After Iraq

Please urge your legislators every chance you get, whether they're Dem or Republican, to reinstate all the veterans benefits this administration has cut. Remove the extra red tape. Whether their injuries are physical or mental, every healthcare door in this country should be open to vets and they should be welcomed at the front of the line. We owe that to them. They held up their end of the bargain.

Certainly, this case is extreme and captures the experience of only a small number of Iraq veterans returning, but it is also certainly the experience more than just this one returning vet. (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 it skittering 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.