Philadelphia Weekly

Photographs by Jeff Fusco

Outside the red brick home of Jason Gunn, a suburban winter day begins quietly in ice. It's nearly Christmas in this sleepy Lansdowne neighborhood, and Gunn has been home from the military for five months. But inside his parents' house the 26-year-old sits wrapped in a blanket, eyes fixed on the ceiling, his mind still lingering on hot desert air.

"We were crossing over this bridge in Baghdad we'd crossed hundreds of times." he says flatly, his hands clasped behind his stubbly head. "They set off an improvised explosive device just as the front of the truck had nosed across. The guy behind me took the majority of the blast, like point blank. Everything that didn't hit him, hit me."

Gunn's lanky body is covered with ink. His right arm bears a green graffitilike tattoo that reads "Misled Youth," the name of a favorite band but also a hint at one source of Gunn's burgeoning anger. His left arm and torso are dimpled with scars.

"I can turn one way and it looks normal. I turn the other way and I'm full of holes," he says, tracing his left side from ankle to chin, and pointing out the places where shrapnel, glass and gravel are imbedded in his skin. Considering the unarmored Humvee Gunn was driving had no doors, he's lucky to have survived at all.

"I was conscious for the whole thing," he says of the blast that obliterated his close friend and left him barely able to walk. "I got a whole bunch of tattoos to try to cover up the scars."

For Jason Gunn and a growing number of Iraq veterans, the scars they bring home are less easily masked. Thanks largely to advanced technology, more soldiers are surviving with injuries that would've killed them in previous wars.

Helicopter evacuations allow injured soldiers to receive prompt surgical attention, often within an hour of being wounded. Casualties are transported to nearby medical staging areas and then to hospitals in Germany, frequently returning to the United States after only a few days.

While the increased survival rates are welcome news, the result is a huge pool of returning veterans with serious needs. According to U.S. Senate research, the amputation rate for injured soldiers has risen to 6 percent-nearly double the rate reported in previous wars. The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) spends $1 billion annually on prosthetic services for vets, a 30 percent increase since 2000.

On top of the growing number of injured veterans, the VA saw a 10-fold increase in cases of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) last year. An Army study has found that one in six of the more than half-million veterans of Operation Iraqi Freedom now report symptoms of PTSD. Because of the stigma surrounding mental healthcare in the military, many experts believe the actual number is considerably higher.

PTSD-a disorder that produces symptoms ranging from nightmares to flashbacks to hallucinations, often triggered by reminders of a particularly traumatic or horrific event-didn't become an accepted medical diagnosis until 1980, long after Vietnam. The myriad symptoms include irritability, difficulty sleeping, detachment, hyper-vigilance, depression and intense anxiety or panic. The disorder is exacerbated by the unpredictability of the warfare that characterizes combat in Iraq.

In October the VA reported that more than 101,000 of the 430,000 U.S. soldiers who'd been discharged from the military after service in Iraq and Afghanistan have sought treatment through the VA. After coming up $1 billion short in 2005, the VA has predicted a $2.6 billion budget shortfall for 2006.

Add to these numbers the psychological ramifications of fighting what 52 percent of Americans now believe is an unjustified war, and the result is a huge percentage of Iraq war veterans who are coming home only to find themselves facing a whole new nightmare.

"I believed that if I did get out, every door, every opportunity was mine," says Gunn. "I just had to want it and take it. But when I got back nothing was falling into place. I got into this big funk about how my life was turning out."

Gunn has stopped taking the PTSD medication he was prescribed while recuperating in Heidelberg Hospital in Landstuhl, Germany. "That's some horrible stuff. It turns you into a zombie," he says. "You basically have no emotions whatsoever."

Gunn was in Germany for two and a half weeks and home for 45 days before the Army sent him back to base camp and then to Iraq, with the rationale that facing his fears would help him work through whatever was bothering him. "The doctors said I shouldn't go back because I had to go through a whole bunch of treatment. I couldn't carry any weight. I was still using a cane to get around. I was still wrapping my own bandages and stuff like that."

Despite his doctors' objections, Gunn redeployed in February 2004. He says he signed the deployment form "to stop all the bullshit."

"Once they got me over there, it was such a big fiasco. I was like, 'I don't care where you put me, where you send me. Just get me there and stop making me tap dance for you.'" At that point Gunn had already given up most of his hope of making it home for good. He said goodbye to his family and friends for what he told them would be the last time.