RAY CITY, Ga. — April and Tom Marcum were high school sweethearts who married after graduation. For years, she recalls, he was a doting husband who would leave love notes for her to discover on the computer or in her purse. Now the closest thing to notes that they exchange are the reminders she set up on his cellphone that direct him to take his medicine four times a day.

He usually ignores them, and she ends up having to make him do it.

Since Mr. Marcum came back in 2008 from two tours in Iraq with a traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder, his wife has quit her job as a teacher to care for him. She has watched their life savings drain away. And she has had to adjust to an entirely new relationship with her husband, who faces a range of debilitating problems including short-term memory loss and difficulties with impulse control and anger.

“The biggest loss is the loss of the man I married,” Ms. Marcum said, describing her husband now as disconnected on the best days, violent on the worst ones. “His body’s here, but his mind is not here anymore. I see glimpses of him, but he’s not who he was.”

Ms. Marcum has joined a growing community of spouses, parents and partners who, confronted with damaged loved ones returning from war who can no longer do for themselves, drop most everything in their own lives to care for them. Jobs, hobbies, friends, even parental obligations to young children fall by the wayside. Families go through savings and older parents dip into retirement funds.