what a horrible tragedy

my heart goes out to the family and friends of jason cooper, iraq vet. i've never been in a war (or the armed forces for that matter). i cannot imagine what it's like to not only watch people with guns (and other things) fighting each other BUT to have to fear for your own life every second. how CAN one be sane when one returns home from a place such as iraq?

Mother of Suicide Vet Flies Old Glory Upside Down
By Matthew Rothschild, The ProgressivePosted on July 18, 2006, Printed on July 19, 2006http://www.alternet.org/story/39159/
Terri Jones lost her son Jason Cooper just over a year ago.
He was an Army Reservist in the Iraq War.
On July 14, 2005, four months after returning home to Iowa, he hanged himself.
He was 23.
Since then, Jones has been flying her American flag upside down, though someone came on her property once and turned it right side up, and another person stole it.
“We had a flag out the whole time Jason was in Iraq,” she says. “Once he died, my boyfriend Vince turned it upside down to protest everything that’s happening with our government, especially our soldiers being failed when they come home.”
Jones says Jason wasn’t the same when he got back from Iraq.
“He was a really upbeat, happy, funny kid” before he left, she says. “You could tell his smile was gone when he came home.”
He also had a hard time paying attention.
“We did notice right away that he’d space off while you were trying to talk to him,” she says. “His thoughts were floating off somewhere else.”
And the reaction of some of his friends caught him by surprise.
“He was excited to see them,” she says, “and he thought they would be, ‘Hey, Coop, good to see you.’ But instead, the first thing that would come out was, ‘Jas, you shoot anybody?’ He was so taken aback he didn’t know how to answer. He’d just say, ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ ”
Jones tells me her son was hit by enemy fire. “His flack jacket took 37 pieces of shrapnel,” she says. “He didn’t even get a bruise.”
Jones also told Jennifer Jacobs of the Des Moines Register of one haunting memory he had about an insurgent who executed an Iraqi child in full view of Cooper and other members of his unit.
Jason was having a lot of nightmares and flashbacks, his mother says. “His girlfriend said he’d wake up in night sweats, and she had to take him out for a walk at three in the morning.”..............