Iraq vets need time to heal

'Be patient with us': Iraq vets need time to heal
I pulled the newspaper clipping from my bag and slid it across the table.


Nicole Brodeur
Seattle Times staff columnist

Iraq war veteran Marc Loiselle was an Army platoon leader. "Sometimes I just feel like I broke," he said. "You just see too many things."

I pulled the newspaper clipping from my bag and slid it across the table.

Marc Loiselle took in the headline: "Obama marks end of Iraq war, welcomes 'equal partnership.' "

He looked at the photo of the president and Iraq Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki placing a wreath at Arlington National Cemetery.

"How clean this looks," Loiselle said, running his hand across the clip. "How clean it seems, when it was absolute horror, an absolute nightmare. It's insane how bad.

"If someone wrote a screenplay, it would be torture porn."

This is not the young man I remembered meeting in 2004, when he returned from his first, one-year tour in Iraq. His parents had invited me to a welcome-home party at their house in Seattle, and I went, wanting not only to talk to a witness to a war, but to gauge how one returns from it.

Loiselle, then 25, had attended the University of Washington with plans to be a teacher, but the former ROTC member decided to join the Army instead.

At one point, Loiselle and I talked about what he had done as a platoon leader. He was quiet, but clear-eyed. Smart and well-read. It seemed he had gone to war with an informed understanding of why we were there, and what he needed to do.
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