Home is where the heartache is

Home is where the heartache is
By Christine Byers

In a back yard in downstate Forrest, a family in August welcomes the return of a soldier.

Yellow ribbons brighten trees, porch railings and car bumpers. The smell of food on the grill fills the summer air.

A banner outside her mom’s house heralds the words that kept Army Spc. Sherri Perales going during her year in Iraq.  “Welcome Home.”

When she finally sees them, disappointment haunts her. The 28-year-old mother of two feels further from home now that she’s back than at any time in the past 12 months.

The town she knew as a child is foreign now. The people she’d known since she was a kid are different today.

“Your life gets put on hold when you go to Iraq, but theirs,” Perales says, “continues on.”

Thus the line has been drawn – in back yards and banquet halls around America.

Soldiers returning from war frequently find their life views so altered they can’t connect to the happiness their homecomings evoke in others. This internal struggle often is a war that can’t be won – and can flare anew at any time.

In the past five years, the federal Department of Veterans Affairs says the number of veterans from as far back as World War II who have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder has almost doubled to more than 200,000.

“Ever since 9/11, they’ve been coming out of the woodwork,” says Lemuel Slaughter, a therapist in a Chicago Heights veterans clinic. “What’s going on is a waking up of the dark secrets within them.”

Slaughter served in the Army in the 1980s but did not see combat. For those who have, in any war, every day is filled with triggers that can ignite the emotional disconnect that hit them on their return.

In the past few years, Slaughter has seen an increase of almost 50 percent in veterans seeking help.

Many did not fight in Iraq.

Charles Bemis of Algonquin knows the feeling. The 61-year-old Vietnam veteran watches all the TV war coverage he can.

“My wife figures it would be better not to have the TV,” Bemis says. “But I can’t not look at it. … It’s just like it was when I was overseas, except for the uniforms and the equipment, the war is similar. They’re fighting a guerrilla war and so were we.”

At 22, Bemis’ fellow soldiers called him “grandpa” while he was in Vietnam from August 1966 to August 1967. Carrying dead or dying soldiers out of battle and shooting a man who ran instead of surrendering are memories that haunted Bemis when he came home.

“The anger most of us have is because after the parades and welcome backs are over, now what do you do?” Bemis says. “How do you get on with your life? Your life is never the same. You’re not same person.”

Unlike many returning veterans, Bemis was able to keep a job. That’s because most of the workers at the engine and construction equipment plant in Melrose Park were World War II and Korean War veterans. They had a silent understanding and acceptance of Bemis’ struggle to come to work sober, a common symptom of the stress disorder plaguing many veterans.

“If I wasn’t as lucky as I was finding a job where a bunch of old vets understood me, I’d be out on my rear,” Bemis says.

“Most people don’t give a damn why you’re screwed up, just that you are.”

Although a veteran of another war in another place more than 30 years later, the situations and sentiments are not much different for Perales.

Her fellow soldiers also struggle to adapt to life as they once knew it. A friend made in Iraq recently was arrested during a scuffle at a bar.

“Instead of viewing her as a soldier who needed help, they viewed her as a problem,” Perales says, who also struggles.

For the first time in their nine-year relationship, Perales and her husband argue.

“It’s important for people to realize that once you get home, it’s not always a happily-ever-after ending,” says Perales, who now lives in Harvard.

“You come back expecting things to be the same,” she says, “and they’re just not.”

Sometimes it’s the little things that bring Perales to tears. Like the time she rode in her husband’s car and didn’t know how to use the new radio he got while she was gone.

Or hearing her son David, 7, and daughter, Samantha, 4, say something they learned while she was at war.

Instead of feeling better about letting her emotions out, Perales is humiliated. To her, it’s losing control.

“In Iraq, you can’t afford to let your emotions get in the way or you could lose your life.”

But she says things are improving now that she’s working with Alan Belcher of Woodstock, a Vietnam veteran and a counselor paid by the federal government to help soldiers readjust.

“When you’re in the military, you’re careful not to talk too much about your problems because you become a weak link in the system,” Belcher says. “Especially soldiers that have been there for a while; they have a death mask on.

“Their feeling is gone. You can’t tolerate the intense fear and terror, so within the first few weeks you shut it down … but nobody tells you how to turn it back on.”

Those feelings and thoughts manifest in other ways. About 30 percent of men and women who serve in war zones develop post-traumatic stress disorder. Between 20 percent and 25æpercent experience partial symptoms, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Most can’t sleep, waking up with night sweats, terrified from nightmares. Perales says she checks the locks on her doors several times a night, even though she knows her husband already locked them.

With all of the training a soldier receives to stay alive in combat, the handbook provides nothing to prepare them for coming home, Algonquin’s Bemis says.

The only ones who truly understand what she’s going through are her fellow veterans, Perales says, again sounding much like Bemis.

Belcher plans to start group counseling sessions in January for those returning from Iraq. He expects the conversation to be intense – but healing.

“For 12 years I ran a Vietnam vets group and not once did we talk about football,” Belcher says.

Along with counseling, Perales forced herself to join her daughter’s parents group at school and become active in her son’s Cub Scout troop to keep herself from slipping into isolation.

It’s how she hopes to find her way home.

War: Loved ones’ happiness doesn’t resonate, soldiers say

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