Heck, it may not even show up as a military death, since Joseph Patrick Dwyer was, technically, out of the Army when he was pronounced dead June 28 in Pinehurst.

In reality, though, Dwyer was as much a casualty of the Iraq war as any soldier blown to bits in an under-armored Humvee. Those empty aerosol cans surrounding him on the floor, the ones from which he'd been inhaling? They might as well have been IEDs littering a Baghdad roadside.

A published picture of Dwyer made him internationally famous in the first week of the war in March 2003. It showed him running with an injured Iraqi child in his arms.

The image of him that moved me most, though, was the one that appeared in the Pinehurst newspaper with his obituary.

In that one, he's wearing a tightly strapped helmet and wire-rimmed glasses that only accentuate his wide-eyed, bucktoothed innocence. When you think of the demons he continued fighting once he left the battlefield, you have to wonder whether that was innocence in his eyes after all. Or was it horror?

The report from the Pinehurst Police Department makes it clear that Dwyer didn't want to die, that he just wanted peace.

The report stated that Dwyer called a cab for a ride to the hospital, but the driver became worried and called police when Dwyer said he couldn't come to the door.

"The lieutenant asked if he wanted us -- the police -- to break down the door," the report said. "He said 'Yes, please.' "

The cops knew the way to Dwyer's door. He, like a disproportionate number of other vets, had had run-ins with the law. A New York Times story reports that alcohol and drug abuse -- and the social ills that result -- is increasing among Iraq war vets.

Dwyer isn't the first soldier to, in the words of the cop spokeswoman, "freak out" -- to leave the war without the war leaving them.

While I was in Rockingham a few months ago, an agitated man in filthy gray sweat pants started maniacally spouting something to me. He had only a couple of teeth, and those were in such shape as to be useless.

He was talking about Vietnam and veterans benefits that he felt he had coming to him.

It was only after he walked away that someone told me that he was Buddy, a neighborhood legend from the 1960s. He was a legend to me because he was kind and good-looking and had what I thought was the neatest Afro and goatee in the world.

Lord, he had been a sight to see in his uniform, whether hanging around the poolroom or just gliding down the street.

Bruce Springsteen sang "Born in the U.S.A." about young men like Dwyer and Buddy who went to fight at the command of old men, like Dick Cheney, who received five draft deferments.

"I had a brother at Khe Sanh

Fighting off the Viet Cong

They're still there, he's all gone."

I was unable to reach Dwyer's family, but in a previous interview, his mother said of his return, "He wasn't Joseph any more. Joseph never came home."

With patriotism measured more by who wears a flag pin than by who works to ensure that our returning soldiers receive the treatment they deserve, you can bet that if the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan end, there will be a lot more soldiers who never make it home. At least not all the way.

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