Ripples moving outward: the human impacts of war: war doesn't just disappear with the signing of a peace treaty and the onslaught of reconstruction efforts. To understand the true cost of any armed conflict, we must first consider the lingering effects of war one, five, ten, or twenty years from its official end.

"One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one."--AGATHA CHRISTIE

DEEP IN THE GUATEMALAN countryside, wrapped in what appears to be a blanket of unadulterated peace, countless stories of unfathomable terror are buried. Their victims carried some of those stories to the grave; other stories continue to haunt the people who still dwell beneath the forest canopy. These accounts are sometimes retold by men and women who can recall the atrocities of the civil war and a time when the jungle foliage masked unknown brutalities.

In 2001 I was invited to participate in a series of personal interviews with native Guatemalans regarding their experiences during the war, which began in 1991 and lasted through 1996. In the tropical heat of the afternoon we gathered for the interview, sitting wherever we could find space within the tiny, dimly lit stick hut with a thatched roof. Across from me sat a small-statured woman in traditional Mayan dress. Although she was only in her late thirties, the emptiness in her eyes spoke of experiences horrific enough to fill a hundred years. Her name was Dominga.

When we had all settled, Dominga took a deep breath and began her narrative with a trembling voice. Years before, during the peak of the Guatemalan civil war, militia from a nearby village had arrived in the early hours before dawn at the hut she shared with her family--the same hut we were gathered in to hear her story. The militia roused her husband and forced him outdoors, where they broke both of his legs and cut his arms off with machetes. Dominga and her three young daughters, as they watched helplessly from the door, could do nothing but cry and beg their attackers for mercy. Tears quietly streaming down her face, Dominga paused, then continued, "They killed him as we watched. Then they turned to me and my daughters and told us run or we would be the next killed" Mother and daughters fled deep into the jungle, where they hid for a year before being reunited with other villagers.

When I first met Dominga, the war had been over for several years and she was remarried. She and her daughters have tried to live a life similar to the one they led before that horrible night, though it goes without saying that life could never really be the same again. Dominga described a persistent fear that killers would again emerge from the darkness and shatter her life. In fact, the men who murdered her husband continue to live nearby and sometimes, as she goes about her day, she sees them traveling on the path and is reminded.

Throughout the world, in regions that have been touched by war within the last several decades, there is a heaviness, a sadness, that is always lurking just below the surface. Like the concentric rings of water sent out after a stone is thrown into a placid surface, the effects of armed conflict ripple outward toward other places and other times, impacting whatever is yet to come. It is perhaps impossible to quantify war's effects on the human psyche, yet that effect is real. From regions as vastly different as Guatemala, Israel, Sudan, El Salvador, Vietnam, and Croatia, story after story confirms this truth.

Children are especially vulnerable to the impacts of armed conflict and may grow up in a society that has been warring their entire lives. The psychosocial consequence of this is great. The Transactional Model of child development weighs risk factors and protective factors. In a war-torn region, risk factors abound: gunshots, bomb blasts, fear, poverty, limited mobility, and lack of public services. At the same time, protective factors--such as community centers, organized activities, playgrounds, and counseling--are rare. With this imbalance, children are more likely to develop emotional, psychological, behavioral, or mental imbalances that, ironically, may serve to perpetuate the very conflict that first caused them.

Whitney Fry, who traveled to Palestine in 2002 and 2004, described a Palestinian way of life that was overshadowed by conflict. She met with several Palestinians in their drab apartments within semi-permanent refugee camps near the wall in Bethlehem. Her hosts told her how the advancing Israeli Defense Force had bombed the side of their building to enter and search the apartment units, held the family at gunpoint for several days, and denied them permission to leave the small cramped room that had no access to food or water. The IDF spray painted large markings on the apartment walls to mark their path, markings that were still visible. As Fry listened to the stories of her hosts she noted that many of the older residents trembled and cried as they shared their stories, recounting them as if the events had just happened the day before. The younger generations told their stories with less emotion; they couldn't remember any other way of life. The crude cement wall patches neither disguised the damage to the building nor eased the memories of being held hostage.

Throughout her stay Fry observed the detrimental effects of curfews, a lack of playgrounds, and the constant reminder of conflict by such scenes as damaged structures and ever-present guns. She saw first hand the immense risk factors associated with being surrounded by conflict. She hopes these can be mitigated in the next generation by the installment of developmentally appropriate programs to serve as protective factors for an at-risk population. Fry is in the process of obtaining her master's degree in public health with the hope of returning to Palestine to help develop appropriate outlets for the youth there. She explains that, currently, "Not many people are willing to focus on things like sports programs because they're just focused on survival." Yet without some semblance of normalcy, it is difficult to mitigate the emotional wounds of the conflict.

