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Not many couples could ask the questions Connie Spinks and husband
Albert Ross put to each other. “I ask him, ‘Baby, am I worth losing a
leg for?’ And he says, ‘Yes,’” Spinks says. “Then he asks me, ‘Honey,
would you get burned up for me again?’ and I say, ‘Yes I would!’ And I
would, because I love him.”

The two, expecting their first child in March, are former U.S.
Army specialists who met three years ago at the Brooke Army Medical
Center at Fort Houston in San Antonio, Texas, while being treated for
traumatic injuries suffered in the Iraq War.

Ross’ right leg was severed at the knee in August 2004, while he
was on patrol in Baghdad. Spinks suffered a bevy of injuries that would
take 20 surgeries to mend: a crushed right ankle, left leg ripped with
shrapnel, two broken fingers on her left hand and second and third
degree burns on her face, hands and wrists, injuries suffered after the
Humvee she was riding in was attacked by a suicide bomber on October
13, 2004–the day after her 22nd birthday.

“If we hadn’t gotten injured, we never would have met,” Spinks
says. “It was part of God’s plan that we got injured so we could meet.”

It’s an unlikely love story set amongst the casualties of war. Yet
even as medical advances in field hospitals across the Iraqi battle
zone are credited with saving more limbs and lives like Spinks and
Ross, many experts say the military isn’t doing nearly as well by
soldiers who suffer mental injuries. This has particular significance
for African Americans, who have historically seen military service as
an avenue for career training or to get money to buy a home or attend
college. And it has taken on added importance for African-American
women, who have entered the service in advanced numbers since the 1990s
Desert Storm.

Women have been a part of U.S. military campaigns since the nation
came into being, largely playing a supporting role in our nation’s
conflicts, serving as clerks, nurses and other non-combatant roles. But
a change in federal legislation meant that after January 1990, women
could do any job in the military except active combat. That’s why more
than 33,000 servicewomen were deployed in Operations Desert Shield and
Desert Storm that year. During that conflict, 13 servicewomen were
killed and two taken prisoner.

Today, more than 180,000 women have served in Iraq, Afghanistan
and other countries, say Pentagon officials. More than 8,000
African-American women are deployed in the same areas. Though still
prohibited from participating in active combat duties, the guerrilla
tactics of the Iraqi insurgency, including the routine use of roadside
bombs, suicide bombers and anti-personnel rockets, turned the entire
country in
to a war zone. No one and nowhere was safe.

Living under endless stress and, for many, seeing firsthand what
violent combat can inflict on soldiers and civilians alike is often
more than some GIs can handle. Many are haunted by those images to the
point where they can’t eat, sleep or interact with families or friends
when they return home. Once called “shell shocked,” these vets are now
diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The Veteran’s
Administation estimates more than 3,800 women–among 27,000 returning
veterans–were treated for PTSD in 2006, a slightly higher rate among
women than men.

A 2007 American Journal of Psychiatry study of 2,863 soldiers
returning from Iraq found 16.6 percent met the criteria for PTSD. That
number jumped to 32 percent of those injured or wounded in the
conflict. Mental health officials say many career servicemen and women
won’t seek help for PTSD, fearful a notation on their service records
that they received mental health counseling will cost them promotions.
Those who seek counseling find an overburdened system. According to a
2007 story by Washington Post writers Dana Priest and Anne Hull, 100
psychologists left military service during one 12-month period. The
Defense Department’s Mental Health Task Force warned the remaining
system offered “inadequately trained” workers and was not “sufficiently
accessible” to servicemen.

Shoshana Johnson is still living with PTSD five years after she
became the first African-American woman to be held as a prisoner of war
in Iraq. “I pictured myself with a husband, a couple more children,
doing 20 years in the military,” Johnson, 35, says from her El Paso,
Texas, home. Instead, she says, “sometimes I feel I am barely getting
by.”

