This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2008, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Five years and more than 1 million deployments later, the fog of war remains every bit as thick as it was when the United States invaded Iraq.
But with a strong majority of Americans calling for an end to the war, with the U.S. military stretched perilously thin and with some recent, albeit tenuous, indications that security in Iraq has improved, the years ahead appear to promise fewer deployments, if not outright retreat.
Yet for many of those who return, the war will not be over.
And no one knows better what the future holds for today's veterans than those who returned from another horrible fight, more than three decades ago.
'I just don't have a lot of hope': Mary Jane Shipley giggles, apologizes, and then giggles again.
"It's a nervousness thing," she says, shaking her head. "I shouldn't laugh. None of this is funny."
The 62-year-old former trauma nurse is recalling the time she spent at a mobile Army hospital in Vung Tau, Vietnam. Her eyes well with tears at the recollection of the young men she watched die there, burnt and broken and missing pieces of their bodies as they faded away.
Shipley says she knew almost immediately after returning home there was something wrong with her. In part, it was the helicopters. She could hear them, even smell them, ferrying patients to the Salt Lake City hospital where she worked - sometimes minutes before any of her associates could.
She had trouble relating to other people. She was restless. She was constantly afraid.
Perhaps to the eyes of today's doctors and nurses, Shipley's illness would have been obvious. But back then, no one reached out.
It took her 30 years to realize she wasn't alone. Now in treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, the Western-trained nurse has found Eastern therapies to be most helpful. She practices yoga and qigong. And at least twice a week, she undergoes acupuncture.
"It took me so long to figure out what works for me," Shipley laments, "and I still have so much trouble."
Maybe, she says hopefully, the psychological ailments that today's veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan suffer will be easier to identify. Maybe the stigma is gone to the point that early treatment will be more accessible.
"Maybe," she says. "But I guess I just don't have a lot of hope that people will understand their pain."
She giggles again. And sighs.
'What promises are you going to keep?': Terry Schow exists in two worlds.
In one, he is a combat veteran - a zealous advocate for his brothers and sisters in arms - who understands all too well the way those who fought with him in Vietnam were thanked for their service.
In the other, he is the director of the Utah Department of Veterans Affairs. A bureaucrat. A shoulder-rubbing fixture on Capitol Hill.
Balanced precariously between these realms, the brash, booming, rotund Schow offers his fellow veterans an unlikely pitch: Trust the government just one more time, he begs. We can help you.
Yet he is mindful of the limits to what he can offer. It's easy to make promises in good economic times, he says, and it feels right to do so during times of war.
"But what promises are you going to keep?" Schow demands. "That's the real question."
It was less than four years after the end of the Vietnam War that the state of Utah shut down its first veterans-services agency.
"It happened that fast," Schow says. "The government makes a commitment, on behalf of a grateful nation . . . then it finds it has other priorities."
The doors remained closed until 1991, when the state division of Veterans Affairs was created in the midst of the first war in Iraq. Last year, in the middle of two new wars, the division was upgraded to a department, which gave Schow a seat in Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr.'s Cabinet.
What does the future hold for the latest generation of veterans? Schow is hopeful.
"Veterans from my era made a commitment that never again would one generation of veterans abandon another," he says. "I like to think that will make a difference."
Perhaps it has. At the very least, today's veterans are getting a considerably warmer reception than did many of their Vietnam-era counterparts. And the government has made an effort - albeit an inexact one - to recruit them into the VA medical system.
But it is the long term Schow worries about. He says Iraq's veterans and their families must become advocates for themselves.
He recounts the travails of yet another generation of veterans - those who served in World War II and Korea - many of whom never sought help from their government. "They were so modest and humble," Schow says. "They didn't speak up."
And so many, he laments, were forgotten.
'Things kept happening': Von Jones knows the stakes.
The nation moved on past Vietnam. But he never could. As a young Marine, Jones lost 13 months of his life to the war - then lost decades more dealing with its effects on his body and mind.
He came home. Got married. Had a daughter. Began his career. "Everything was going OK for me," he says. "And then, well, things kept happening."
Nightmares. Paranoia. Anger.
No matter what kind of homecoming they're getting now, Jones is sadly certain that many Iraq vets will end up exactly as he did - aimless, sometimes homeless and addicted to one substance or another.
"It doesn't always happen right away," Jones says, leaning over a table at the Salt Lake Community College Writing Center, where he now facilitates a veterans-only writing group. "Sometimes you come back and things seem normal. And then they're not."
Jones says his worst years were from 1982 to 1992 - more than a decade after he returned home from the war.
Jones is not confident that today's vets will be treated so warmly 10, 20 or 30 years down the road. "We have such short memories," he says. "They may very well be on their own."
'Not quite the case': Sharen Welsh says that even among fellow Vietnam-era veterans, she was sometimes brushed aside - a consequence, she figures, of her gender and her role during the war. She never stepped foot in Vietnam, but saw, smelled and touched its effects at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas.
"The assumption is that veterans are men and that they were in battle," she says. "That's not quite the case."
Welsh, who works in a Utah veterans service office, tries to help everyone who walks through her door. But she takes particular interest in those who are not traditionally thought of as war vets.
"If they're less likely to be seen as veterans, then they're less likely to receive the services they need," she says.
And so she worries about women, who make up about 14 percent of today's military. And she worries about all of those whose service put them close to the war but not in the war itself - the soldiers at Brooke, for instance, who are still doing the same job as Welsh did while she was stationed there: Treating the worst of the military's burn victims.
"Those things, they last inside of you for a long time," she says.
And while she is hopeful that the nation has changed the way it has historically honored and cared for its veterans, she is wary.
"I guess," she says, "that time will tell."