Portland observer., November 14, 2012, Image 1

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Number 44
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Wednesday
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• November 14, 2012
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Committed to Cultural Diversity
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commumh' service
Coping at War and Peace
Female soldier
changed by
deployment
C ari H achmann
T he P ortland O bserver
by
As a helicopter mechanic for the U. S.
Marine Corps, veteran of war Marissa Rivera,
31, returned home after her third deployment
to Afghanistan and Iraq in 2008.
Rivera was just 22-years-old and working
at Auto Zone when she felt a calling to enlist
in the military after terrorists crashed Ameri­
can passenger jets into New York City’s twin
towers, the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.,
and into a Pennsylvania field on Sept. 11,
2001.
Fearing the unknown and wishing loved
ones goodbye, she deployed for her first
time overseas in late 2004 to an air station in
a cold mountainous region of Afghanistan.
During her six to eight month stay, she sur­
vived three separate bombing attacks by
Taliban insurgents.
After returning home to San Diego’s ma­
rine base at Miramar, Rivera deployed again
in 2006, only this time with the Navy, on
board the U.S.S. Peleieu. She was one of two
female helicopter mechanics confined to a
cramped air shop where the male to female
ratio was near 100 to 1.
There, Rivera learned to suck it up as one
of the guys. “I had to work 10 times harder
and 10 times faster,” she said. “It was pretty
evident— they didn’t want me there.”
Following a brief docking at a U.S. base in
Kuwait, Rivera returned to the southern
California shore, where she would leave again
in 2007 for her final deployment to an air
station in Iraq. By this time, the young
woman was what soldiers call “salty”— she
knew what she was getting into. Yet, the
seasoned marine still found few comforts in
the sand-stormed, 140 degree Fahrenheit
Iraqi dessert.
Rivera says she didn’t realize how the war
had changed her until after she got out and
even then, it was a slow process of coming
to terms. It took her four years to realize she
had symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Dis­
order.
The stigma of PTSD in the military comes
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PHOTO BY CARI H a CHMANN/T h E PORTLAND OBSERVER
Iraq and Afghanistan veteran Marissa Rivera (right) gets a helping hand from Belle Landau of the Returning Veterans Project,
a southeast Portland non-profit offering free health services to veterans and family members.
from not wanting to be considered weak or
crazy by fellow soldiers and commanders.
The condition keeps a lot of veterans in the
dark and they don’t seek the help they need,
said Rivera.
“You ’ ve been re-programmed by the mili­
tary to be a certain way,” she said. “How do
you undo that?”
After marrying a fellow soldier from her
unit, moving to Portland and finishing a
degree in psychology at Portland State Uni­
versity, Rivera was working at Portland’s
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Veterans Affairs Medical Center, assisting
counselors with other veterans, when she
began noticing her own PTSD symptoms.
Ailments such as flat effect, hidden emo­
tions, anger flair-ups, impatience, hyper-vigi-
lance, isolationist tendencies — these were
conditions where, “I saw myself in other
veterans,” said Rivera.
As a female in a no-excuse, male-domi­
nated warzone, Rivera grew a thick skin.
“You can’t have weakness in the mili­
tary,” she said. Every day she had to prove
to others that she could fix airplanes flown by
fellow soldiers and handle herself in life or
death situations. It never got easier, she
said.
Once home, she suffered the effects. “It’s
not something I asked for. It’s not my fault.
It’s something that happened,” she said.
“How do you separate from being a weapon
to being someone who’s breaking down?”
Post-war, Rivera is very private and
continued
on page 2