(Metro Times Detroit) Fighting For Peace

[noamnety]

When he enlisted as a U.S. Marine in 2003, Lars Ekstrom believed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein needed to be ousted to prevent terror strikes against the United States.

... Those threats gone, he says he re-evaluated the military's role in the region. Between the newly proven futility of the original invasion and the stress he experienced in combat, Ekstrom broke.

"Rolling it over in my head, over and over again, one day I just started crying for no reason. I cried for four to six hours. I asked to see a chaplain," Ekstrom, 22, says. "After that, I suffered a catastrophic blow to my morale. ... I just completely lost faith in the chain of command and I developed chronic depression."

...

Coming home to Madison Heights, he found a night-shift job, enrolled at Oakland Community College and thought about the conflict he'd been a part of. Surfing the Internet, Ekstrom found the MySpace page for Iraq Veterans Against the War and joined.

http://www.metrotimes.com/editorial/story.asp?id=12650