The Army denies that combat stress causes homicide

Michael de Yoanna and Mark Benjamin — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 03:19:00 PDT

The harsh combat in Iraq, including potential war crimes that were witnessed by soldiers, contributed to a series of brutal murders by soldiers based at this Army post near Colorado Springs after they returned home, according to a hard-hitting Army study released Wednesday. Many of the findings in the study, which was announced by senior Army brass at a press conference on the post, mirror those in Salon's Coming Home series, which identified a pattern of preventable homicides and suicides at Fort Carson among soldiers who served in Iraq with combat stress and failed to receive proper medical treatment.

Branded

Daniel Glick — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 12:11:00 PDT

Day after day, Army Spc. Cheyenne Forsythe roamed around Saddam Hussein's magnificent palace compound in Tikrit listening to dazed and tearful soldiers, many of them barely out of high school. With its lush palm gardens and ornate frescos, the palace was an incongruous place to be counseling American troops shaken by the harrowing montage of combat. There were dazed young men whose skulls had been grazed by 9 mm rounds. Tearful soldiers who had seen their buddies' bloody limbs blown off by roadside bombs. Thousand-mile-stare soldiers whose convoys had been ambushed by invisible combatants firing rocket-propelled grenades. Soldiers like Staff Sgt. Georg-Andreas Pogany, who came to see Forsythe after being deployed "about two inches from hell" near the town of Samarra, deep in the insurgent-infested Sunni Triangle.

Military suicides

The Army denies that combat stress causes homicide

Branded