Recovery centers cater to female vets

[unhappycamper]

Air Force Master Sgt. Cindy Rathbun, 43, of Yuba City, Calif., checked herself into a residential treatment center after her hair started falling out "in clumps" while on duty in Iraq. While being treated, she revealed another secret: She said that when she was a young airman, she was raped by a superior.


Recovery centers cater to female vets
By Andrea Stone - USA Today
Posted : Wednesday Jan 2, 2008 13:05:12 EST

MENLO PARK, Calif. — Master Sgt. Cindy Rathbun knew something was wrong three weeks after she arrived in Iraq in September 2006. Her blonde hair began “coming out in clumps,” she says.

The Air Force personnel specialist, in the military for 25 years, had volunteered for her first combat-zone job at Baghdad’s Camp Victory. She lived behind barbed wire and blast walls, but the war was never far.

“There were firefights all the time,” Rathbun says slowly, her voice flat. “There were car bombs. Boom! You see the smoke. The ground would shake.”

As the mother of three grown children prepared to fly home last February, she took a medic aside. Holding a plastic sandwich bag of hair, she asked whether this was normal.

“He said it sometimes happens,” she says. “It’s the body’s way of displaying stress when we can’t express it emotionally.”


Rest of this most excellent article at: http://www.armytimes.com/news/2008/01/gns_womentoll_080102/