A Veteran’s Descent, and a Prosecutor’s Choice

A Veteran’s Descent, and a Prosecutor’s Choice
By DEBORAH SONTAG
Published: January 20, 2008
TOOELE, Utah — Not long after Lance Cpl. Walter Rollo Smith returned from Iraq, the Marines dispatched him to Quantico, Va., for a marksmanship instructor course.

Mr. Smith, then a 21-year-old Marine Corps reservist from Utah, had been shaken to the core by the intensity of his experience during the invasion of Iraq. Once a squeaky-clean Mormon boy who aspired to serve a mission abroad, he had come home a smoker and drinker, unsure if he believed in God.

In Quantico, he reported to the firing range with a friend from Fox Company, the combined Salt Lake City-Las Vegas battalion nicknamed the Saints and Sinners. Raising his rifle, he stared through the scope and started shaking. What he saw were not the inanimate targets before him but vivid, hallucinatory images of Iraq: “the cars coming at us, the chaos, the dust, the women and children, the bodies we left behind,” he said.

Each time he squeezed the trigger, Mr. Smith cried, harder and harder until he was, in his own words, “bawling on the rifle range, which marines just do not do.” Mortified, he allowed himself to be pulled away. And not long afterward, the Marines began processing his medical discharge for post-traumatic stress disorder, severing his link to the Reserve unit that anchored him and sending him off to seek help from veterans hospitals.

The incident on the firing range was the first “red flag,” as the prosecutor in Tooele County, Utah, termed it, that Mr. Smith sent up as he gradually disintegrated psychologically. At his lowest point, in March 2006, he killed Nicole Marie Speirs, the 22-year-old mother of his twin children, drowning her in a bathtub without any evident provocation or reason.

“There was no intent,” said Gary K. Searle, the deputy Tooele County attorney. “It was almost like things kept ratcheting up, without any real intervention that I can see, until one day he snapped.”
click post title for the rest

Fresh from Iraq, Fort Hood soldiers cope with life back home

Fresh from Iraq, Fort Hood soldiers cope with life back home
Newly returned soldiers get counseling to make transition from battlefield.
By Robert W. Gee

INTERNATIONAL STAFF


Thursday, December 13, 2007

NOLANVILLE — The nightmare is usually the same. First, an explosion. He is thrown across the room. The walls and ceiling collapse on top of him. His mouth fills with dust. Then, silence.

Staff Sgt. Steven Johnson escaped that day in February with a Purple Heart and returned to combat. Three of his comrades died.


"Ever since that happened, I've just wanted to be home with my family," Johnson, 29, of Spring said late last month, near the end of his 14-month tour of duty in Iraq.

Now that he's home, he has found that the war followed him.

As in Iraq, he sleeps in fits and starts. His nightmare revisits him as he sleeps beside his wife. Once since his return Dec. 1, he was strangling her as they slept until she pushed him away.

"It's scary to be in bed with him," said Sarah Johnson, 26.

Like many of his fellow returning soldiers from the Fort Hood-based 1st Battalion, 12th Regiment, Johnson has symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, a severe and ongoing emotional reaction to psychological trauma, which affects as many as one in five soldiers returning from Iraq, according to the Veterans Affairs Department.

It's one piece of an often difficult transition from combat to everyday life in America.

"It's not the same when you come home. It's never the same," said Maj. Leslie Ann Parrish, who oversees a clinical review at Fort Hood of soldiers returning from war zones.

About 60 percent of soldiers returning from Iraq to Fort Hood, the largest military base in the United States, are required to seek mental health treatment, and an additional 20 percent are recommended for treatment, according to Army officials. In extreme cases, soldiers are escorted to an Army hospital because they are considered to be suicidal or homicidal.
click post title for the rest