MOUNT JACKSON, Va. - The campaign medals Venus Hammack received after the Persian Gulf war are lost in the clutter, stuck behind a mountain of videotapes in her old house. She threw them there in a fit of rage one afternoon, and there they have stayed, discarded with the rest of her military existence.

The moment those decorations clattered against the foyer wall and dropped out of sight, Hammack entered the messy aftermath of a supposedly tidy war. The years that followed brought the end to her Army career, the collapse of her marriage, the progression of a shadowy gulf war illness that cost her custody of her youngest child.

As Operation Desert Storm marks its 12th anniversary this week, Hammack greets the occasion far more changed by that war than the rest of the country ever seemed to be. Perhaps it's because her wounds are harder to quantify than most.

After all, how do you measure the unraveling of a life?

In the years since the conflict, Hammack has turned from soldier to protester, separating herself from everything that was once hers - her home, her family, her job. She traded it for a new identity as a lobbyist for veterans who, like herself, suffer health problems they attribute to chemical and biological exposures during Desert Storm.

And now all that anger at the last war is assuming a new incarnation, as the retired Army reservist gathers up her rage and redirects it at the prospect of a second U.S. war with Iraq. On Saturday, with the country on the brink of a rematch in the Middle East, Hammack will travel to Washington to protest another gulf war.

But her mission is more complicated this time. Hammack, a 47-year-old self-described "G.I. Jane" who spent more than half her life as a soldier, is fighting military policies to which her own children have sworn allegiance. Over her objections, a son and daughter have joined the Air Force reserves. Both expect to serve in the gulf.

Now, when she rails against the costs of a future war, it's their faces she sees.

The woman named for the goddess of love is branded by battle, too: A tattoo of Athena, the goddess who delivers strength in war, blazes on Venus' left hip, inked there in the presence of good friends and hard liquor when Venus was a young soldier.

But long before that boozy night in a tattoo parlor, she was marked for the Army.

Her father, a World War II veteran, filled their home in Queens, N.Y., with tales of the Red Ball Express - a support operation made up primarily of black soldiers that kept combat troops stocked with supplies in Europe.

Mundane household items - a cup, a can, a scrap of fabric - became instruments of wartime ingenuity in his retelling; they doubled as tools the troops used in the French countryside, or supplies they traded for food in Belgium. The cold at night in an English port town, she learned, was worse than anything New York City could deliver. The best thing about the bullet that kills you, she was told, is you probably won't see it coming.

Though fascinated by the tales, Venus at first tried to resist the path of her father by attending a high school for performing arts in Manhattan. The child - born Venus-Valiery because her mother didn't like "Venus" and her father refused to yield - dreamed of becoming an opera singer.

But when Venus injured her larynx just before graduation, the default plan was clear. Her father's dinner-time dispatches from Gen. George S. Patton's celebrated 3rd Army, with their cinematic plotlines and character lessons, had their effect.

When basic training was about to start, Adrian Weekes took his daughter to the airport.

"My father said, 'You finally figured out you need to do something with your life,'" Venus now recalls. "The day I was shipped out was the day I got some approval from him."

An 18-year-old Venus, with wide eyes and a gap between her teeth, had joined the all-female Women's Army Corps. It was 1973, and though the United States was still embroiled in Vietnam, that war felt abstract. Venus learned combat photography but never tested her skill. Instead, she worked odd jobs and hopscotched between U.S. bases.

A year after enlisting, she married an instructor, Sgt. David Hammack, and went from wiry, 110-pound waif to fully fleshed-out Venus. In a photograph, she directs traffic at Fort Dix, N.J., motioning "STOP" imperiously - part crossing guard, part Supremes. Off duty, she wore short shorts and flashed her warrior goddess tattoo.

She and Hammack, a white sergeant she jokingly called "the redneck," had two daughters, Venus-Victoria and Cassandra. But the marriage was brief; Venus blames the stress of military life and the pressure they felt as an interracial couple.

The Women's Army Corps disbanded by 1978, and Venus was integrated into the mainstream Army. Before she had only studied pictures of rifles; now she had to learn to fire an M-16. In a noncommissioned officer training course with lessons on subjects like ammo, land mines and concertina wire, her drill instructor, Kenneth Tower, tried to intimidate her.

It didn't really work. The two began a quiet flirtation. Later, she married Tower, a sergeant 16 years her senior, and they had a son, Logan. But the union dissolved by the time Logan entered pre-school. Of those years, Venus says wryly, "Don't marry a drill instructor unless you're really good in basic."

By the mid-1980s, Venus had a new plan. Over the years, she had trained as a medic, a secretary, an environmental specialist. Now she was becoming an Army paralegal, commuting from a Boston suburb to Fort Devens, Mass.

She lost herself in her military routine. Then one morning in 1987, her phone rang. Bert Gibbs, an old high school sweetheart, had always told Venus that someday he would marry her. Now he was on the phone, talking about how he'd kept every letter she'd ever written him. After a failed marriage of his own, he was courting her again.

They were newlyweds in the summer of 1990, as the United States prepared for war in the gulf. Before war, America sends in the lawyers; Venus, with the 46th Judge Advocate General Corps, left in September for the pre-war buildup of Desert Shield.

