Much has been written of the short-term experience of combat trauma. Almost nothing has been documented about how that trauma impacts individuals years after their first conflict experiences and into later life. Here, Johnson relates the stories of fifteen of his combat brothers to share with the world what their terror of four decades ago has done to them and how it affects them to this day. With candor and vivid detail, they reveal how their combat trauma symptoms still infect their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors on a daily basis. Those returning from battle now and their family and friends will find here a roadmap of what to expect from those suffering from PTSD as a result of combat. With this knowledge, today's veterans and those who love and care for them can tackle the issues and challenges so that symptoms may be minimized and addressed. Those who still carry these wounds will find that they are not alone, and that there are ways of dealing with the horror, no matter how long ago it may have been. Johnson concludes the book with resources for obtaining help and mending the spirit in the face of what can be debilitating thoughts and fears.

In biology, signal transduction is the transmission of information into and within the cell. Signal transduction events within a cell are often initiated from an extracellular cue. Current knowledge suggests that there are far fewer intracellular second messengers than extracellular cues. This means that a conserved core set of second messengers, including ions, small nucleotides, and lipids must be coordinated to pass the information from their point of origin to their audience receptors effectively. In many cases, signal transduction involves significant amplification. One of the best-understood and ubiquitous second messengers is ionic calcium (Ca2+). The knowledge surrounding the coding of information via Ca2+ signals has served as a template for studying other second messengers. Ca2+ signaling and intracellular Ca2+ homeostasis are highly complex and still incompletely understood. In this chapter, will we review the current knowledge of Ca2+ signaling. We will first provide a review of the general principles of Ca2+ signal transduction and examples of some of the major Ca2+-dependent cellular processes. Next, we will review the main sources of Ca2+ and the molecular effectors of Ca2+ signals. Then, we will provide some examples from the literature that illustrate how Ca2+ signaling works: how it can mediate signal amplification, how it encodes different types of signals, how it performs agonist-specific signals as well as function-specific signals, signal integration and co-incidence detection, and how it can cross-talk with other second messenger signaling events. Throughout this chapter, we will use Ca2+ as an example of a prototypical coded second messenger, since it is clear that much of the complexity of Ca2+ signaling likely applies to many of the other known second messengers.