Robert Shrode can't sleep.

At night, in the fly-speck town of 
Guthrie, Ky., in the rented 
farmhouse he shares 
with his 20-year-old wife, 
Debra, he surfs the Internet, 
roams the house. 
He lies down and gets up again.

For a while, he sweated out his bad dreams on the living-room couch, and it drove Debra crazy. She would come down from the bedroom, touch his shoulder, ask what the problem was. Shrode would just turn his back to her and not say a word. Now she knows better than to ask, though occasionally when the silence between them gets too deep, she'll put it out there, What're you thinking about? 

''Iraq,'' he'll say. And then the silence falls
again. 

I can't believe that he is gone, that he won't be coming back."

Matthew Laskowski, a chief warrant officer for the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, was serving in Iraq when his helicopter crashed. 

ALFRED ZAPPALA: Sherwood's wife called me hysterically. It wasn't sinking in. I thought, who is this woman calling me? Why is she crying? She told me that Sherwood's been killed.

You know, my son was betrayed by the Bush administration. This whole war -- you know, people make analogies between Vietnam and Iraq, and I think the big difference is that it took years to find out the lies in Vietnam. We discovered these lies in less than a year. 

CELESTE ZAPPALA: We knew it going in. 

ALFRED ZAPPALA: Right. So, you know, my -- it was a senseless death, just like all of those other boys. 

CELESTE ZAPPALA: And girls.

ALFRED ZAPPALA: Yes. And the 10,000-plus Iraqi citizens that have been killed in Iraq. I mean, it's just going on and on.

CELESTE ZAPPALA: I feel like we have opened the gates of hell, and we don't know how to  close them and we don't know why we have done it now. 

"Mr. Bush, 
You'd Have Liked My Brother"

Dante Zappala recently wrote a letter to President Bush:

"My brother, Sherwood Baker, died in Iraq last week. I tried to call you and I tried to write to you, but you never responded. I'm writing to you again because I believe had you known him,  you would have liked him... 

And maybe if you knew him, if you knew the other soldiers, you'd have thought differently about sending them. 

I know you're familiar with fabrications. You remember the things you said about the weapons and the terrorist ties ? 

Well, he wasn't as good [at lying] as you, but listen to him: He told us he would be OK, he'd return safe, we'd see him soon. 

And check this out - he was a "C" student, too [like Bush]. When he was called up, I told him that if he wanted to get out of guard duty, he, too, could apply to Harvard Business School. 

Sherwood just laughed. You made him laugh. Yet, he still went to fight in your war. He never wavered, never cried, never expressed a desire to somehow get out of this mess. He went.

He knew it as well as he knew how irresponsible you had been for sending him. 

He had honor, and he had pride. Sherwood had commitment - to his country, to his job and to his unit. Maybe not so much to his commander-in-chief, quite honestly, but that's probably because he didn't know you. Because you didn't sit down with him. 

"He's proud to serve his country, but the Army doesn't seem to care about him or us." 

     As the war in Iraq continues, and the Pentagon prolongs the mobilization of tens of thousands of troops, the toll on both the soldiers, and the families they have left behind, is mounting.

     Two weeks after announcing 90-day extensions for 20,000 troops, about a quarter of them in the Guard or Reserves, the Pentagon said last week that those returns might be further delayed, adding to the distress of some military families.

These are among her memories: "the mortar rounds, the gunfights, the car bombings." 

A war veteran wearing a backpack, pushing a stroller and carrying a baby stayed in another strange hotel room last night, mostly because the city of her birth does not know what to do with her. 

In combat, Army Spc. Dwayne Turner was a hero. Back home from Iraq, his life has been in shambles.

Just last month Turner, a 101st Airborne Division soldier, was honored with the Silver Star medal for saving at least two lives in combat. Today he is out of the Army, driving a borrowed car and sleeping at a friend's house. 

The smile he beamed at the medal ceremony masked months of problems he says he experienced since returning home with battle wounds: a suicide attempt, along with flashbacks and nightmares so bad he resorted to binge drinking to fall asleep. 

"I kind of felt like I was blowing in the wind pretty much," said Turner, 23, of Indianapolis, who was an Army medic. 

He said that because he had been absent without leave for two days and smoked marijuana while drunk, he received a general discharge rather than an honorable discharge.

