A PAPERWORK PROBLEM LEADS TO DEATH

This is a sad story, especially when you consider that perhaps 300,000 vets of Iraq and Afghanistan are suffering from PTSD or major depression. Why didn't the paperwork go through? Or was it just ignored?

Memories of Iraq haunted soldier until suicide
Posted on Sunday, May 25, 2008
By Halimah Abdullah McClatchy Newspapers

But when he returned from Iraq in 2005, Brian Rand was a different man.

His voice was distant. His jokes were morbid. He moved as if trapped in a nightmare.

At his family's behest, he finally sought counseling at a hospital near Fort Campbell. He later told his sister the waiting room was full of soldiers who went in for 10-minute visits with a psychiatrist and came out with prescriptions for pills.

The psychiatrist spent nearly two hours with him and wrote an evaluation that suggested he not return to battle, Somdahl said. But that paperwork never made it to his commanding officer. That Sunday, Rand was told his unit was deploying back to Iraq.

His widow, Dena, said the military told her it has no record of the psychiatrist's recommendation that he not redeploy to a combat zone or any record of requests during his first tour of duty for a mental evaluation.