There is an invisible war after a war.

It's the effects of the invisible war that the just published book, Retire the Colors: Veterans and Civilians on Iraq and Afghanistan, presents its readers.

The book offers the words, feelings and truths of 19 different voices intimately involved with combat or impacted by it.

The feelings are intimate and painful.

Edited by Dario DiBattista, a Marine veteran, the book is divided into three sections: "War, Up Close," War, Beyond the Warriors," and "War and What Follows."

Each essay offers readers reflective stories that provide a glimpse into the how and why Iraq and Afghanistan veterans seem transformed into different people.

"These stories lend us all a greater understanding of the transition from military to civilian life," wrote Rosalia Scalia in a review of the book.

"They demonstrate what Homer means in the Odyssey when he refers to the war of homecoming being greater and more arduous than any battle at the front."

One of the writers, Joseph R. Bawden, a local veteran who served in Iraq, presents a vision of the war after the war in "It's Nothing (Singed).

While serving in Iraq in a field hospital, he recounts a mass casualty experience of wounded civilians, many of them children.

"Suddenly, I came around the corner of the emergency room and smelled burnt hair.  Singed hair," he wrote.

The smell reminds him of the time in Montana spent hunting deer with his grandfather, and how he would singe the excess fur off a fresh carcass.

"The smell was the same.  People and deer.  Dead."

Bawden skillfully leads the reader from Mosul to his return to Montana and another deer hunting trip with his grandfather.

After killing a deer, Bawden writes about his granddad using a blowtorch to remove the hair from the carcass.

"There was that smell again," he continues.

The smell hits a nerve.

"That's when I first encountered it," continues Bawden.  

"The feeling - or lack of feeling.  I don't have a word for it.  It's nothing."

The rawness of the recall ties directly to the deadening of Bawden's feelings.

He continues by relating how some of his friends don't understand his lack of interest in professional sports.

"People are dying all over the world ... and I am supposed to be excited about millionaires who won a game?  I don't think I can do that."

Retire the Colors is a glimpse into the invisible war after the war.