Soldiers Describe 'Emotional Roller Coaster' Upon Return From War

CLOQUET, Minn., March 2, 2006 — -- The crowd inside the National Guard Armory at the Minneapolis-St.Paul airport looks kind of bleary-eyed. The 20 or so Minnesota Guardsmen have just returned home from a year in Afghanistan. They arrived just the night before, and not all are eager to be here.

But they've come anyway, along with their spouses and parents. It's Day One of their reintegration program.

"Morning everybody," Chaplain Maj. John Morris says cheerily to the group. A few nod back. Others stare straight ahead, bracing for what will be two days of lectures, presentations and warnings.

In most of the country, the rule for National Guard members returning from war zones is to leave them alone for at least three months, while providing space and quiet time so they can reconnect with their families, their jobs, their communities. But here in Minnesota, the men and women back from war are expected to show up for these seminars immediately, and then return at 30-, 60- and 90-day intervals.

Maj. Gen. Larry Shellito is the father of the program, which works hard to address the emotional toll of returning from a war zone but also covers how to obtain federal benefits.

"We owe them," he said of the Guardsmen. "This country owes them to make sure that we can give them that box of tools to help them reintegrate and be successful." Leaving soldiers to their own devices for the first three months of their return, he believes, courts disaster.

"The ones that we just turn loose on society to fend for themselves," said Shellito, "those are the ones that I'm worried about because I don't know what support mechanisms they have."

Statistics indicate these battle-hardened veterans need all the help they can get. A groundbreaking study on the mental health of returning troops released this week indicates that fully one-third of those who served in Iraq during the first year of the war sought mental health services upon leaving the fighting. The war's succeeding years have been, if anything, more intense.