August 8, 2008 - She wants to be there. Really, she does. Jessica Oliff, a 25-year-old Army veteran, plans to attend the Calvet Women Veterans Conference today at McClellan Business Park – if it's not too much for her.

"I'm kind of scared," she says, "because it'll be a lot of people. If I get overwhelmed, I'll have to leave."

She was 20 when she enlisted, a paramedic and community college student from Virginia who wanted to become a registered nurse. Two difficult tours in Iraq with her Fort Hood, Texas-based military police company – a total of three years out of her five-year enlistment - changed all that.

In the cool shade of the Orangevale apartment she shares with her caretaker, Chiloe Lane, Oliff tries to explain.

"There were a lot of attacks," she says, then she stops.

"No offense," she says. "I won't go into that. I can't even go into that with my psychiatrist. There were a lot of IED attacks. A lot of friends dying. I got hit a lot. I developed PTSD. I have TBI. I have seizures now. I have shrapnel in my hands. I can't even feel my hands. I'm all tore up.

"I developed memory loss. Sometimes I don't even remember what happened over there."

"And obviously, her speech was affected," says Lane, 30, a family friend who used to work with autistic children.

"It's Tourette's," says Oliff.

Her service to this country, in short, has left her severely disabled. Her TBI – traumatic brain injury, called the signature injury of the Iraq war, largely as the result of the prevalence of roadside improvised explosive device attacks – resulted from shrapnel piercing her skull, she says.

Her asthma, she says, is the result of being trapped in a burning tank.

And her post-traumatic stress disorder?

"I saw friends die," Oliff says. "I was also a medic in Iraq. I was treating my friends as well as fighting alongside them. If they got blown up, I was helping them."

While politicians continue debating whether women should be assigned to combat, a different reality long ago became clear in Iraq and Afghanistan. Women, who make up 15 percent of the active military, have already gone into war, attached to military police and logistics units. On the ground in a war zone, they face the same dangers as servicemen.

They fight. They die. They come home broken.

As Barbara Ward, California Department of Veterans Affairs deputy secretary and a Vietnam-era Air Force veteran, says: "Women are being exposed to what men have been exposed to, even though they're not supposed to be on the front lines."

The point of the women veterans conference, she says, is to let California's 164,000 female military veterans know that support is available to them.

"I'll have women veterans say, 'I'm not sure if I'm eligible for benefits,' " says Ward. "Sometimes, even the younger veterans say that."

The free, one-day conference - which begins at 7 a.m. at McClellan's Lions Gate Hotel – includes sessions on PTSD, military sexual assault and mental health issues.

"I'm going to try to go," says Oliff. "If I can speak, I will."

She moved to California late last year for treatment at the Palo Alto Polytrauma Rehabilitation Center, only to find she's too high-functioning for the hospital's TBI program. Now she receives extensive outpatient care at the Sacramento Veterans Affairs Medical Center.

"I'm getting better," she says. "I'm letting new people into my life. I'm opening up, slowly but surely. I'm trying. That's the only thing you can do. Every day, I tell myself I'll get through it."