On Sept. 11, 2001, Desma Brooks was a single mother of three in her mid-20s who served part-time in the Indiana Army National Guard. Watching the attack, she wondered if she might be assigned to a support role on the home front. Instead, she served two yearlong deployments – one in Afghanistan and one in Iraq. During the second, while driving a military vehicle, she hit a roadside bomb. Brooks returned home with a mild case of traumatic brain injury and a serious case of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Of the almost 22 million veterans in the United States today, more than 2 million are women, and of those, more than 635,000 are enrolled in the Department of Veterans Affairs system – double the number before 9/11. Women are the fastest growing group of veterans treated by the VA, and projections show that women will make up more than 16 percent of the country’s veterans by midcentury.
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