back in the civilian world, many find it hard to notch down the vigilance. "To shut that off, sometimes, they need help with that," Dube said.

Recent studies of the soldiers returning from Iraq indicate that significant numbers have been traumatized by the war. The more frequent their encounters with violence, the more likely they are to report symptoms, according to research published in the June 2004 New England Journal of Medicine.

Researchers' surveys of 6,200 Marine and Army veterans of the Iraq war indicated that as many as 29 percent experienced some form of depression or anxiety in the first three or four months they were home. Of them, 18 to 19 percent reported symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder.

Last week, the New England Journal of Medicine published a broader but more cursory look at the soldiers seeking treatment at Department of Veterans Affairs health clinics and hospitals from October 2003 to February 2005. Researchers found that 26 percent of the soldiers were initially diagnosed with a mental disorder, 10 percent of them with PTSD, another 9 percent with alcohol or drug abuse problems.

That's where Westfall found herself her first winter home, numbing out the isolation and fearful images with alcohol, and beating herself up emotionally because she wasn't coping better.

"All the things I did while I was over there, this should be a piece of cake," she said. "Other times I wished I was back (in Iraq), because I knew how to deal with that. Emotionally and mentally I knew where I fit in."

It wasn't until a good friend called her on the carpet about the drinking that things began to change.

"She said, 'I don't want to find you in a gutter some day,'" Westfall recalled.

About a month later, Westfall went to the local Veterans Affairs clinic and asked for help. They steered her to the Vet Center.

Vet Centers are part of the Department of Veterans Affairs, created in 1979 to offer readjustment counseling services to Vietnam combat veterans.

But other war veterans also needed the assistance, and now the counseling centers help vets who have served in conflicts spanning 60 years - from World War II, to Somalia, Kosovo and the current war on terrorism, Dube said.

Anyone can experience PTSD symptoms after being exposed to a traumatic event.

"It is not a sign of weakness but a normal reaction to a horrific situation," Dube said.

Those who suffer from PTSD re-experience the trauma, and try to avoid reminders of it, Dube said.

Counseling helped Westfall, who was diagnosed with PTSD and depression. Her counselor helped her put her experiences in context, she said.

"He explained to me: 'You have a special knowledge that most of the world, most of America, doesn't have. That's just the way it is.' But there are other people that do understand. ... I have a place I can go now," she said.

Not all war veterans will suffer from full-blown PTSD, said Dinsmore, the National Guard chaplain. But there are plenty of other stumbling blocks on the way back to civilian life.

The problems aren't always immediately apparent during the a soldier's first days home.

"It's kind of a honeymoon," Dinsmore said. "They're welcomed at the airports and the armories. The communities welcome them back with open arms."

But some soldiers are coming home to divorces. Others find their families changed, their spouses more independent, their children older.

Communication techniques that work in a highly structured military environment don't go over as well with wives and bosses, Dinsmore said.

Even the epithets that are part of a soldier's verbal arsenal, don't work back home.

"You're getting them used to a population that is not used to hearing the F-word every fourth word," Dinsmore said.

But the Oregon National Guard's effort to get out in front of these problems with lengthy debriefing sessions may only be partially effective.

Westfall said that similar sessions were held for her unit when they came back from war, but the information went in one ear and out the other.

"None of us wanted to be there," Westfall said. "Sitting for us was difficult because we'd been go, go, go."

Dinsmore acknowledged the problem.

"The timing is off on our end," he said. "Our problem is we're not going to see these guys for 90 days."

After demobilization, soldiers have three months before being required to show up for their reserve duties and go back to work. Guard administrators believe that providing soldiers with information despite their distraction is better than waiting, on the theory that even if they don't remember the specifics, they'll recall that resources are available to help them along the way.

Oregon National Guard Soldiers can get help looking for work at any of the state's Employment Department branches, where there are staff members specifically assigned to help veterans find work.

At the Vet Centers - in Salem, Portland, Eugene and Grants Pass - soldiers are eligible for counseling services. And his family members are also eligible.

For physical problems, state VA clinics and hospitals provide the same assistance to Guard troops as they do to full-time soldiers.

The Guard's family assistance program will continue providing support even though the soldiers have returned.

The Guard's reintegration team is also creating an online resource manual listing health care, counseling, employment, education and other benefits available to Guard members home from Iraq.

"What Oregon has realized is our job doesn't end when they come off duty," said Ressel, who heads the team.

For Westfall, things are better this year than they were last year.

"I have my good days and my bad days," she said.

And while her dream of being a doctor has fallen away, a casualty of the war, a new dream has taken its place.

Vet Centers are likely to need more counselors as U.S. soldiers continue going to war and coming home. Westfall is considering a degree in social work and a career in counseling.

"If there's any way I can be part of their lives, somebody who can listen to them, I want to do that," she said.

HELP FOR WAR VETS

Online: www.orng-vet.org/a listing of available resources, but the Web site is still under construction

Eugene VA clinic: 100 River Ave., 607-0897

Eugene Vet Center: 1255 Pearl St. Suite, 200, 465-6918

State employment office: Assistance for veterans at 686-7652

CAPTION(S):

Former Army flight medic Andrea Westfall welcomes fellow soldier Bruce Cutshall home as his unit returned to Eugene last week.