Word: bunn
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...Paul Bunn is an old hand at combat, an infantryman who served in Panama and the first Gulf War. This latest experience was the worst. His unit in Baghdad, part of the military's quick-reaction force, which deployed for four-day stretches against insurgents, was hit by 37 improvised explosive devices while in Iraq, 13 in one day in Sadr City. Bunn still has nightmares about a rocket attack on his unit in April 2004. He spent two hours, he says, picking up "pieces and pieces and pieces" of bodies of U.S. soldiers. He remains agitated about...
...failure of his insulation business in Little Rock hard as well. "It's so embarrassing. When I left, it was netting about $300,000 a year, and now it's $500,000 in the hole," he says. The tension is exacting a toll. "There's a disconnect there somewhere," Bunn says, tapping his head. "My highs are real high and my lows are real low. It's like a light switch, my mind." Hoping that other soldiers will seek help, he's open about taking Paxil, an antidepressant, for posttraumatic stress disorder. Loud noises-even test runs of the town...
When he left for the war, Bunn gave an enthusiastic speech to Bradford's sixth-graders about the duty of "citizen soldiers" to help Iraq's "nation building." No one realized how much the mayor had changed until April, when several hundred people gathered downtown to dedicate a patriotic wall, dreamed up by the soldiers' wives and families to honor all the townsfolk who had served in battle from World War I to Afghanistan and Iraq. The list started with 25 names and grew to 400. Bunn, not yet officially released from active duty but out on a pass from...
...gore, though even some of the town's most conservative citizens were sympathetic. "Coming back from a place like that, everybody understands," says Tim Clark, music and outreach minister at the mayor's church, Bradford Baptist. Citizens State Bank officer Carol Cagle, whose grandson Richard Farmer served with Bunn in Iraq, says she had "mixed emotions" about the mayor's speech. "He was emotional, but Richard is having problems too," she says, reluctant to share more with an outsider...
...probably said some things I shouldn't have," Bunn says now. He blames his off-kilter speech on a second drug he's taking for his posttraumatic stress disorder, which, he says with a laugh, makes him "a slobbering idiot." Says Bunn: "There was no more hard-core Republican than me until I went to Iraq. I'm against abortion and gay rights, and don't mess with my guns, but I have grown up a lot. When you have spent a year in hell and you have seen the waste of money I have seen ..." He lets the thought...