Can you describe how you felt coming home from a deployment or combat?

On arrival at BWI after both deployments to Iraq, I needed time alone to reflect on the previous six months of intensity. After 24 hours, I was ready to connect with my family and start the reintegration process. Visions of the people I served with were first and foremost in my mind for a long time and after about a month, I had adjusted to civilian life and regular sleep.

I was tired, yet happy I had did my job, brought my Soldiers back home alive, and the first person who hugged me was my son.

Combat or actual firefight?
Some combat might be a mental health development or horrid experience...

I felted like I should be sorry for the misfourance of war..No Side wins with the cost of life..And the wasted time we spend away from family and frends.Take it's toll as well.You never seem to fine a comfort zone or to be happy any more..The only way too end a war for someone to be layed to rest..

thanks for sharing

Truly Honored to serve our country.

Desert Storm. I felt like an empty shell. I couldn't think. Our post authorized something like 80% leave. Most people took it. I was one of the few that stayed behind. We did not have any equipment back yet. It was being shipped back to Germany from Saudi Arabia. We spent a month mostly sleeping. Get up at 8:00 AM. Formation. Go back to bed & sleep till noon. Get up & eat. Go back to bed & sleep till 5:00. Afternoon formation. Occasionally pulled CQ or guard duty on an empty motor pool. We averaged sleeping 12-16 hours a day for month. I couldn't tell you much of what happened that month.

I had the opposite experience. I didn’t come back through Oakland but through Walter Reed, on account of having gotten blown up on a boat in the Saigon River. I had a smashed foot, which meant there was no point in my taking up a hospital bed, so I spent five months on leave hopping around the old neighborhood with a cast . . . which NOBODY would believe I got in Vietnam. It was weird how removed Jody was from the reality of the war. It this had been 1942 and I’d been hopping around with overseas patches and a cast, people would have bought be drinks. Finally I just gave up and told everybody I’d been in a boating accident, which they believed without comment.

The only person who ever seemed to notice was a bus driver at Cape Canaveral when I stumped onto his tour bus in my cast. He snarled at me to “get that army shit off my jacket.” Later on it occurred to me he was probably a retired lifer who thought I was a hippy . . . the one person the whole time I probably would have agreed with didn’t realize I’d been wounded, either.

When I ETS’d, I went to school at the U of Oregon on the GI Bill, one of the most lefty schools in the country. So lefty somebody bombed the ROTC building in the name of the “people” and killed the janitor who, probably, was under the impression he was a people too. I wore my field jacket with the overseas patches everywhere I went on campus . . . kind of a stick-it-in-your-eye gesture . . . and nobody ever said boo to me about it. Very strange.

When I came home from Afghanistan, we were met by volunteer greaters who made sure that our experience was better than that of our Vietnam vet brothers.

I felt numb and angry returning from Bosnia and Hungry. We were supposed to be stabilizing forces but everyday getting shot and mines being blown up during the night. No one cared and the entire situation got swept under the rug by command. The strange part is I felt more welcomed with bullets flying then when I got stateside...