ABSTRACT
Jim, a 25-year-old Marine, came in two weeks before his second deployment to Iraq. Newly shorn and unnervingly polite, he would have looked more like a 16-year-old high school student were it not for the telltale thousand-yard stare that marks those who have seen entirely too much. He sat stiffly in my office, eyes cast down. He reflected on the ways in which he had changed and wondered if he would ever be the same. He was embarrassed to admit that he was actually anxious to get back to the field where he felt confident and his so-called symptoms were adaptive. On the other hand, he had a tremendous sense of fatalism regarding his redeployment.
