One night after falling asleep Steve Kraft dreamt that balloon people armed with AK-47s were shooting at him. He began to shoot back, and pretty soon everything turned real, with blood and guts everywhere.

Steven Kraft, forty-six, lives in the Crawford House shelter for the homeless in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He served in the U.S. Army during Operation Desert Storm, and he believes that Americans should have known more about the Arabic culture before going in. U.S. forces were trying to change a culture that had evolved over thousands of years, he says. It is his belief that the Americans weren’t welcome over there to begin with, and the people of Kuwait changed back to their familiar ways, he says, after being liberated.

Kraft has no good memories of that time. A medic was kidnapped and later found beheaded. That was the moment when Kraft, then a young man of twenty-one, changed his outlook on everything. Steve and the medic had become friends during their training, and he had known the man’s wife and newborn daughter.

The preparations for going to war were thorough, recalls Kraft, but much seemed woefully lacking when it came time to engage in real warfare on the battlefield. He remembers the first time he shot someone: it was an Iraqi he shot in the chest three times in the midst of a battle. On advancing forward afterward, he could see nothing was left of the man. Kraft’s eyes reflect refund sadness as he explains his PTSD-the constant nightmares and the fearsome signs of alcohol abuse. For quite a long time alcohol was the only way he knew of covering up the experience of war. When Kraft returned home, he listened in shock as his grandmother said she didn’t recognize him. Eventually, his marriage of seventeen years ended, and his life fell apart in every other way.

Kraft says he has no regrets about joining the military, and even wishes he had remained in the army longer. But the war did him in. He worked in concrete construction afterward for twenty years, but sclerosis in his lower back, PTSD, arthritis, and intermittent problems with alcohol caused him to give up.

When interviewed for this profile, Steve Kraft had gone 222 days without alcohol and was still counting each day a special achievement.

Story and Photo Source: PORTRAITS OF SERVICE, Looking into the Faces of Veterans by Robert H. Miller and Andrew Wakeford available on Amazon @ www.amazon.com/Portraits-Service-Looki…/…/ref=sr_1_1…

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