Memories of Iraq haunted soldier until suicide

WASHINGTON — Until the day he died, Sgt. Brian Rand believed he was being haunted by the ghost of the Iraqi man he killed.

The ghost choked Rand while he slept in his bunk, forcing him to wake up gasping for air and clawing at his throat.

He whispered that Rand was a vampire and looked on as the soldier stabbed another member of Fort Campbell's 96th Aviation Support Battalion in the neck with a fork in the mess hall.

Eventually, the ghost told Rand he needed to kill himself.

According to family members and police reports, on Feb. 20, 2007, just a few months after being discharged from his second tour of duty in Iraq, Rand smoked half of a cigarette as he wrote a suicide note, grabbed a gun and went to the Cumberland River Center Pavilion in Clarksville, Tenn. As the predawn dark pressed in, he breathed in the wintry air and stared out at the park where he and his wife, Dena, had married.

Then he placed the gun to his head and silenced his inner ghosts.

"My brother was afraid to ask for help," said April Somdahl. "And when he finally did ask for help the military let him down."

Since the start of the Iraq war, Fort Campbell, a sprawling installation on the Kentucky-Tennessee border, has seen a spike in the number of suicides and soldiers suffering from severe post traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.
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At his family's behest, he finally sought counseling at a hospital near Fort Campbell. He later told his sister the waiting room was full of soldiers who went in for 10-minute visits with a psychiatrist and came out with prescriptions for pills.

The psychiatrist spent nearly two hours with him and wrote an evaluation that suggested he not return to battle, Somdahl said. But that paperwork never made it to his commanding officer. That Sunday, Rand was told his unit was deploying back to Iraq.
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Memorial Day *promote

Must be something about the human condition that makes us want to do this shit.
Its sad that its so self-damaging, I would bet my paycheck that every single soldier would come back with PTSD, ive experienced it first-hand myself, and beleive you me, it is not some simple illness that can be fixed with a few weeks of soup and rest.

Its deadset serious, a total personality change, to the point where you have all the memories of the person you once were, you knew what you were like, but theres this internal struggle with your new self to attempt a solution to get back to what you were like. No matter how many psychotropic drugs you take, or how many times you tell your story to a shrink, nothing helps.

Its not fun, its not heroic, and it certainly is not noble.

I genuinely feel sorry for every single soldier over there, its a shame society and wars in general are controlled by so few, who are so shielded from the hienousness of it all, that they can just sign a document, smile to the camera, and not feel one iota of remorse for how many peoples lives they are fucking over, regardless of how "noble" it is in their minds.

War is never noble...ever.

>> ^jwray:
Only nonwilling participants in something can be deemed victims of it. Informed consent makes it impossible to call the dead soldiers victims. They knew what they signed up for. It's a shame they had to die. They ought to have deserted.


jwray, sure, if you think of all the enlisted soldiers as rich white suburb kids, then fine. Keep pretending they knew all the risks and what they were signing up for. They knew they would be living in a crappy desert and spending their days as policemen waiting for a bomb to blow them up. They knew they would be firing on crowds and shooting at kids holding ak-47s.

You might be naively forgetting about all the people who joined the Reserves to pay for their kids college, or maybe they need the income, or maybe they were patriotic and doing it for many years, even decades. Did they plan to be called up? Did they know about stop-loss and having to do three combat duties. Did they know they'd have to keep getting sent back to Iraq because the military is stretched so thin.

And what about the people who didn't have any options. Inner city kids with not many other options. People who are told they get their choice of 3 yrs in jail, or enlist instead. Who do you think are they ones coming home in bodybags? Informed consent? Did they know about PTSD? Did they know about how many people are maimed? Did the news report on this in the last five years? Did the military HIDE all the coffins? Did the US Govt prevent the media from showing ANY IMAGES? Do you know how many soldiers are coming back maimed and permanently wounded?

Forget about reporting the deaths. Just on numbers alone, how many are coming back with PTSD or missing legs, arms, hearing, vision? Do you know?

Just 12 beds for PTSD patients!?? In a Veterans hospital!!?? WTF, I say, WTF???

avril lavinge gives me PTSD style seizures... never work in a mall people, never ever work in a mall.

My personal belief is that we must always address the questions of the people no matter how ridiculous initial claims are.

- Copernicus was prosecuted for his ideas about the Solar system.
- Galileo was prosecuted for his ideas.
- We still can't separate religion from goverment policy. In the US and elsewhere.
- Gulf of Tonkin incident was ridiculed as well, then it turned out to be dubious.
- Agent Orange is still claimed to have caused no harmful effects.
- Depleted uranium still is denied having any effects post Gulf War 1 and Gulf War 2.
- PTSD was only identified post-Vietnam when effects were seen in WW2, at the time they were dismissed as 'battle fatigue' and 'cowardice'.
- We went to Iraq for WMD. Don't let the smoking gun be a mushroom cloud.
- The US administrations handling of the war is claimed to be reactionary in light of overwhelming odds, when it reality is it failing due to mismanagement and poor planning.

And on and on and on....

<Ahref="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JbPvMaLR-M">Iraq Veterans Speak Out - Part 2

Iraq Veterans Against The War in Pittsburgh in November 2006. for more information check out http://www.ivaw.org/

Post-traumatic stress disorder.
Health considerations of depleted uranium.

This is so sad. I feel like QM has been put in a water torture device of talk radio.. and now sympathizes with his captors.

That cracks me up, "decades of war a neglect".. Um, Iraq was formerly the most modern, western, and secular of any country in the area. They had the best hospitals, much higher literacy than western countries, etc. Years of bombings and embargos kinda hurt things. Then W comes along and destroys what was left.

So sure, it's easy to claim new schoos built. But there were more before you bombed the country. Wow, 40,000 troops for security and border partol?! You know how many people were formerly doing police or military duty. You know how many are needed?

Do you know how many Iraqis have abandoned their homes. Land their relatives lived on for how many generations... How many millions are refugees are there? How many Iraqis have been killed, murdered, mutilated? How many now live in a sea of depleted uranium?

So, we should be proud because of a happy douchbag voice-over, some piano background music, and 4500 schools???!!! This is the saddest QM offering of "facts" to date. So this justifies 3,000 dead US soldiers, 12,000 permanent wounded soldiers, and who knows how many PTSD victims. Bravo, QM. You are Glen Beck are two chicken hawks of a feather.

It's important also to note that PTSD is not just a "mental disease". In a large part it is a rational human reaction to the choas and meaninglessness of war.

I think there was a lot more coverage of Vietnam.

The point is that too many soldiers are coming home and suffering from major PTSD. Heck, all the massacres you are hearing about of Iraqi civilians have all gone back to PTSD, and the 14yr old girl story, also was ptsd.

The subject in this video took his life, like many soldiers traumatized by this occupation. (It's not war until Congress declares war, but you'd have to believe in the Constitution to have this view)