Memories of lost friends follow soldier through therapy

Memories of lost friends follow soldier through therapy
By Erik Slavin, Stars and Stripes
Pacific edition, Monday, October 29, 2007

CAMP CASEY, South Korea — “John” didn’t really notice how much he had changed until five months after he watched his first friend die in Iraq.

On Dec. 26, 2005, John and others in the 5th Engineer Battalion were looking for roadside bombs near Baghdad when a rocket-propelled grenade caromed off a Humvee turret and ended Sgt. Dominic Coles’ life.

“I didn’t even know how to react to what I saw,” John said. “But I knew what to do. I stood up on the gun.”

John still sees Coles in his dreams. Sometimes he looks as healthy as when they played spades together in their barracks.

Other times, Coles and two other dead friends look as they did when they died; sometimes they slowly disintegrate in front of him. One dream was so bad John pushed himself off his bed and cracked his ribs on a chair.

The nightmares began in Iraq, before he arrived home in May 2006 for his mid-tour leave. At the airport, most welcomed him and other troops home. But one man began shouting at the servicemembers, calling them baby-killers.

“That didn’t make me feel too happy,” John said during a recent interview at Camp Casey.
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http://www.estripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=49858

Before you go to the link to read the rest, I still have no clue what gets into people when they say things like "baby killers" as if those things don't happen in combat. In Iraq, babies get killed, kids get killed, so do mothers and fathers and grandparents. Innocent people die. They end up in the wrong place at the wrong time. In Iraq, it is the civil war causing more innocents to die that even the contractors. It is not as if the troops target innocent people. One the rare times when it does happen, they go on trial. Pig headed people call them "baby killers" just like pig headed people join Westborough Baptist Church and protest at the funerals of the fallen. Taking out anything against the troops does not make sense at all. They are not the ones making the choices. Bush is. The generals are. The congress is.