Finally, something that puts a human face on the war.
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New York Times
(11-Page Special report)
By SARA CORBETT
The wounded soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division contend with sleepless nights, restless days, fractured relationships and vials of pills that help with the pain — but not enough. Robert Shrode can't sleep.
At night, in the fly-speck town of Guthrie, Ky., in the rented farmhouse he shares with his 20-year-old wife, Debra, he surfs the Internet, roams the house. He lies down and gets up again. He drinks a beer and stares out the window at the black fields beyond. Hours pass. He can't sleep. Before the war, he could have six beers and sleep like a baby, but now that works against him. Drinking may help get his head to the pillow, but it also ratchets up the nightmares. For a while, he sweated out his bad dreams on the living-room couch, and it drove Debra crazy. She would come down from the bedroom, touch his shoulder, ask what the problem was. Shrode would just turn his back to her and not say a word. Now she knows better than to ask, though occasionally when the silence between them gets too deep, she'll put it out there, What're you thinking about?
''Iraq,'' he'll say. And then the silence falls again.
He pops Ambien to coax some sleep. The results are mixed. On the advice of his doctors, he is taking three different pills for pain, a pill for swelling and another pill for depression. There are days when he is unrecognizable to himself, a guy who a few years ago was a party-loving bartender at a Mississippi casino and who is now 29 and engaged in what can feel like a never-ending battle to see his own future brightly.
The only person who understands him is his buddy Brent Bricklin, a restless, dark-haired 22-year-old and fellow Army specialist in the 101st Airborne Division, who is also home after serving in Iraq. Most mornings, Shrode picks up Bricklin at Fort Campbell, the sprawling base that straddles the Kentucky-Tennessee state line where both men are stationed, and they go driving. It's always more or less the same. They drive through the buttressed gates of the base, patrolled by armed National Guardsmen, and turn onto Fort Campbell Boulevard, passing the check-cashing outfits, the strip clubs and gun-and-ammo shops that, during peacetime anyway, boom with military business.
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