 Johnson was shot through both ankles and taken prisoner March 23,
2003, when her supply convoy got lost in Nasiriya. A videotape of her
interrogation by Iraqi captors was broadcast around the world. Marines
rescued Johnson and five other POWs 22 days later. They returned to the
U.S. to great fanfare; on New Year’s Eve, 2003, she pulled the switch
to drop the ball in Times Square.

  But Johnson didn’t know she had PTSD until three months after
she returned and her 10-year-old daughter, Jenelle, told Johnson’s
parents that “Mommy was sad and crying all the time.” She  still has
“massive mood swings” and finds herself reacting to mental “triggers”
about the war. “They’re everywhere,” she says. “”It’s hard to avoid
them when the conflict is ongoing. They’re even putting them in music
videos! I wonder if they know what that does to people to see those
things.”

Some women found they and their attackers were on the same side. Increasing numbers of women
veterans have sought treatment for “military sexual trauma,” a
pseudonym for rape by a fellow American soldier or officer. “I see a
lot of women who have been raped in the service,” says Barry Campbell,
a New York City benefits counselor with the Veteran’s Administration
Hospital. “They get attacked by superior officers or guys in the ranks.”

Kymber Lea Durant, 38, says that’s what happened to her while she
was one of 10 women among 300 men stationed in Egypt with the 101st
Airborne in support of the first Desert Storm. “I went to the guy’s
tent to borrow a tape, because he had a big collection of CDs and
movies,” she says. “He attacked me.” Afterward, nobody believed her. “I
told my sergeant, and he took it to the first sergeant.”

Durant says she was labeled a troublemaker, a reputation that
followed her when she was deployed at King Faud Airport in Iraq in
1991. “When I got to Iraq, there was a lot of what I called ‘mental ass
whipping,’” she says. “They called me Dead Beat Durant. Nothing I did
was good enough.”

A supply clerk, Durant suffered back injuries on the job and was
left infertile when an Army surgeon removed one of her fallopian tubes
during an ectopic pregnancy. “I went into the Army to get money for college,” says Durant, who now lives in Brooklyn, New York. “If I
could go back, I would never have joined.”

Experts and other studies warned doctors were often too quick to
prescribe drugs to treat PTSD–drugs that mask, but don’t solve, mental
health issues. Spinks recalls a doctor at one of her counseling
sessions asking if she was having bad dreams or trouble sleeping. “When
I said yes, he said he could give me this drug for that, and this drug
for that,” she says. “He asked ten questions and was ready to give me
four different drugs to take.”

Johnson is off the anti-depression and anti-nightmare medication,
though she still sometimes uses sleeping pills. Single, she’s also had
trouble developing relationships. “Civilian men, once I tell them who I
am and what I went through, you don’t hear from them again,” she says.
“Military men are coming back from Iraq and have their own issues.”

Durant’s mental trauma was such that she was homeless for a time.
She now lives in her late mother’s house, surviving on 50 percent
disability pay of $728 a month, and takes care of her 10-year-old
adopted sister. She takes four different drugs daily to deal with
migraines, depression, panic attacks and gynecological issues. “I can’t
hold a job,” she says,  ”because some days I can’t get out of bed.”

Spinks rejected VA counseling in favor of sessions with her pastor
and her husband. She speaks with her pastor “about anything, even my
scars,” while she and her husband “witness and minister to each other.”

Faith was the rock that got Keona McNair through her year-long
service at Kirkut Regional Air Base in Northern Iraq. “I was more
sensitive to God’s voice while I was in Iraq than I had ever been
before or since,” says McNair, 31, now a Realtor in Largo, Maryland. In
Iraq she organized church services and sang in gospel choirs to
maintain her faith. “I used to have conversations with God,” she says.
“He would tell me which way to go and not to go.”  

Johnson, too, relied on a higher power: “I leaned on my faith
during captivity, and I still lean on it. I’m not perfect. I make
mistakes. But I try to do the right thing every day.”