Word: melissa
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...telephone with his mother Kay McMullen. "Mom, there's a lift dropping huge bundles of shingles on top of the roof," she says he told her. "It seems like I'm back in Iraq again--my head is pounding." But around dinnertime he had an upbeat conversation with Melissa. He talked happily about visiting home the next weekend. Two weeks after that, he was to return for good and continue treatment at a civilian hospital...
...years, get a pension and then retire to teach junior-high history. He served in Bosnia in 2004. And in April 2006, when the Army called, Cassidy left his landscaping job for Iraq. "Some guys had gone to Iraq three times at that point, and he hadn't gone," Melissa says. "He felt if he volunteered, someone else would get to stay home...
...Melissa was grateful when Cassidy finally came home. "I felt like I could breathe again," she says. But because of the continuing head pain, the Army decided to send him to Fort Knox, 150 miles (240 km) from his home in Indiana. It was a strange choice. Cassidy was apparently suffering from traumatic brain injury (TBI) compounded by posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which should have required treatment by neurologists. But there are none at Fort Knox's Ireland Army Community Hospital...
...Melissa was unable to reach her husband on his cell phone later that night or the next day. By Thursday, she became anxious after he had failed to respond to her four messages. On Friday morning, she called and found his voice mail was full. Moments later, her apprehension turned into panic when she dialed into his cell-phone messages and found he hadn't listened to any of them, including her good-night call on Tuesday...
...immediately dialed Kearney and her husband's platoon sergeant, but they didn't answer. She reached a soldier at his barracks who promised to hunt him down. When Melissa hadn't heard anything by mid-afternoon, she called the barracks again and spoke to Sergeant Rory Martin, another outpatient. She asked him to check to see whether her husband had applied on Wednesday, as required, for his weekend pass. When they spoke again four hours later, Martin told Melissa that Cassidy had not applied for a weekend pass and that a knock on his door had gotten no response...