Iraq war still a battle for Army veteran

Iraq war still a battle for Army veteran Jesse McNaughton (video)
The Plain Dealer
By Brian Albrecht
October 04, 2013

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Jesse McNaughton leaned back, staring down a desert highway 6,000 miles and nearly a decade distant. It was a scene from 2005, back when he was a U.S. Army soldier serving in Iraq.

He was remembering the day when he was part of a patrol convoy rolling just outside of Baghdad. In a heartbeat the sky went orange, then black. An Iraqi police vehicle had just exploded from a suicide car-bomb attack in front of McNaughton’s Humvee.

Through ringing ears he heard the screams of three Iraqi policemen trapped in the truck, burning alive. “We ran up and tried to put the flames out. No effect,” McNaughton said. “We watched those men die in front of us.”

He shook his head, bringing himself back to the present as his cell phone suddenly rang. He took the call on the front porch of his brother’s house in Cleveland.

Minutes later he was back. His wife had called. They've separated. She says she’s scared of him and wants a divorce, he explained.

The war “destroyed my marriage,” McNaughton, 40, said, referring to his post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and the emotional baggage of combat that includes anger outbursts, alcohol abuse, hyper-vigilance, anxiety . . .

And flashbacks to incidents like that convoy blast and the three dead Iraqi cops.
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