"I was ready for war," she recalls now from the kitchen of her home, a modest one-story rancher in this rural town nestled in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. "They said, 'You're going,' and I said, 'I'm going!' And that was it. I locked and loaded."

She was stationed at a military base near Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, helping lawyers process contracts for supply purchases, wills for troops and other legal paperwork. She relished telling her father that now she, too, was at war. She collected adventure stories. She gossiped about the top military brass. She rode a camel.

On Jan. 17, 1991, at 3 a.m. Iraq time, Desert Storm officially began.

War, Venus soon learned, did not exempt soldiers with desk jobs. Aside from her paralegal duties, she worked security patrols. Always on edge, she slept with her M-16 in her arms and walked with a knife in her boot. She learned to jump before the air raid sirens went off, grabbing her gas mask at the first far-off hiss of an incoming missile.

She had just finished sentry duty on Feb. 25, 1991, when the Iraqis launched what would become the single worst attack on U.S. forces during the war. It was 8:40 p.m. Venus was walking toward the barracks to find a friend who had promised to buy her a bottle of orange juice at the commissary. An Iraqi Scud lit the sky. The barracks exploded in flames.

Boxes of stored ammunition went off like firecrackers. Soldiers with shrapnel wounds and shattered eardrums spilled outside. A man with an ear barely attached waited for help; another, eyes glazed, sat saying nothing. She never saw her friend in the chaos; he was injured and shipped out to Germany. Venus helped medics perform triage, piling victims into Saudi ambulances and taxis while 28 soldiers lay dead, another 100 wounded.

Night and day blurred, passing without rest. When Venus finally lay down, the smell of burning plastic still in her hair, what came felt more like a coma than sleep. Except that when someone kicked a box in the dark, it jolted her awake like a scream.

Homecoming Day: March 11, 1991. The day Venus' war was supposed to be over.

Desert Storm would officially end in a month, but already troops were streaming back. Venus returned to her patch-work family in their cream-colored colonial in the Boston suburb of Lynn, Mass. In the six months she was gone, Bert had become the primary caretaker, comforting the children through bouts of sleepwalking, nightmares and crying fits while they asked questions about their mother's absence and the war on CNN.

Bert was working in the Army reserves - Venus had urged him to join because he had been unemployed - but it was the paycheck, not the mission, that resonated with him. He could never mask his opposition to war. When his unit started shipping to the gulf, he told his superiors - and the local press - that he refused to fight; he called it a battle over oil, not principle. He was never sent to the gulf.

Venus, meanwhile, came home with a medal. Noting her service in the barracks attack, the Army granted the staff sergeant a bronze star - an award issued for an act of heroism or merit.

Still, she was rattled and exhausted. She avoided a posting to Somalia and started a less demanding National Guard job. She and Bert tried to restart what the gulf had interrupted.

The war had separated them after only six months as a married couple. They decided to take a second honeymoon. The couple - both Star Trek fans - hitched a ride on a military transport plane to a Star Trek convention in Los Angeles. Bert bought his wife prismatic earrings like those worn by an alien tribe in one of the Star Trek movies. They dined out in their Trekkie tunics.

"It was the perfect place to go," says Bert, 46. "These conventions are about imagery and imagination and the feeling that there's hope in the world. People will not shoot at each other or kill themselves. It's a Utopian existence that mankind should be striving for."

But the afterglow didn't last. Soon after their return, Venus started experiencing fainting spells, joint aches, digestive problems, fatigue. She suffered a miscarriage. She began forgetting things: her Social Security number, family birthdays.

With each problem, she became more convinced she had been poisoned by a toxic wartime cocktail during her travels in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Venus blamed fumes from oil well fires, wartime anthrax shots, chemical fallout from U.S. air strikes on Iraqi factories. She sought out ailing veterans and lobbied the federal government. She testified before Congress repeatedly about hers and their failing health.

Bert watched from the sidelines, slowly growing alienated as he cooked meals she wouldn't eat while her illness and her activism sat like two uninvited guests at their table.

"Here I am trying to regain my wife, trying to regain my family, and she is monomaniacally focused on Desert Storm," he argues, speaking over the phone from the Massachusetts home the two once shared. "She was doing a good thing, helping veterans who couldn't help themselves. Still, I thought, 'What about our marriage?'"

But Venus believes she was blamed for fighting, and then getting sick.

"We had different political philosophies," she contends, her brittle body shaking slightly at her kitchen table, a tremor she claims is a result of the war. "He was always angry that I went and then got sick. It upset him. He's been traumatized as much as I've been hurt."

A cloud settled over the house. Venus found comfort at her computer, looking for other ailing veterans. Bert took refuge reviewing movies for a local cable channel; videotapes, almost 1,000 of them, piled up along the entranceway hall.

Venus stood by those tapes on a spring day in 1996, an overnight delivery package in her hand. It had been a long wait but here were the Kuwaiti Liberation medals she'd been promised, awards granted to every U.S. soldier who served in the war. Tired, lost, sick, she closed her fist around the medals and flung them as hard as she could.

They disappeared, swallowed up by a house she no longer calls home.

