Iraq and PTSD

Unbelievably sad! Puts other problems in perspective.

clipped from spokanevalleyinsider.com clipped from www.newsday.com The sad saga of a soldier from Long Island The March 2003 image became one of the most iconic of the U.S. invasion of Iraq: that of a bespectacled American soldier carrying an Iraqi child to safety. The photograph of Army Pfc. Joseph Dwyer, who was raised in Mount Sinai, was used by news outlets around the world. After being lionized by many as the human face of the U.S. effort to rebuild a troubled Iraq, Dwyer brought the battlefield home with him, often grappling violently with delusions that he was being hunted by Iraqi killers. The war that made him a hero at 26 haunted him to the last moments of his life. "He loved the picture, don't get me wrong, but he just couldn't get over the war," his mother, Maureen Dwyer, said by telephone from her home in Sunset Beach, N.C. "He wasn't Joseph anymore. Joseph never came home." "Talking to him, he knew he was going to die," Maureen Dwyer said.