Salon: Branded (Soldier charged with cowardice)

[kskiska]

When Staff Sgt. Georg Pogany asked for help after a combat-stress reaction in Iraq, his superiors charged him with cowardice and sent him home. He's fighting to restore his reputation -- and save other soldiers from his ordeal.

Day after day, Army Spc. Cheyenne Forsythe roamed around Saddam Hussein's magnificent palace compound in Tikrit listening to dazed and tearful soldiers, many of them barely out of high school. With its lush palm gardens and ornate frescos, the palace was an incongruous place to be counseling American troops shaken by the horrors of combat. There were dazed young men whose skulls had been grazed by 9 mm rounds. Tearful soldiers who had seen their buddies' bloody limbs blown off by roadside bombs. Thousand-mile-stare soldiers whose convoys had been ambushed by invisible combatants firing rocket-propelled grenades. Soldiers like Staff Sgt. Georg-Andreas Pogany, who came to see Forsythe after being deployed "about two inches from hell" near the town of Samarra, deep in the insurgent-infested Sunni Triangle.

Forsythe, a member of the Combat Stress Control Team in the 85th Medical Detachment, pulled up a couple of plastic chairs on the edge of a marble veranda and listened to Pogany's story, taking notes in what he calls his "little green book." It was Oct. 2, 2003. Forsythe had never met Pogany and has not seen him since. Here are some of the things that Pogany said, according to Forsythe's notes:

"Fell apart."

"Shaking, throwing up."

"I don't want to fucking die here, man."

Over the next few hours, as shadows stretched across the Tigris River and the oppressive heat abated, Forsythe heard Pogany recite the classic signs of combat fatigue: loss of appetite, sleeplessness, hyper-vigilance, a quick-trigger startle reflex, an inability to focus. Dozens of soldiers had told eerily similar stories to Forsythe about how Iraq had gotten under their skin. How they were locking and loading at the sound of their own Hummer door closing, how they found themselves flipping out all the time, tossing their food, cradling semiautomatic weapons like teddy bears, sweating, hyperventilating. Paranoid. Worried that they were letting their units down. Worried that they'd never feel normal again

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http://salon.com/mwt/feature/2004/06/09/georg_pogany/index.html