More recently, there's Jessica Rich, a 24-year-old former Army reservist who one night early last month climbed drunk into her Volkswagen Jetta and drove south on a northbound interstate outside of Denver. She slammed head-on into a sport-utility vehicle, killing herself and slightly injuring four others. After a nine-month tour of Iraq in 2003 - and according to former soldiers who'd been in group therapy with her, having been raped during her service - PTSD was diagnosed. Her friends say she never got past those experiences. ''She was having nightmares still, up until this point - flashbacks and anxiety and everything,'' one told The Denver Post. ''She said it was really hard to get over because she couldn't get any help from anybody.''

V. 'What's Wrong With Me?'

Earlier this winter, hoping to understand more about PTSD and its effects, I visited a couple of female Iraq vets who felt their postwar lives had been shaped - if not temporarily ruined - by the ''double whammy'' of combat and sexual stress. Both happened to live in Colorado, though each had deployed to war through units located in other states. I met Keri Christensen one morning at her home in a tidy subdivision outside of Denver, where she recently relocated from Wisconsin with her husband and two daughters. She had just taken her daughters to school, and her husband was away on a business trip.

Christensen is 33, blue-eyed and outwardly perky, with an easy smile. By the time she was deployed to war in 2004, she had finished 13 years of part-time service in the Wisconsin Army National Guard as a heavy-equipment transporter. Prior to her deployment in Iraq, she loved her role in the military. ''Before we were married, my husband was in awe of it,'' she said, laughing. ''He was like, 'I met this girl and she hauls tanks!''' She added that she was good at what she did, receiving several awards over the years. Beyond commitment to the Guard of one weekend a month and two weeks' training each summer, Christensen spent the previous six years as a stay-at-home mom. Her life, she said, had been a generally happy one.

But the stresses of deployment were surprisingly manifest: she agonized over leaving her daughters, who were then 6 and 2 years old. Stationed in Kuwait, Christensen's unit ran convoys of equipment back and forth from the port to inside Iraq. ''It was really scary,'' she said, explaining that her convoy had been mortared during an early mission. ''But it was like, Hey cool, we're on a mission.'' Then one day in February 2005, Christensen was accidentally dragged beneath a truck trailer and run over, breaking a number of bones in her foot and injuring her knee and back. She was assigned to a desk job in a tent in Kuwait, mostly working the night shift. It was there, she said, that a sergeant above her in her command - a man she'd known for 10 years - began making comments about her breasts and at one point baldly propositioned her for sex.

Something inside of her broke, she said. Christensen claims that she was punished for even mentioning the situation to her company commanders - written up for minor infractions; accused, she says falsely, of being intoxicated (for which she was demoted); and reassigned for duty to an airfield near a mortuary, where she occasionally helped load coffins of dead soldiers onto planes bound for the U.S. (The Wisconsin Army National Guard denied that Christensen was punished for making a sexual-harassment claim and stated that the claim was investigated and dismissed for lack of evidence.) Christensen says that a combination of war stress, harassment and the reprisals that followed were so upsetting and demoralizing that she considered suicide on several occasions. Her military records show that during her deployment, she was given a diagnosis of depression and PTSD.

After Christensen's experiences in Kuwait, she allowed her military enlistment to expire, which given that she was six years short of receiving military retirement benefits, only added to her pain. ''That was my career, and they stole it from me,'' she said, sitting on an overstuffed couch in the family room of her home, idly fiddling with one of her children's stuffed animals as she spoke. ''They make you feel like you're crazy. And I'm not just the only one. There's other women out there this has happened to. Why is the attitude always 'Just shut up and leave it alone'?''

Christensen had been home from war then for just over a year, having returned to her life as a stay-at-home mother, yet she could not shake what the deployment had done to her - the accident, the confusion and shame of her sexual harassment, and then what she felt was an ignominious demotion and marginalization after reporting the incidents. And while there are those whose image of PTSD is still tied to Vietnam War movies - the province of men who earned their affliction only after having their best buddies die in their arms in a gush of blood - Christensen shares the same diagnosis. That is to say that no matter what constituted her war experience, the aftermath was much the same. She suffered from severe headaches and forgetfulness. ''I feel like I'm always forgetting something,'' she said. ''I leave the house and I don't know if I've left something on - the stove or a candle. I can't trust my memory.'' She told me that her 8-year-old, Madison, recently had to tell her the family's new phone number. She'd lost friends and had ''rough spots'' with her husband. Afraid of crowds, she started grocery shopping at 6 in the morning and was having her mother buy clothes for her children. Driving, too, made her fearful, since she felt ''foggy'' and more than once ran a stop sign or a red light with her kids in the car. Though she went for counseling and medical treatment at a local V.A. while living in Illinois after she returned from Iraq, Christensen had not yet found her way to the Denver V.A. for treatment. The thought of getting in her car and making the 20-minute drive petrified her.