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...hypervigilance, isolation, suicidal tendencies. And all are plagued by images they can't forget, some so disturbing that combat-stress workers in the field have to monitor one another for a state known as "vicarious traumatization." A soldier deployed near Baghdad for nine months witnessed several members of his unit torn apart by mortar fire. "I can't erase that picture," he says. "It's something I cannot take anymore." Some stressed-out troops can't control their rage. "They don't know who the bad guy is," says Anthony Pantlitz, a chaplain with the Army's 785th Combat Stress...
...enter the fray, "healed" enough to undergo combat again. Rabb and other mental-health practitioners in Iraq say research from past wars shows that sending troubled troops home too early prevents them from dealing with their trauma and increases feelings of guilt stemming from a sense of abandoning the unit. Rabb won't quantify the number of combat-stress injuries incurred in Iraq. But he estimates that his team of counselors alone conducts up to 800 informal visits a month to troops in and around Baghdad, "just smoking and joking, letting them know we're available...
Troops who don't use official services must find their own coping mechanisms, often within their unit. Leaders try to find downtime for their men, and memorial services for the fallen can help with grieving. But clinically speaking, Nash says, most soldiers and Marines engage in denial and dissociation to get through. "Everybody out here is putting all this stuff in a closet and storing it up," he says, "because you just can't deal with it right...
Sergeant Harding agrees. "You can't dwell on it, or you can't do what you need to do," he said shortly after his unit returned from another firefight in town. Troops say the thing that most helps the traumatized is their commitment to one another. Their unit is the only thing they can trust, and helping one another get home safely is the most compelling motivation they have. A twice-wounded Whiskey Company Marine suffered two concussions in successive bombings and was told that a third could lead to severe, lasting damage. But when given the option of going...
...President's re-election. The evidence was circumstantial at best. But many Republicans nonetheless came to believe the agency was rooting for Senator John Kerry when it cleared for publication a book, Imperial Hubris, written anonymously by Michael Scheuer, a CIA analyst and former chief of the bin Laden unit, that accused the Administration of botching the war on terrorism. Members of Tenet's staff didn't think much of Scheuer--they regarded him as a zealot who couldn't see the whole picture--but they were in a bind. CIA rules allow an officer to publish a book...