The Conservative Cave
Current Events => Breaking News => Topic started by: TheSarge on July 07, 2008, 09:37:02 AM
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(http://www.drudgereport.com/ip.jpg)
The March 2003 image became one of the most iconic of the U.S. invasion of Iraq: that of a bespectacled American soldier carrying an Iraqi child to safety. The photograph of Army Pfc. Joseph Dwyer, who was raised in Mount Sinai, was used by news outlets around the world.
After being lionized by many as the human face of the U.S. effort to rebuild a troubled Iraq, Dwyer brought the battlefield home with him, often grappling violently with delusions that he was being hunted by Iraqi killers.
His internal terror got so bad that, in 2005, he shot up his El Paso, Texas, apartment and held police at bay for three hours with a 9-mm handgun, believing Iraqis were trying to get in.
Last month, on June 28, police in Pinehurst, N.C., who responded to Dwyer's home, said the 31-year-old collapsed and died after abusing a computer cleaner aerosol. Dwyer had moved to North Carolina after living in Texas.
Dwyer, who joined the Army two days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and who was assigned to a unit of the 3rd Infantry Division that one officer called "the tip of the tip of the spear" in the first days of the U.S. invasion, had since then battled depression, sleeplessness and other anxieties that military doctors eventually attributed to post-traumatic stress disorder.
The war that made him a hero at 26 haunted him to the last moments of his life.
"He loved the picture, don't get me wrong, but he just couldn't get over the war," his mother, Maureen Dwyer, said by telephone from her home in Sunset Beach, N.C. "He wasn't Joseph anymore. Joseph never came home."
Dwyer's parents said they tried to get help for their son, appealing to Army and Veterans Affairs officials. Although he was treated off and on in VA facilities, he was never able to shake his anxieties.
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/ny-lisold0706,0,814136,print.story
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RIP soldier. The demons that were chasing you are gone now.
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This is so sad. Why can't the VA do a better job at getting these guys the help they need?
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This is so sad. Why can't the VA do a better job at getting these guys the help they need?
Cause turing over Health Care of civilians to the federal government and expanding welfare to the masses is more important.
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RIP solider.
Let's hope the leftist idjits don't decide to use his grave as a podium. Of course we know they will....
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:taps:
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He died from huffing dustoff or somthing like it?
Damm... RIP brother.
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RIP. You did your job and after that you fought an even harder battle. God bless you for the serivce you gave.
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What a very sad end for an American Hero. May he rest peacefully in God's care.
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I read about this during lunch...almost started crying at work. Guess the good really do go young. :(