Yesterday one of our soldiers who was being treated for stress, entered the very clinic where he had been seen. He shot and killed five fellow soldiers while wounding three others. Sergeant John Russell was on his third tour of duty in Iraq and attempting to deal with the stress of being in this war, as well as the stress of not being at home when he committed this act. He seems to be as much a victim as those whom he shot.
Our veterans are returning home with PTSD. More …

My brother had a wicked sense of humor and could make me laugh with amazing ease. He once called me and said, “I don’t know whether to go bowling or commit suicide.” He did the latter. And I learned he could also make me cry from depths I never knew existed. Though he was not a veteran, his death has given me a gut-wrenching awareness of suicide. Today our troops are committing suicide at alarming rates.Too many of these men and women who have served our country are now leaving us by their …

Years ago I had a friend whom I will call Sam. He had been a Marine in Viet Nam and suffered Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. His conversations threw me back into the clutches of a time which stirred a caldron of emotions in me. Having come of age in the sixties, I thought I had developed a perspective of that era which neither romanticized it nor intellectualized it. Somewhere in the middle was the truth as I had lived it, a college student looking for reality through an unfocused lens.
When …