Wounded lives

After three years of war, many who served in Iraq are returning home to face a different kind of battle. And the casualties this time are American families.
Sunday, March 19, 2006
JULIE SULLIVAN
The Oregonian

The Fourth of July had fizzled into a tense fifth at the tidy two-story Hillsboro home. Outside, water shimmered blue in the backyard pool and bicycles lay on the lawn. Inside, William R. Stout Jr.stepped toward his wife.

"Give me the gun," he demanded.

Thirteen-year-old Samantha Stout pushed between her parents. Sam was petite for her age, but her voice was strong. "Dad," she said, "stop it!"

"Dad and I are just trying to talk," Wendy Stout recalls saying. "Go into the other room."

"I just want to clean my gun," police reported the father of two saying. He'd started with a beer that summer evening and then moved on to four tumblers of Jack Daniel's and Coke. Then he demanded his 9 mm Makarov.

"It's not here, Bill," Wendy recalls saying. The relief that the 40-year-old woman felt at having her husband return from Iraq nine months earlier had dissolved in his dark moods and the growing realization that he could hurt himself. Wendy was worried enough to have taken Bill's old pistol from its bedroom hiding place, wrapped it in a plastic bag and shoved it under the back deck.

"Give me the gun," he barked again. He smacked the electric fan, sending itskittering across the floor. Sammy's little sister, Maggie, 10, started to cry. Their dad never hit anyone or anything.

Suddenly, Bill grabbed his wife's left wrist. The girls screamed.

Wendy snatched the telephone, dialing 9-1-1 and crying out for help "Now!" Minutes later, Hillsboro police pounded across the freshly stained porch to the front door.

Bill slammed out the back. The Oregon Army National Guardsman limped across the large and well-used backyard. He passed the girls' tiny playhouse and his prized garden of tomatoes, beans and corn, now weed-choked and abandoned. He headed to his motorcycle shed as he had every summer day since returning from Iraq, barricading himself behind a wall of head-busting heavy metal music and the stale smell of alcohol.

As police officers stood before the barbecue grill and lawn chairs, Bill "appeared to be in a trance and remembering the events in Iraq." He didn't want to be ambushed, they said in their official report, by them -- or the Iraqis. Then, as police watched, Sgt. Stout pulled out his cell phone and called in help.

http://www.oregonlive.com/printer/printer.ssf?/base/news/114257315584450.xml&coll=7

:cry: Nom.

to our troops. All he sees is his false glory, and ignores all the pain and destruction that he is causing to everything and everyone he touches. The bottom line is that he does not give a fuck.

prayed daily that no other families on any side would suffer as we did--yet today, there will be tens of thousands of such families, and virtually no help for them.

May the gods have pity on us all.