Prometheus 6

The Globe has this four part series called "The War After The War," on Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.

About this series
October 30, 2006

Soldiers through the years have had different names for it: Soldier's heart. Shell shock. Battle fatigue. PTSD.

But the symptoms of warfare trauma have not changed: Flashbacks, nightmares, withdrawal, emotional tempests, isolation.

The number of post-traumatic stress disorder cases from the Iraq conflict is already large and expected to grow. Today, 3 1/2 years after the war began, studies show between 11 and 17 percent of those fighting have showed signs of it. And some specialists worry that the nature of this war, with its guerrilla style attacks, random killings, and exhausting need for constant vigilance, make PTSD a particularly powerful risk.

For nearly a year, the Globe has documented the consequences of a roadside bombing in Baghdad that killed Jeremy F. Regnier, 22, of Littleton, N.H., in October 2004.

This series is based on extensive interviews with the two soldiers who survived the blast when their Bradley Fighting Vehicle was attacked outside Baghdad International Airport and with the friends and family of Jeremy Regnier. It is also based on in-depth discussions with the soldiers they served with, and with the physicians who are treating the survivors today for PTSD.

Unless otherwise noted in the text, all direct quotes were either heard by a reporter or confirmed by those present when the conversation took place. When someone's thoughts or feelings are described, the source is that person.

The series also draws from military and medical records, letters, and e-mails sent from the battlefield, and reporting from New Hampshire, Ohio, Indiana, Texas, and Georgia.

There are two photo galleries attached to the series so far, "Welcome to Hell" and "I should have died." I didn't look at them.

This what happens when folks get back home after being broken in Iraq. This is how you are honored if you survive. This is what is going to continue as long as George Bush remains in office...he promised!

The series started yesterday.

The war after the war

They were an Army of Three — fun-loving, young, courageous, afraid. And when the bomb went off outside Baghdad, killing New Hampshire's Jeremy Regnier, the survivors of the squad found their lives upended. What they suffer has a name — post-traumatic stress — but a label can't describe it. This is a story of a death and its descendants.

Picked up today.

Nothing's wrong with you
By Thomas Farragher, Globe Staff | October 30, 2006

When he came to, Andy Wilson squinted through a gauzy haze and struggled to remember how he'd landed in the Texas Army hospital's emergency ward.

"What the [expletive] are you doing here?" the groggy staff sergeant asked a friend and fellow soldier when he finally opened his eyes.

"I'm here baby-sitting you," Chris Liu, who had served with Wilson in Iraq, told him. "That's what I'm doing."

The comrades exchanged some rough and profane banter at his bedside, but beneath the bravado was an air of crisis.

Ever since his friend Jeremy Regnier's combat death six months before, Wilson had been slipping away. The day before, he had swallowed a bottle of an antipsychotic drug.

"I put the pills in my mouth," he said. "Just ate them."

There was just too much to handle. His marriage, always stormy, was in free-fall. His mind flickered again and again with images of Regnier, cut down by a roadside bomb.

Most soldiers put the horror behind them, enclosing it in an armored inner space, or seeming to. But, for others, moving on is the work of months, or years. Or a life.