As Kirsten Holmstedt traveled the country in 2007 to promote her first book, Band of Sisters, about women in combat, “I’d run into female veterans and I’d realize the battle wasn’t over when they came home,” she said.

“It was going on inside of them,” Holmstedt said. “They hadn’t finished.”

One said the war didn’t start until the day she got home. Holmstedt decided she had a responsibility to give their stories a voice.

In The Girls Come Marching Home: Stories of Women Warriors Returning from the War in Iraq, Holmstedt tells the sometimes triumphant, often heart-rending stories of 18 women who served in Iraq and returned home to challenges they never expected.

Holmstedt grew up in Mystic and played tennis in Westerly. She is visiting Middletown on Tuesday with three of the women from the book, which was published July 7. They will speak and sign autographs at 7 p.m. at Barnes & Noble Booksellers, 1311 West Main Rd.

“Men have been coming home from war, and we expect them to come home with challenges. We don’t expect that from women,” Holmstedt said. “Women just want to come home and be accepted. They don’t want to come home and have to teach people.”

Americans didn’t seem to understand what was going on in Iraq. Fellow soldiers understood, and many veterans craved the company of other veterans after they returned, feeling uncomfortable or distant with loved ones.

At bases such as Camp Ramadi in Iraq, soldiers had to shower and brush their teeth in water that was neither filtered nor disinfected. Their armor was inadequate. There was the danger of snipers and mortars and explosive devices hidden along the roads or in the bodies of fallen comrades. One woman had to shoot a boy on a bridge about to launch a mortar at her convoy. The heat was sometimes 140 degrees. The need to eat was outweighed by the danger of mortar attacks on soldiers headed for chow. The job never stopped. They became adrenaline junkies.

Back home, life seemed unreal.

One of the women who will be in Middletown on Tuesday is C.J. Robison, who has known since age 6 that she wanted to be in the Army. She joined at 18 and served 18 years. Then, as a master sergeant in the National Guard, she was sent to Iraq in 2003 in charge of 17 soldiers and the task of delivering provisions to troops near Baghdad. She led by example, often riding on convoys to deliver supplies. When an improvised explosive device (IED) blew up a Humvee eight feet from her, she lost the hearing in her right ear. On her way to get her hearing checked, she lost her balance and fell, causing a gash and a hairline fracture in her leg. Others seeking medical attention were worse off, she decided, so she superglued the gash closed and got on with looking after her soldiers and the deliveries.

She lived through more explosions, more falls, more refusals to leave her men. With the hearing in her right ear gone and the vision in her right eye going, she toughed it out until her tour was over. She and the rest of her unit were to be reunited with their families at an Iowa armory in January 2005.

They’d taken six steps in from the cold when the Army asked for its coats back.

That moment foretold the troubles Robison would have with re-entering U.S. life. Talking about Robison’s story last week, Holmstedt said: “I feel like her wounds didn’t break her. I feel like this country broke her. It didn’t take care of her.”

A large number of women returned from combat to find “a limited number of resources –– such as counselors and doctors –– who were trained to work with women traumatized by their battlefield experiences,” Holmstedt wrote in the introduction to her book. “Neither our female warriors nor their support systems were prepared for their return.”

Holmstedt was unable to write Robison’s story. “I was grieving what Robison and other women had left behind on the battlefield,” she wrote in a postscript, “and I was angry about what they had gone through when they returned home. How do they go on after what they’d been through? How would I go on after hearing and internalizing what they had experienced?”

dnaylor@projo.com