Stacy Bannerman didn't recognize her husband after he returned from his second tour in Iraq.
"The man I had married was not the man that came back from war," she says.
Bannerman's husband, a former National Guardsman, had been in combat and been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. He behaved in ways she had never expected, and one day, he tried to strangle her.
"I had been with this man for 11 years at that point, and there had never been anything like this before," Bannerman said. "I was so furious and so afraid."
At first, she thought it was just a problem within her marriage. She called a hotline for military families to ask for help and learned something else she hadn't expected.
"The woman operating the hotline began weeping," Bannerman remembered. "She was getting so many of these calls from military spouses all over the country."
The debate about the relationship between domestic violence and post-traumatic stress disorder has waxed and waned since the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, but has never quite gone away. Headlines periodically reignite it, as when the son of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who is an Iraq vet, faced domestic violence allegations earlier this year.
[For more of this story, written by Quil Lawrence, go to http://www.npr.org/sections/he...-can-show-up-at-home]
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