PILOT POINT, Texas - Hospital Corpsman 3rd Class Aaron Ramirez wasn't holding out much hope for his marriage when he and his wife, Carrie, arrived at the lodge on the shore of a manmade lake about 60 miles north of Dallas.

The two were married for just seven days when Ramirez, a reservist at a Navy Reserve center in Oakland, Calif., was ordered to Iraq with a Marine military police unit last year. He served nine months there and returned home in October.

The Ramirezes enjoyed the first days of their reunion. But shortly after the parties ended they began to bicker, if only a little at first. Within weeks, the arguments grew to a point that both began considering divorce.

By March, the two had stopped speaking, and Aaron Ramirez doubted that a one-week retreat could make much of a difference. The Ramirezes were not alone. While public attention on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has focused on deaths and injuries, marriages also can be casualties of war.

COMFORT FOR A NEW GENERATION

The Ramirezes traveled to Texas for Phoenix Project, a novel retreat begun in 2005 and initially bankrolled by billionaire and former presidential candidate Ross Perot. Operated by the Military, Veteran and Family Assistance Foundation, the retreat is staffed by a group of veterans of the Korean and Vietnam wars who say they don't want this generation of veterans to suffer the way they did after returning home from war.

The military does not pay for or operate the retreat, but most service members who attend do so on temporary duty orders, and staff members have visited several bases to inform service members about the program, says Teresa Goforth, Phoenix Project's founder and one of its two board members.

Couples are assigned rooms without televisions or Internet access. They attend relationship classes, and individual and group counseling sessions are assigned a horse to ride throughout their stay.

Couples are given intimacy "homework," which involves communication and touching and can lead to sex, which counselors say is the greatest form of intimacy.

While the Phoenix Project is less than 2 years old, staff members already have a track record of success. Mary Nguyen, a former Veterans Affairs counselor now working with the project, says not one of the 150 couples who have completed the program has divorced, despite the fact that "many, many" had filed for divorce before they came here.

Problems the couples face typically stem from their senses of alienation from one another and from anger about their experiences, she says.

The problems Aaron Ramirez described echo Nguyen's explanation.

He chafed at his wife's lack of a sense of urgency and attention to detail after his time in Iraq's Anbar Province, where those he served with knew that orders had to be carried out quickly and efficiently or people could die. He thought his wife should have saved more money while he was gone.

According to her husband, Carrie Ramirez thought he did not appreciate the sacrifices she made while he was gone and wondered why there were times when he did not want to talk to her while he was deployed.

RITUAL CLEANSING AND HEALING

But on a hot, windy afternoon six days after arriving here, Aaron and Carrie Ramirez stood outside a circle of small stones as an elderly man in Native American tribal clothing chanted.

A fire inside the circle heated rocks that would be used to warm a sweat lodge where the couples would gather for rounds of prayers.

Ten other veterans and their wives - in this group, all the veterans were men - stood with them.

One by one, the men spread red clay over their hands and then walked around the circle, where each was joined by his wife. The couple washed their hands in a small bowl before pausing at a makeshift memorial to friends lost in the war.

The ceremony, says Red Eagle, the elderly man who is himself a veteran, is intended to welcome service members back into the community because it is unnatural to kill another human being. But Red Eagle stresses that the service members have done nothing wrong.

During the ceremony, he reads from a poem written by another Native American warrior more than a century before, one that captures the difficulties veterans face in adjusting to the civilian world.

"They knew that my spirit would be wounded," he reads. "My days would be filled with searching and not finding. I would not be able to find connections between myself and the rest of creation. I would look forward to an early death. And I would need cleansing in all these things."

The veterans and spouses gathered here all seemed to share that same sense of alienation — from one another and from society.

"People come back with a lot of anger," says Nguyen, who served as a State Department nurse treating civilians injured during the Vietnam War. "Spouses who have waited here have a lot of anger. That is extremely common and very natural. ... Defusing the anger and numbness that people have to develop as a survival skill when they go into combat zones is what we try to help with.

"This is just a beginning. We try to give them tools to work with."

Those tools are already proving their worth for the Ramirezes.