Staff sergeant  Christopher Schwope was a good guy with a tough job when I met him in late 2005. Back then he was a young Army recruiter working the North Side of San Antonio, and I was writing a story about the Army’s growing enlistment crisis. The war in Iraq was dragging on, and recruiting numbers had dropped to their lowest levels since the post-Vietnam years. The Army had responded by offering cash bonuses to new enlistees and soldiers who re-upped, as well as signing recruits who had the kinds of criminal records and aptitude test scores that would have precluded their consideration in earlier eras. But its best hope was recruiters like Schwope. Fresh-faced and charismatic, with bright blue eyes and a highly dexterous way with the word “dude,” he told the kids run-and-gun war stories from his deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq and bragged on a brand-new pickup truck that he’d bought with his combat pay. For more-practically-minded candidates, he described the free Lasik surgery he’d received after basic training. He was earnest and energetic, and when he talked about owing his life to the Army, you believed him.

But there was also this: One afternoon, as we drove between high school campuses, he talked about his time in Iraq. He’d been a team leader with the 4th Infantry Division, and his unit had been part of the force that found Saddam’s famous spider hole, in December 2003. He’d kicked in doors, dodged RPGs, and blasted his way through firefights, and luckily he hadn’t lost any of his buddies. But he’d also wrenched his knee while chasing an IED triggerman in Tikrit, and when that injury grew into a blown ACL, he was reclassified out of his infantry job. And then, as he moved on to the subject of his present desk duty, his tone changed. He pulled off the road and stopped my tape recorder. 

He said he wanted to go back in a way I wouldn’t understand and that he had feelings even he didn’t understand. Something inside him was different. Now that he was home—he’d grown up in nearby Boerne—he was drinking too much and getting in bar fights and flying off the handle at his wife. He burst into tears anytime he saw a flag on TV. He felt that life was happening outside his control, that his marriage was collapsing, and that if he didn’t make his numbers at the recruiting station, his job would too. But worst of all, he worried that if he talked to an Army counselor about any of it, he’d be labeled a PTSD case and his career really would be over. Then, remembering we had to meet the principal at Samuel Clemens High School, he slid back into the role of enthused recruiter and got on the road.

That was more than seven years ago, when Operation Iraqi Freedom was nearing the three-year mark and the war in Afghanistan, Operation Enduring Freedom, had already lasted more than four. As time would reveal, neither was close to ending, and the cost to Texas—which has more active-duty military than any other state—would be high. Since the beginning of those conflicts, 593 Texans have been killed and 3,601 have been wounded. Now, finally, the end appears to be in sight. The last troops left Iraq in December 2011, combat forces should be home from Afghanistan by the end of 2014, and President Barack Obama has announced his intention to pivot off the perpetual wartime footing of the Global War on Terror. Bases around Texas that have spent more than a decade sending troops off to fight are gearing up for the last homecomings.

But as the conversation with Schwope made clear, there’s something inadequate about the way the civilian world uses the term “homecoming.” Or at least incomplete. We picture tearful reunions on tarmacs, soldiers who drop duffel bags to throw their arms around spouses, parents, kids—the sort of scene captured in the photo essay by Joe Pugliese. But there’s another side to the equation, one we are lucky to know nothing about: the returning warriors are trying to leave someplace too.

That part is never easy. The worst cases can’t stop reliving unthinkable events they witnessed or endured. The unique horror of Iraq and Afghanistan comes from the enemy’s new preferred weapons, IEDs and suicide bombers, which have produced a heart-wrenching number of amputees and burn victims. The hidden wounds of traumatic brain injuries have proved just as severe, leading to memory loss, slowed thinking, and a debilitating depression that can’t be treated by counseling alone. Yet even the troops fortunate enough to have avoided those harrowing attacks face a massive transition when they get back. They’ve just spent long months in a nonstop state of alert. Forget all the nerve-racking patrols and night raids they went on; if they were at a combat outpost, merely walking to an outdoor latrine was an invitation to get picked off by a sniper. Amplifying all that is the unprecedented number of repeat deployments. Of the nearly 2.5 million troops who served, more than a third deployed more than once, and some 400,000 went over at least three times. Each trip back multiplied the exposure to IEDs, the time spent on edge, and the wear and tear on their psyches.

Psychologist Sharon Wills leads a PTSD clinical team at the Department of Veterans Affairs outpatient clinic in Austin, the largest such clinic in the VA system. “They’ve come home, but they’re still on hyperarousal,” she said of returning soldiers. “They don’t look at the world the way they did before. They’ve been in situations where bad people weren’t punished, where despicable things were done to children. Their trust in human nature has been severely compromised, and so has their ability to feel safe.”

Wills and her staff see dozens of former combatants every day who are having trouble finding their way into a peacetime mind-set, and those numbers are set to