As for Jeremy Feldbusch, blinded in the war, his hometown of Blairsville, an old coal mining town of 3,600, held a parade for him, and the mayor honored him. 

I thought of the blinded, armless, legless soldier in Dalton Trumbo's novel Johnny Got His Gun, who, lying on his hospital cot, unable to speak or hear, remembers when his hometown gave him a send-off, with speeches about fighting for liberty and democracy. 

He finally learns how to communicate, by tapping Morse Code letters with his head, and asks the authorities to take him to schoolrooms everywhere, to show the children what war is like. 

But they do not respond. "In one terrible moment he saw the whole thing," Trumbo writes. "They wanted only to forget him." 

In a sense, the novel was asking, and now the returned veterans are asking, that we don't forget.
 

       An American soldier comes home from Iraq. 

When people talk about the Army being good for a certain kind of young man, it's boys like Michael Cain they have in mind. Tall and lean, with a sweet smile and doll's eyes, Michael spent his high-school years searching fitfully for the disciplined achiever within him.

To his mother's amazement, Michael thrived under military discipline...  Michael rose smoothly to the rank of specialist and was sent to Fort Hood, Texas.

IRAQ

  ... they could see at once that the hemmit had hit a mine; the enormous right front wheel was gone and the cab was crumpled. Blood, shiny oil, and bright-green engine coolant made a mess on the tarmac. Screams echoed from the hemmit's twisted cab;  "Oh, shit," he remembers thinking. "It's my friend." 

In addition to having to duck and return fire while administering aid, combat medics, unlike their civilian counterparts, often find themselves wrist-deep in the hot ruined flesh of their best friends. 

Mistreated,  neglected, and hidden in America

The Landstuhl facility, located near the huge US air base at Ramstein Germany, reported on January 23, 2004 that the total US medical evacuations from Iraq to Germany by the end of 2003 was 9,433. The number of hostile and "non-hostile" wounded listed by the Army at that point was approximately 2,750. The under reporting of wounded continues. 

Figures don't lie, but . . . 

Clearly, Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld don't really care about the US servicemen and women casualties from their war on Iraq. They rarely acknowledge it publicly. The seemingly low, "acceptable" number for American loss of life in Iraq looks much better than Vietnam, but the injury figures are much worse. 

Dear President Bush, 

With heavy heart, tears in my eyes and a home full of sorrow, I pick up my pen to write you about a brave soldier, 2nd Lt. Seth J. Dvorin, U.S. Army. My son was killed in Iraq on Feb. 3, 2004 fighting in a war. 

 Seth was a good boy, well-mannered, smart, kind and understanding. 

He joined the Army in an effort to serve his country. 
And serve his country he did. 

Seth made the ultimate sacrifice. 

 Burying a child will no doubt be the hardest task that his mother and I shall ever have to do. The one question I have, and the one question I would like you to answer, is, 

"Why did my son and every other soldier that was killed maimed and wounded have to suffer settling your vendetta?" 

My son is gone just when he was laying a strong foundation to build upon for the rest of his life. 

Now, President Bush, his life has been snuffed out in a meaningless war. 

Where are all the weapons of mass destruction, where are the stock piles of chemical and biological weapons? 

Please President, pray for all our fallen heroes and as a tribute to these heroes get our boys and girls out of Iraq now, before too much more blood is shed. 

 Since you waged this unnecessary war on Saddam Hussein the world has become a horrible place to live in. 

 I know my boy is safe now, in a new world free of hate and prejudices where GOD is his president, but you tell me President Bush why he had to go so soon and in such a violent way.

Respectfully yours, 
 Richard M. Dvorin 

Army Spec. Joseph Suell had been distressed before. 

He missed his wife and their daughters so badly last year that he was granted a short visit home from his yearlong assignment in South Korea. 

It was a different story this year. In March, five months after completing his Korean tour and right after re-enlisting, the 24-year-old was sent to Kuwait and then Iraq. 

The day after Father's Day Suell died in Iraq, 
reportedly after taking a bottle of Tylenol. 

His death was classified as "nonhostile," but a military chaplain told Suell's wife, Rebecca, it was a suicide. 

 Since the U.S.-led coalition invaded Iraq last spring, 24 soldiers and five Marines have committed suicide, most of them after combat was declared over on May 1, the military said.