The divorce came through last year. Venus now lives with fellow Desert Storm activist Kirt Love, 37, who also suffers chronic ailments he traces to his service on the front lines in Kuwait. Pill bottles fill their kitchen, discussions of sickness fill their hours.

Venus has turned herself into a full-time advocate for veterans who suffer the assortment of unexplained maladies they call "gulf war syndrome." She relocated to this quiet Virginia town, two hours south of Washington, to be closer to gulf war health conferences around the capital.

Venus left the military in 1997, after 24 years of service, honorably discharged when she failed a physical fitness test. But she still identifies herself as a soldier; her license plates, e-mail address and home answering machine all refer to her as a gulf war veteran.

She lives off her savings and a $791 medical disability check from the Veterans Administration, spending her limited cash to videotape gulf war hearings. She and Love edit the tapes in their "Desert Storm room" - an old children's room with video editing equipment, gas masks and soldier figurines stacked against teddy-bear wallpaper.

But perhaps the most telling sign of the gulf war's power in this house is what is not here: Thelma, Venus' 5-year-old daughter, her only child with Bert Gibbs.

She is what her mother calls a "Desert Storm baby," a child Venus never thought she'd be able to have after the war. She is also a mouthy girl who loves Batman and macaroni and cheese and holidays the family might ignore were it not for her.

Venus gave up custody of the girl to her ex-husband two years ago, without a fight. Thelma visits in the summers, and Venus and her daughter talk several times a week, sometimes watching each other through Web cameras on their computers.

More involvement than that, Venus says, and she falters. On a visit not long ago, Thelma couldn't wake her mother from a midday nap. Only the girl's 911 call roused her.

"I had to make a choice," Venus says matter-of-factly. "Does she want a mom for a short period of time and I weaken to a point where I die, or does she want a mother who doesn't live with her, but who she can still come to, who she can still call?"

The mother chose the latter.

The phone rings in a kitchen that smells like cookies baking. They're not; Venus has lit a cookie-dough candle, which burns while she talks to 19-year-old Logan, her only son.

The call from Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., where Logan is training with the 212th Engineering Installation Squadron, does not last long. On this recent morning, he tells her his unit just received its orders to deploy to the Middle East. Venus is prepared. She shows no emotion. It's no use warning Logan about war.

"Mom, I told you, I'm Peter Pan," he'd said the last time she tried.

Only when she hangs up does Venus speak her mind.

"He's young and dumb," she sighs. "He thinks he's indestructible."

Logan loved drawing in high school but graduated with no firm career plans. He knew his father, a Vietnam veteran turned drill sergeant, thought the military would give him discipline, goals, a future. He heard his mother's horror stories, but he knew the military would pay for college. So did one of Venus' daughters, Cassandra, 23, a member of the 439th Aeromedical Evacuation Squadron who is now training at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas.

Two winters ago, at Christmas, the siblings told their mother of their military plans together, taking her to a crowded shopping mall so she couldn't make a scene. They broke it to her in the food court. She threatened to hit them with a chair.

But it was no use; their contracts were already signed.

"I never thought they'd join - they'd seen me hurt," Venus says. "But I didn't get angry at them because I know I fell for it once, too. You think, 'This is my duty.'"

On Saturday, Venus will attend a Washington rally which some predict will draw tens of thousands of demonstrators against another war in Iraq.

In this latest fight, Venus is breaking ranks with most of the 700,000 veterans of Desert Storm. Only about 350 American veterans signed an online petition critical of a possible war that was circulated by the group Veterans for Common Sense.

But this former soldier does not describe herself as a peace activist, exactly. She believed in the last war, saying the United States was right to intervene when Iraq invaded Kuwait. This time, however, she sees no such trigger for a U.S. strike, and what's more, she worries the military has not done enough since the last conflict to protect troops from chemical or biological attack. Though the Pentagon established an office to investigate the causes of gulf war illnesses, Venus believes many of the 150,000 veterans collecting benefits for those ailments still lack the answers and attention they need.

And then, finally, come her fears as a mother. Gulf war fatalities - 147 U.S. troops killed in battle, 235 more killed in accidents and noncombat situations - are considered low. But not to her, not when she thinks of her own children.

"To the public those are 'acceptable losses,'" says Venus. "But I'm trying to prevent my kids from being 'acceptable losses.' Because it's not acceptable to me."

Despite the anguish, her military loyalties won't entirely leave her. Maybe because it's hard to figure out where the military ends and her family begins.

Venus has willed all her Desert Storm possessions - the war keepsakes, the videotaped gulf war hearings, even the medals still lost in that house in Massachusetts - to the servicewomen's museum run by the Women's Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery. It is a place she hopes her children will associate with her when she's gone.

Last year, just before Cassandra left for basic training, the young recruit asked her mother to take her to the memorial. They made the trip in September.

Along the way, Venus recounted war stories, offered advice. They followed a path with a view of the capital, the Potomac, the monuments. When they passed the tombstones at Arlington, they were almost there. Together, mother and daughter found their way to the granite wall of the memorial, a semicircle of white stones that opens like an embrace at the bottom of a gentle hill.