Meeting a Buddy from My First Embed -- As More Return from an 'Unhealthy' War

By: Dennis Anderson A couple of days ago I was meeting friends at a local restaurant, and ran into an Army chum from my first embed in 2003. Live in a small-to-midsize American town, and if your local National Guard unit was on the call-up list, you will run into friends from the old big story for years to come.

Crossing the room to meet my friends I spotted Dwaine Brooks. When the Lancaster unit of the National Guard moved out to the first phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Staff Sgt. Dwaine Brooks was one of the unit's most experienced soldiers. He was a paratrooper with a Ranger tab, and 43 years old at the time. In other words, a man in his prime, but not a kid.

And that was more than six years ago. He's pushing 50 now, the same age now that I was when the California National Guard cleared my embedded reporting assignment in March 2003. Brooks: Same smile. Same piledriver arms. Same personal warmth.

Staff Sgt. Brooks has been out and back to Iraq twice, and was nearly sent to Afghanistan.

He looked a little tired, like a man who has seen things he wished he had not. Which I will not go into, except for this: Iraq was and is an unhealthy place in any number of ways you can think. Apart from the roadside bombs, the insurgent attacks, and the stalking enemy of post-traumatic stress disorder, it can be hard enough just to breathe there.

Army Times just editorialized against the use of so-called "burn pits." They involve the burning of trash, plastic bottles, sometimes even amputated limbs. The burn pits are a feature of the landscape. One Air Force non-commissioned officer who returned from Iraq is officially diagnosed with COPD, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. It's related to bronchitis and emphysema.

Our soldiers are coming home. When they get home, the families are out at the airports and bases with the yellow ribbons, the balloons, the tears of joy and the welcomes. But our soldiers are coming home in the eighth year of war, and many have gone through multiple tours.

It's worth noting that Army Times, published by Gannett, and the other Military Times papers, and USA Today, have done a superior job of reporting the hazards of duty, and the hazards of post-deployment. It was USA Today that was instrumental in making the case for Defense Secretary Robert Gates to step up acquisition of Mine-Resistant, Ambush Protective (MRAP) vehicles to replace the Humvee death wagons that the unlamented, departed Donald Rumsfeld called "going to war with the Army you've got."

When I arrived at Camp Roberts six and a half years ago, one of the problems was the beer ration. It sounds like a small thing, but it isn't, and the issue went deeper than beer. The whole issue was morale and readiness.

Staff Sgt. Brooks banked that a reporter with prior military service could get a boulder moved. Soon after arriving at Camp Roberts, we angled to get the beer privilege re-established. It wasn't easy. Nobody wanted a bunch of drunken beer brawls or barracks parties going on while troops of the National Guard got prepared to go to Iraq, to war, to face chemical weapons on the battlefield.

Nobody knew then what lay ahead. But soldiers, adult men and women, believed that off-duty they were entitled to a beer. For those who want it, the beer ration is nearly sacred. It took some angling, and a heroic Command Sgt. Major of the National Guard name of Sally Donaghe to get the beer ban lifted, at least in a compromise fashion for the weekend. We had a company barbecue, and the beer flowed like wine.

Then there was Kuwait. Then there was Iraq. Then there was war. Not the way anybody believed it would happen. It happened the way it really did happen. One roadside bomb at a time. One insurgent attack becoming many. One year in the desert for the citizen soldiers seeming like a decade, and now it seems like it was a hundred years ago.

Except for this. This is a war of people coming and going. The last time I saw battle buddy Brooks it was at another restaurant on Valentine's Day. And he was leaving for his second tour.

As we had on a Valentine's Day past, we exchanged our bear hugs and pleasantries. Brooks told his companion, "Mr. Anderson was our combat photographer." It lent a warm feeling, even though I was more a writer than a photojournalist.

But this is not about auld lang syne.

In the next week or two, the Palmdale unit of the National Guard is returning from a year in the Iraqi desert. They have made it, about 125 of them, without any killed in action, and that is a quiet blessing. But the hazards do not end with the deployment.

Army officials are and ought to be racing to find links of increased suicides to stresses of repeated deployments, even if such discovery is inconvenient to the service. In addition, all effort must be devoted to helping service families cope with the pressures of deployment, the financial worries, the separation, anxieties about effective health care, and too often the stresses of divorce from mates who have lost their patience with using a small military force to staff a global war that seems endless.

Coming home, our soldiers have to reintegrate, and they are owed all assistance we as a society can support them with in that reintegration.

It was last year that the Army experienced its peak rate of suicides, 128 in 2008, plus 15 more under investigation for regulars and activated Guard and Reserves. The rate was 20.2 per 100,000. A Guard soldier I know believes the number is much higher, with so-called "inconclusive" reporting results.

It was a joy to encounter Dwaine Brooks, wearing Army gray and black. And it makes you feel the psychic "whoosh" of the bullet shooting past.

It is good to be home. Not necessarily easy. But good.