After Combat, Victims of an Inner War

This hasn't gotten any easier over the years. I've been at this for so long now that it should be easy to just post these stories and move on. It should be, but I doubt it will ever stop hurting. If anything, the pain in my soul of having to still be reading about the suffering of our troops, our veterans and their families, cuts even deeper. We do a great job sending them off to risk their lives for us, but after that, well, they're someone else's problem. They're all stuck in a political game right in the middle of the Right ranting that other people are "Bush bashing" and the Left screaming about how they all need to just come home. Is anyone screaming about them? Is anyone willing to stuff politics, their own ideology, their own power trip, long enough to notice what is happening to them?

I have to read the emails from both sides and most of it has nothing to do with anything we can do anything about today. They have nothing to do with the troops suffering from PTSD, being pushed into such a deep depression that they lose all hope, or what they come home with haunting them. Cable news is useless when they could be reporting on what has been happening all along, but they don't want to bother. People, well they want to be entertained so very few will bother to read this article beyond the first page, if they read it at all. They get their news from their TV sets so if the broadcasts don't bother to tell them, they will never know and the troops, well, they'll just keep paying the price.

Clinton Gill
Sgt. Jacob Blaylock, seated left, one of four in his Guard unit to commit suicide, at the grave of Sgt. Brandon Wallace.

Suicide's Rising Toll
After Combat, Victims of an Inner War

By ERICA GOODE
Published: August 1, 2009
Sgt. Jacob Blaylock flipped on the video camera he had set up in a trailer at the Tallil military base, southeast of Baghdad.


He lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, blew the smoke upward.

“Hey, it’s Jackie,” he said. “It’s the 20th of April. We go home in six days. I lost two good friends on the 14th. I’m having a hard time dealing with it.”

For almost a year, the soldiers of the 1451st Transportation Company had been escorting trucks full of gasoline, building materials and other supplies along Iraq’s dark, dangerous highways. There had been injuries, but no one had died.

Their luck evaporated less than two weeks before they were to return home, in the spring of 2007. A scout truck driving at the front of a convoy late at night hit a homemade bomb buried in the asphalt. Two soldiers, Sgt. Brandon Wallace and Sgt. Joshua Schmit, were killed.

The deaths stunned the unit, part of the North Carolina National Guard. The two men were popular and respected — “big personalities,” as one soldier put it. Sergeant Blaylock, who was close to both men, seemed especially shaken. Sometime earlier, feeling the strain of riding the gunner position in the exposed front truck, he had switched places with Sergeant Wallace, moving to a Humvee at the rear.

“It was supposed to be me,” he would tell people later.

The losses followed the men and women of the 1451st home as they dispersed to North Carolina and Tennessee, New York and Oklahoma, reuniting with their families and returning to their jobs.

Sergeant Blaylock went back to Houston, where he tried to pick up the pieces of his life and shape them into a whole. But grief and guilt trailed him, combining with other stresses: financial troubles, disputes with his estranged wife over their young daughter, the absence of the tight group of friends who had helped him make it through 12 months of war.

On Dec. 9, 2007, Sergeant Blaylock, heavily intoxicated, lifted a 9-millimeter handgun to his head during an argument with his girlfriend and pulled the trigger. He was 26.
read more here
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/us/02suicide.html?_r=1&hp