Huffington Magazine Issue 64-65 | Page 51

HUFFINGTON 09.01-08.13 COURTESY OF CRAIG BRYAN INVISIBLE CASUALTIES ma, he said, does affect “all those other career fields who see the consequences of war even if they are not directly involved.” “We are realizing now that a lot of service members and vets see things and experience events that are not necessarily life-threatening situations but that disrupt their sense of security, what is right and wrong — and that creates tremendous inner conflict,” Bryan said. A gradual change in the military culture has also raised stress within the ranks, experts believe. Frequent deployments have increased the isolation of those left behind. At the Army’s Fort Drum in New York, for instance, it was not uncommon after 9/11 for two of the 10th Mountain Division’s three infantry brigades to be gone at the same time, leaving the post a virtual ghost town. At military posts across the country, many families have chosen to move into nearby civilian communities. More spouses find work outside the military and many send their kids to civilian schools. Under congressional mandate, underused bases have been shuttered and their military Dr. Craig Bryan, director of the National Center for Veterans Studies at the University of Utah, served in Iraq in 2009 and has led numerous research projects on military suicide. families sent elsewhere. Social media has made it easy to connect to the world beyond the military. All of this disrupted what in the 1980s and 1990s was a comfortable, insular existence. Life in places like Camp Lejeune, the Marine base in North Carolina, and the Army’s Fort Benning in Georgia often resembled small towns of the 1950s, with children walking to Defense Department schools, housewives gathering for coffee, families maintaining manicured lawns, and crime and drugs staying mostly outside the main gates. “Service people used to live in their own world, and I don’t mean that negatively,” said Jacqueline Garrick, a retired Army officer who directs the Pentagon’s suicide prevention programs. “There was