From Combat to the Homefront

(NECN/CNN) - Independence day is a good time to acknowledge the men and women who serve our country to maintain our freedom.

As a new generation of veterans returns home, there's a new effort being made to make sure their homecoming and recovery are successful.

Master Sergeant "Spanky" Gibson knows what it's like to shift from combat, back to the homefront.

"You're checking out everything and everyone. So when you get in that mindset over a period of six or seven months, and then you come back, its hard to downshift it very quickly," he says.
The two-decade marine corps veteran has done it a number of times, like so many members of the new generation of wounded warriors.

Like pieces of the transition puzzle, a cluster at Virginia's Fort Belvoir includes barracks, a resource center, and a new hospital that will start seeing patients in August.

There's more than just physical recovery that has to take place. They have to recover physically, emotionally, and socially with their families.

The first of its kind in the U.S, a Wounded Warrior and Family Center - its lighting, the floor material, the layout, the art of bringing the outside in, all based on a premise of an architecture of healing.