Even when military personnel aren’t injured physically or psychologically by experiences in war, long deployments take a toll on their families. The spouse left at home gets resentful, and the spouse who returns home from deployment often finds his or her role in the family has changed.
Infortunately, this is a problem as old as war. The tragedy Clytemnestra, at heart, was an acting-out of the male nightmare of a soldier’s return to a wife he no longer knew.
The military has done a great deal in this over the years. There is a 7 step emotional cycle of deployment that families go through. The last three steps are even more complex in time of war. I remember returning from the Gulf and behaving like I was still in the war zone for a few weeks. Even though I knew I was home, I still drove around parked cars like they might be IEDs and visually scanned pedestrians for weapons. Fortunately, we had been through peacetime deployment before and my wife and kids didn’t freak out too much. They treated me as an ‘honored guest’ for a couple of weeks and let me slowly get back into the family process.
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Also:
http://www.usarpac.army.mil/SoldierFamilyWellBeing/Reintegration/The%20Emotional%20Cycle%20Of%20Deployment.htm