Just One Returning Soldier's Tale

"Chris Dana came home from the war in Iraq in 2005 and slipped into a mental abyss so quietly that neither his family nor the Montana Army National Guard noticed.
He returned to his former life: a job at a Target store, nights in a trailer across the road from his father's house.
When he started to isolate himself, missing family events and football games, his father urged him to get counseling. When the National Guard called his father to say that he'd missed weekend duty, Gary Dana pushed his son to get in touch with his unit.
"I can't go back. I can't do it," Chris Dana responded.
Things went downhill from there. He blew though all his money, and last March 4, he shot himself in the head with a .22-caliber rifle. He was 23 years old.
As Gary Dana was collecting his dead son's belongings, he found a letter indicating that the National Guard was discharging his son under what are known as other-than-honorable conditions. The move was due to his skipping drills, which his family said was brought on by the mental strain of his service in Iraq.

The letter was in the trash, near a Wal-Mart receipt for .22-caliber rifle shells."

Suicide Shocks Montana Into Assessing Veterans' Care

Back in November CBS did an investigation (finally) of suicides among returning veterans from the filthy occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. They sent a freedom of information act request to the DoD to get suicide numbers from all branches for the last twelve years. The DoD got back to them with the number at 2,200, but that was only active duty personnel.

Then they went to Veteran's Affairs, who didn't know and apparently didn't care because no national study was ever done to find out.

Puts a whole new meaning to Tommy Franks' "we don't do body counts" remark.

Fact is, this war criminal cabal has never given a shit about it's returning warriors, from radiation poisoning to secretly flying corpses home in the middle of the night to Walter Reed to this latest gem, where the white house vetoed a bill containing new veterans' programs because an obscure provision would "expose the new Iraqi government to billions of dollars in legal claims". Too bad about the damaged goods, they say with that veto, that's our money you're talking about.