Hearts and Minds Back Home from War: A Therapist's Journey Through Soldier Stories

I'd been listening to war stories since the 1960s, when I was a young girl sitting at the kitchen table and, night after night, my dad recounted the horrors of WWII. I didn't know why he was telling us those gruesome stories, but I knew for sure that I hated hearing them. And I hated war.

In 2004 my life hit a reckoning point. Maybe you've had one of them too-a moment when you look back and realize that somewhere you made a wrong turn on an important path. It took a war breaking out seven thousand miles from my peaceful little existence in Boulder, Colorado to engage me in a larger world and a role I was meant to play in it. Not many years later, I moved across the country and began working at Ft. Bragg as a staff psychologist tasked with helping to heal the psychological roadkill of combat. This time, the war stories would change my life.