These Elite Troops Spent 15 Years At War. This Program Tries To Prepare Their Minds And Bodies For The Next 15.

NAVAL SPECIAL WARFARE COMMAND, Coronado, Calif. -- With no fanfare, U.S. special operations commandos head out on long, dangerous and secretive missions to snatch or kill militants or to advise allies in combat. They shoot it out with ISIS extremists in Syria or spend months tracking al-Shabab in Somalia.

And then they come home from months at war -- sometimes with blood still on their boots, one officer said -- and quietly slide into bed beside their wives, exhausted and grim-faced. They say nothing and begin preparing for the next mission.

But after 15 years of war and no end in sight, even the toughest men -- theyre almost all men -- can falter.

Our people need help with mending their mind, body and spirit, Army Lt. Gen. Tony Thomas wrote to Congress last month, shortly before he was confirmed to lead the U.S. Special Operations Command, which oversees all U.S. special operations forces.

It was a rare public acknowledgement of the pressures these operators, in military parlance, are under. But it was not the militarys first recognition of the problem.

For several years, SOCOM has been taking extraordinary steps to restore and strengthen its operators battered physical and mental condition.

They are wrestling with questions as old as warfare itself: How can the human body be developed to absorb the repeated physical punishment of combat and still perform far above the ordinary? How can even elite warriors endure the cumulative effects on mind and spirit of extreme stress and continual exposure to death and destruction? How can the damage to their wives and kids be prevented or healed?

The answers will help determine how the United States fares in the long war against Islamic State militants and other extremists.

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In recent conversations, most operators, spouses and support staff -- at the Naval Special Warfare Command in Coronado, California; the 1st Marine Raider Battalion compound in Camp Pendleton, California; the Armys 10th Special Forces Group at Fort Carson, Colorado; and Air Force special operations units -- asked not to be identified by name and declined to be photographed. But they spoke openly about the pain and costs of their lives.

Our first three years [of marriage] he was gone 30 months, one woman said of her husband, a special operations officer. She recalled fondly that shed fallen for him because of his laugh. But one day she realized he hadnt laughed for years. Their life, she said, was all about the mission. Our 3-year-old cried herself to sleep every night for four months, crying that my daddy doesnt love me, my daddy cant find me!

Once, home after a long and difficult combat deployment and in the middle of an argument with her, she said, he jumped out of the car and ran across four lanes of highway and jumped a fence and took off. Shocked, she sat there wondering, Where do I find him? What do I tell the children? How do I go on?

In another conversation, a 29-year-old pilot wept when describing recent missions in which noncombatants were caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. We were trying to do the right thing, he said, but the situations are so complex and dynamic that we cannot -- everything is not good. Hes been in treatment for depression, he said, for seven months.

But the mission doesnt stop while men heal. Even at a steady pace of deployment, there arent enough operators to meet demand. Two operators in their 50s are still being sent downrange. And the pace of deployments is accelerating, with new battlegrounds in Syria and Libya.

A few years ago, alarms went off. As Adm. William McRaven took command of SOCOM back in 2011, a fat report landed on his desk. A legendarily tough Navy SEAL commander, McRaven had led the team that captured Saddam Hussein and later supervised the effort to track down and kill Osama bin Laden. But this report left him deeply troubled.

It was a global survey of the 69,000 special operators and support staff, plus their families, detailing the wear and tear of what was then a decade at war. The report was anecdotal but substantial: widespread instances of divorce, domestic violence, drunk driving, depression and sleep problems; outbreaks of angry violence; chronic physical ailments and pain. Suicides rocked the community. And funerals seemed constant: Since 2001, 471 special operators have been killed in action and 3,745 have been wounded, many left struggling with traumatic brain injury .

The salient point was that the force was frayed, but I recognized that the study had started 18 months earlier, McRaven, now chancellor of the University of Texas system, told me. Almost certainly the situation had gotten worse, he thought. We were asking guys to go back into hard combat much more frequently. The report had recommendations, and I turned to my staff and said were gonna implement every one of these and as quickly as we can.