A team from the Veterans Administration in Honolulu is in American Samoa to assess the need for counseling services for veterans and their families.
Team leader Filipe Salas says the same trends being seen across the United States of high divorce rates and family problems are coming through in their assessment of families of local soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan .
He says it's quite apparent that families of local reservists as well as veterans of earlier wars need help.
"One of the things that has come out of the deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan that has been almost monumental, and this is not just in Samoa or Hawaii, this is across the nation, is that divorce rates are pandemic. It's huge. The difficulties that families are having, not only with the deployment but the veterans coming back from the deployment, the numbers are overwhelming."
Filipe Salas