Across the border, in Israel, similar problems exist. Roger Lerner of Cincinnati, Ohio, lived in Jerusalem with his family in 2000 and 2001. Because of the violence there, Israel is categorized in his memory as "both a paradise and a hell." His young daughter Lily had sensed the tension around her as mortar attacks pummeled the city, unconvinced, as her parents had tried to reassure her, that the terrifying attacks were mere thunderstorms. She has been petrified of storms ever since, even after returning to the United States.

Sayrah Namaste of East Lansing, Michigan, was exposed to war's lingering effects in an intensely personal way at the age of four. In 1980 her parents took in a family of "boat people," or Vietnamese refugees, who left their war-torn homeland behind and started over in the United States. Although the war in Vietnam had officially ended long before, life in Vietnam was treacherous and severe. The four children (ages five to nine) who joined her family spoke no English but managed to communicate with Namaste and her siblings using the universal language of childhood: play. Even as they played together, Namaste recounts, "Something was deeply different about them. It wasn't the language and it wasn't the way they looked and it wasn't the culture. They weren't like children. They were missing a childhood. They were missing an innocence."

As Namaste grew older she learned more about the life that her Vietnamese siblings must have led prior to moving into her house. They almost never spoke of Vietnam. "I wonder if they didn't have any words to explain it," Namaste suggests. "They had seen some of the same things that grown men saw and killed themselves over."

Today in Vietnam visitors can crouch through the Cu Chu Tunnels carved underground by the Vietcong. American Michelle Forman had been teaching in that country for only a short time when she went to see the tunnels for herself. Like other tourists, she paid her five dollars to fire the weapon of her choice. "I shot an AK-47," Forman said. "I do not see myself shooting a gun again. Too loaded, so to speak." To a tourist, such physical reminders are eerie, perhaps even uncomfortable. To a survivor they are horrific--a constant reminder of the fear, helplessness, and terror of the war. Yet even in the absence of such physical reminders, psychological reminders abound. Although her young siblings were mostly silent about their early experiences in Vietnam, Namaste came to understand that their memories hadn't diminished and would continue to haunt them for perhaps the rest of their lives.

Since the Vietnam War, society has had to recognize and acknowledge the crippling effects of war on those who fight in it. Post-traumatic stress disorder is now recognized as one of the most common ailments afflicting veterans. It may present itself immediately or decades later. And while many veterans dearly do reintegrate and lead successful lives, many don't. Consider the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs report that indicates one-third of the U.S. adult homeless population has served in the armed forces. Of this, 45 percent suffer from mental illness and greater than 70 percent experience drug or alcohol abuse. The National Center for Post-traumatic Stress Disorder reports, "Nothing in life ever seems quite the same again, even if everything works out for the best. Trauma leaves a lasting imprint of terror, horror, and helplessness on the body and mind."

War occurs for a complex set of reasons. And as many perspectives exist as there are people involved in each conflict. Regardless of the cause, however, war's impact reaches far and wide. Wars might officially end in a peace treaty or a hostile understanding, and military operations draw to a close, but what has already transpired cannot be erased from the combatants' or civilians' consciousnesses. Once armed conflict has occurred its effects expand outward indefinitely. Reminders are everywhere: buried deep in the psyche of a child born in Rwanda, in the bullet-riddled buildings of an abandoned Croatian neighborhood, and in the fearful explosion of another unmarked land mine in Mozambique.

Governments and societies are abstract entities, perhaps even unfeeling. Peace treaties and truces may resolve these organizations' economic, religious, political, and ideological differences. But individuals--the men, women, and children who are personally affected by war--are very real and very fragile. Peace treaties and truces can't heal their wounds. Once peace has been achieved, the horrors can't be neatly folded and tucked away into the same spaces in our minds that hold other memories. The raw emotions of war--unsettling and difficult to process--remain for a lifetime. Not included in the calculations and budget proposals, these effects are just as sensible and just as important to weigh as the dollars and cents involved.

U.S. President Jimmy Carter once said, "War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each others' children." A family may be eternally grateful for their freedom but forever without their innocence. A soldier may be proud of her or his service to cause and country but will never be the same again. The start of a new war isn't a celebration but a somber and reluctant event, for with each conflict will undoubtedly come mourning, pain, and incredible hardships.

Perhaps Croatian author Slavenka Drakulic best expressed this when she wrote, "Once you feel the presence of death all around you cannot remain the same person; it is not only love that changes its meaning, everything alters--bread, light, water, friendship."

When not living abroad, Michelle Bargo resides in Cincinnati, Ohio. She is a freelance writer with a master's degree in Communication Sciences and Disorders.