As he tells the story six months after his return from Iraq, Randy Hartley, a senior medic for the Des Moines Fire Department, is apologetic. He’s recounting the day he chased down an errant driver and “got belligerent,” told him he’d just returned from Iraq and wasn’t going to have some idiot on the freeway getting him killed. Another time, a state trooper stopped Hartley for speeding, noticed his veteran-status license plates and asked if he’d just returned from Iraq. When Hartley answered that he had, the trooper told him to “slow it down and have a good day” before sending him on his way.

“I was driving a speed I thought was normal,” says Hartley, an Iowa Army National Guard first lieutenant who was deployed with the 767th Engineers detachment in Iraq from October 2003 to February 2005. Often under sniper fire themselves, the soldiers in Hartley’s unit were responsible for heavy rescue operations, including firefighting, rescuing casualties and recovering the maimed and charred bodies soldiers killed in action, sometimes finding “more limbs than bodies,” he says.

“It’s a huge transition going from a civilian job to a military job and back to a civilian job. Everybody has some kind of image or thought or condition that gets permanently embedded.”

Fortunately for returning soldiers like Hartley, the Iowa National Guard created a pilot project called Enduring Families to help them deal with some of the stress they experience when re-entering civilian life. Psychologists, therapists, social workers, counselors and religious leaders have given more than 250,000 volunteer service hours to the Enduring Families program and have debriefed around 2,000 soldiers since the program began earlier this year. Participation is mandatory for all Guard soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, but voluntary for their spouses and other family members.

In group counseling sessions, the volunteer professionals “listen to what they have to say” and may make referrals, “but stay out of therapy work,” says Margie Conrad, director of the Central Iowa chapter of the American Red Cross’ Critical Incident Stress Management Program, one of the Enduring Families facilitators. “We’re openers of doors and remind people of the coping skills they have. We’re coordinators of ideas and coordinators of information and other services they can use to help each other.”

Also supporting the program are the National Organization for Victim Assistance through the Iowa attorney general’s office, the Iowa chapter of the National Association of Social Workers, religious leaders and a half-dozen Iowa mental-health organizations.

Conrad says many of the soldiers initially “grumbled and complained” about being required to take part in the weekend debriefing, “but when they go through the peer-to-peer counseling, they come out with a whole different perspective.”

“The comment we hear most of the time is, ‘It’s too bad I didn’t get this sooner.’”

Some soldiers, like Hartley, face only minor re-entry difficulties, like driving as they did in Iraq. Others have more serious problems, such as combat flashbacks and panic attacks, that may require counseling or other mental-health services. Hartley says re-adjustment difficulties can run the gamut from “attempted suicides and accidental shootings, to people not wanting to come back from leave and get out of the Guard to wanting to go back because they miss that thrill.”

“They get very used to their life and have a hard time coming back,” Conrad says. “That is a lifestyle they enjoy or like being a part of. We do hear a lot of soldiers complaining about coming back to jobs that are not as rewarding. They’ve maybe been a commander, but can’t supervise anyone here. Employers are starting to see that.”

The Enduring Families volunteers back up Hartley’s assertion that “one of the biggest issues is relationship problems.” Statistics from groups like the Miles Foundation, a Connecticut-based non-profit group that deals with abuse in the military, show calls reporting domestic violence and sexual abuse skyrocketed from about 75 a month before the 9/11 terrorist attacks to about 150 a week since troops have been deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In some cases, marital discord may stem from something as easily resolved as a reversal of roles in bill paying and child rearing during one spouse’s deployment. “They come back and try to reclaim their territory and it’s a hard transition,” Hartley says. “There are a lot of issues they have to be open-minded about. There’s not just one way of doing things.”

Becky Coady, a family programs assistant at Camp Dodge whose husband, Capt. Mark Coady, is deployed in Iraq with the 194th Field Artillery, says family dynamics can change greatly during the months to more than a year that a soldier is deployed. It’s normal for husbands and wives to change, “but when you are separated for several months, you change without the opportunity to view those changes,” says Coady, the Camp Dodge liaison for the Enduring Families program. “It’s like coming back to a totally different person, like courtship all over again. One person becomes very, very independent without that soldier there. Few families are like they were.

“It’s a matter of feeling, ‘Can I be compatible with this person again?’” she says. “The two of you are in the same house, but it’s like you’re dating to get to know that person.”

When Coady’s own husband returned from his first Gulf tour, he displayed some of the same symptoms of stress the Enduring Families volunteers see in the soldiers they counsel. “Here’s the thing,” she says. “Right away, he was combative. I knew he was going to criticize. We had to learn to communicate without having those interjections of anger.”

Lt. Col. Bill Vangerpen, a National Guard chaplain who hears the stories of combat veterans who sleep fitfully, if at all, with a weapon near their pillows or become compulsive about home safety, says continuation of the Enduring Families program is especially important in Iowa. Soldiers in states with active-duty military bases go through a mandatory debriefing, but no such services were available to Iowa’s returning National Guard and Army Reserve soldiers.

“There are some very real issues they have to work through,” he says. “It’s very helpful to get the soldiers to open up and share what issues they are returning with, and find other soldiers who have similar fears and anxieties.”

Iowa is the only state to offer such a program, but John Harrell, a chaplain at Mercy Medical Center-Des Moines and an Enduring Families volunteer, says other states have shown interest and the Iowa National Guard program is being used as a model. Hartley thinks the Enduring Families program should get permanent funding from the Legislature. “When you do start having problems, it can be too late, not just for the individual but the people he reaches out and touches,” he says.