Her troubles really started when she got home to Baltimore after completing her tour. It seemed that nobody understood or appreciated what she'd done, what she'd gone through, what she'd lost. Life for others went on as before. She felt betrayed for being unprotected.
She didn't have the words to make people feel what she felt.
You return from that experience, she said, "speaking a foreign language."
After two years of spasmodic white-hot anger, broken friendships and family bitterness, Hunter sought help for post-traumatic stress disorder.
At the VA Medical Center in Baltimore, she got it, working through long and intense sessions with mental health professionals. Still in therapy, she is working as an outreach counselor for homeless veterans.
"We speak the same language," she explained.
"I'm OK. I'm contributing," she said in a soft voice. "Maybe I was a little greedy before. Everything was about me. My life now is dedicated to giving back."
But, she added, "I think I'll be in transition for five years."
Other veterans have spiraled downward for years and even decades before they hit bottom.
Vietnam, 1968: Dwight Lamar flew in medevac helicopters under fire, "bagging and tagging" American dead and lifting the wounded from bloody battlefields. Back home, deeply disturbed and angry, he turned to drugs.
Lamar lost 40 years to cocaine before he realized he'd be gone if he didn't grab a lifeline. So last spring he turned up on the steps of a former paper cup factory in downtown Baltimore, a red brick building that houses the Maryland Center for Veterans Education and Training.
"I don't blame anybody for my drug problem," said Lamar, a handsome, rangy 57-year-old. "The most important thing for me was to be honest about what I was doing to destroy my life."
Now he is clean, drug-free and learning to manage life's sometimes bumpy path without narcotics. Soon, he will graduate back out into the world with a new confidence and a good job.
"I came to the Vets Center crying for help," he said. "They answered."
MC Vets, as it's known informally, operates on a $3.3 million budget, providing an intensive continuum of care for the most needy veterans: those who are homeless, jobless, addicted to alcohol or drugs or both, and suffering from chronic mental and physical complications like schizophrenia, major depression, hypertension, diabetes and HIV.
