COLORADO SPRINGS — A year ago, Specialist Michael Crawford wanted nothing more than to get into Fort Carson’s Warrior Transition Battalion, a special unit created to provide closely managed care for soldiers with physical wounds and severe psychological trauma.

Specialist Michael Crawford with his mother, Sally Darrow, in Michigan. He tried to commit suicide after being transferred to the transition unit.

A strapping Army sniper who once brimmed with confidence, he had returned emotionally broken from Iraq, where he suffered two concussions from roadside bombs and watched several platoon mates burn to death. The transition unit at Fort Carson, outside Colorado Springs, seemed the surest way to keep suicidal thoughts at bay, his mother thought.

It did not work. He was prescribed a laundry list of medications for anxiety, nightmares, depression and headaches that made him feel listless and disoriented. His once-a-week session with a nurse case manager seemed grossly inadequate to him. And noncommissioned officers — soldiers supervising the unit — harangued or disciplined him when he arrived late to formation or violated rules.

Last August, Specialist Crawford attempted suicide with a bottle of whiskey and an overdose of painkillers. By the end of last year, he was begging to get out of the unit.

“It is just a dark place,” said the soldier, who is waiting to be medically discharged from the Army. “Being in the W.T.U. is worse than being in Iraq.”

Created in the wake of the scandal in 2007 over serious shortcomings at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Warrior Transition Units were intended to be sheltering way stations where injured soldiers could recuperate and return to duty or gently process out of the Army. There are currently about 7,200 soldiers at 32 transition units across the Army, with about 465 soldiers at Fort Carson’s unit.

But interviews with more than a dozen soldiers and health care professionals from Fort Carson’s transition unit, along with reports from other posts, suggest that the units are far from being restful sanctuaries. For many soldiers, they have become warehouses of despair, where damaged men and women are kept out of sight, fed a diet of powerful prescription pills and treated harshly by noncommissioned officers. Because of their wounds, soldiers in Warrior Transition Units are particularly vulnerable to depression and addiction, but many soldiers from Fort Carson’s unit say their treatment there has made their suffering worse.

Some soldiers in the unit, and their families, described long hours alone in their rooms, or in homes off the base, aimlessly drinking or playing video games.

“In combat, you rely on people and you come out of it feeling good about everything,” said a specialist in the unit. “Here, you’re just floating. You’re not doing much. You feel worthless.”

At Fort Carson, many soldiers complained that doctors prescribed drugs too readily. As a result, some soldiers have become addicted to their medications or have turned to heroin. Medications are so abundant that some soldiers in the unit openly deal, buy or swap prescription pills.

Heavy use of psychotropic drugs and narcotics makes it difficult to exercise, wake for morning formation and attend classes, soldiers and health care professionals said. Yet noncommissioned officers discipline soldiers who fail to complete those tasks, sometimes over the objections of nurse case managers and doctors.

At least four soldiers in the Fort Carson unit have committed suicide since 2007, the most of any transition unit as of February, according to the Army.

Senior officers in the Army’s Warrior Transition Command declined to discuss specific soldiers. But they said Army surveys showed that most soldiers treated in transition units since 2007, more than 50,000 people, had liked the care.

Those senior officers acknowledged that addiction to medications was a problem, but denied that Army doctors relied too heavily on drugs. And they strongly defended disciplining wounded soldiers when they violated rules. Punishment is meted out judiciously, they said, mainly to ensure that soldiers stick to treatment plans and stay safe.

“These guys are still soldiers, and we want to treat them like soldiers,” said Lt. Col. Andrew L. Grantham, commander of the Warrior Transition Battalion at Fort Carson.

The colonel offered another explanation for complaints about the unit. Many soldiers, he said, struggle in transition units because they would rather be with regular, deployable units. In some cases, he said, they feel ashamed of needing treatment.

“Some come to us with an identity crisis,” he said. “They don’t want to be seen as part of the W.T.U. But we want them to identify with a purpose and give them a mission.”

Teri Jackson, a single mother who grew up in Southwest Austin , deployed to Iraq in March 2004, leaving behind her sons, then 11 and 8 years old. As soon as she got to the barren trailer in Balad that would serve as her living quarters for the next year, she decorated it with photos of her children and cheery memories of home.

A few days later, Jackson, 40, a U.S. Army truck driver, went on her first mission, hauling supplies to a distant base. Suddenly, her partner, who was driving at the time, slammed on the brakes, sending Jackson hurtling into the windshield. The move probably saved her life as a mortar round flew past the truck.

When she returned to her trailer, Jackson took down the photos from the walls.

"I said, 'You can't focus on your family.' I couldn't come and sit and see that every day. I had to focus on the mission," she said. "You get so numb. You have to turn off your emotions."

Jackson is part of a record number of women serving in the military — many of whom served as truck drivers, gunners and combat medics — who face unique challenges when they return home to their children from the war zone. She's also part of a historic wave of women who are fundamentally changing the military and sparking a push to revolutionize the lumbering Veterans Affairs medical system that was set up for older, male veterans — not women in need of child care and changing tables.

More than 212,000 women have served in Iraq or Afghanistan, 11 percent of the total deployed military force. Forty percent of active-duty women have children. And more than 30,000 single mothers have been deployed to the war zone, according to Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.

Elwanda Hawthorne, a counselor at the VA-run Austin Veterans Center, says female veterans — and especially mothers — face a set of challenges when they come home that is different from those of their male counterparts.

Like male service members, women often return home emotionally exhausted. But, Hawthorne said, many mothers are thrust back into caretaker roles the moment they return from war. They get no time to readjust, even though the military advises service members to take time off to decompress once they return home.

"We learn to shut down but still function" while deployed, said Hawthorne, a veteran who served in both Desert Storm and Iraq. "When we come home, it's hard to flip the switch. \u2026 It's like, you look OK, you sound OK, so you must be the same person that left 12 months ago. But in actuality, they're not. Women are supposed to be the nurturers of families, but when they come home, that's when the female needs to be nurtured."

Leaving the combat zone behind

For Jackson, a homecoming after a medical discharge meant diving back into motherhood without missing a beat, despite the trauma she experienced in Iraq.

Both her parents had died in the previous year, and her engagement didn't survive the deployment. Jackson, who left the Army shortly after she suffered a herniated disk during a mortar attack on her base in November 2004 , said getting time to decompress after coming home "would have been lovely. But I didn't have time. \u2026 I have to accept what's given to me."

Jackson was vigilant, putting new locks on all the doors and constantly asking her boys where they were going and with whom. She would check the trash cans at the mall for bombs.

"My kids were walking on pins and needles," she said. "They kind of learned the hard way."

One morning, one of her sons jumped on her bed, spooking her. She grabbed him by his shoulders, and his eyes grew wide with fear. "It hurt me to see his face like that," she said.

Jackson said it took about a year and a half to pass through what she calls her hypervigilant stage. Eventually, after the VA accepted her claim for post-traumatic stress disorder, she received counseling, which she said helped her change her mindset. She now works as a medical technician at the Austin VA health clinic .