“DAV truly stands ready to fight for veterans and their benefits.” —Stephen Whitehead, National Senior Vice Commander of veterans who would be returning home and the signature injuries that would follow. Jose Herrera served in the Marine Corps from 2006 to 2011. After a deployment to Iraq, Herrera believed he was returning again, but new orders redirected him to Afghanistan. In what would be the largest airlift insertion of Marines since Vietnam, Herrera was among the 4,000 Marines in Helmand Province launching Operation Khanjar, aimed at driving the Taliban out of southern Afghanistan. Improvised explosive devices were a constant threat—Herrera estimated his unit unearthed 19 each week—but it was enemy fire that claimed the life of his good friend Pfc. Donald “Wayne” Vincent in July 2009. A medic in the Iowa National Guard, Amy Bahl deployed to Iraq for a year in 2003, leaving behind her 5-year-old son Austin Schwendinger. Fifteen years later, the United States still has troops in Iraq and Bahl’s son is a specialist in the Army National Guard in Dubuque, Iowa. “I fought because of the guy next to me,” said Herrera, a life member of DAV Chapter 11 in Wilmington, N.C. “It’s about a camaraderie; this entire generation understands that to the core.” Amy Bahl, a combat medic in the Army National Guard, was deployed shortly after the invasion of Iraq. The then-25-year-old spent a year in Mosul treating gunshot wounds and injuries sustained from roadside bombs and IEDs. “My day-to-day life was very little sleep, followed by trying to fix and save as many people as we possibly could,” recalled Bahl. “It was really hard because medics take a lot of things personal. We always felt guilty when we couldn’t save somebody.” While weaponry was becoming increasingly lethal, better training and medical advances meant surviving multiple severe injuries was the norm, not the exception. In 2016, Army Lt. Gen. Nadja Y. West, surgeon general of the Army, said that 92 percent of soldiers wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan made it home alive, compared to 75 percent during Vietnam. So-called “invisible wounds,” however, aren’t as easy to triage on the battlefield. Traumatic brain injury (TBI) has been referred to as the signature injury of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with nearly 350,000 diagnoses of TBI in the military since 2000. And like those who served in earlier conflicts, veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan experienced post-traumatic stress—with 13.5 percent of those who deployed screening positive. Other conditions—cancers as well as neurological, gastrointestinal and respiratory illnesses—developed over time, resulting from exposure to the burn pits 26 DAV MAGAZINE SEPTEMBER | OCTOBER 2018