Fighting war's demons, soldier seeks help

AHOSKIE -- Sgt. 1st Class Chad Stephens was yelling again. Shouting at his wife, at his school-age son, hollering that he wanted something done and done now.

His wife, Rosalie, yelled back: "I'm not one of your soldiers!"

Stephens felt like he was someone else -- a father given to out-of-nowhere rages, a husband who couldn't talk to his wife, a lost soul sitting on his couch and staring into space, seeing again the blood rushing from his gunner's gut, recalling his own dust-clotted voice shout, "You're going to be OK!"

So he yelled, and as he did, another voice echoed in the back of his mind: The shouts of his father from long ago.

Stephens and his N.C. National Guard platoon returned from Iraq in early 2005, seven months after the battle in Baqubah. The Army thanked the soldiers for their service, gave them some papers and sent them home.

Like other returning troops, Stephens filled out a questionnaire. It asked whether he had seen dead bodies, whether anyone close to him had died. It asked about nightmares and skittishness.

He answered every question truthfully. And he never heard another thing.

Hardship at home

But, like others, he had come home a changed man, one who would find himself separated from his Army brothers and confused about what had happened to him, unsure how to find help. Active-duty soldiers return home to military bases, but National Guard soldiers return to their scattered hometowns, often hours away from the men they bunked with in the war zone.

Stephens feared stores and busy streets. He avoided tiny downtown Ahoskie and its half-dozen stoplights for fear of car bombs. He scanned restaurant dining rooms for snipers. He couldn't remember things. At the National Guard armory, he walked into the supply room and forgot why he was there.

His cell phone rang. It started at dawn and didn't stop until late at night.

His soldiers called in tears. They were fighting with their wives. They lost their jobs.

They drank. They lay awake at night. A car backfired, and they flinched.

A guy tried to kill himself. A guy went busting into a house, shooting up the place.

He found one guy a job. He gave another money. He pushed paper for their health benefits and found extra work around the armory for a fellow who needed to pay his bills.

His cell phone rang, and it was Patty Desens on the other line, calling about her dead son.

Hey, Sergeant Stephens, she said. How are you?

When he was in Iraq, Stephens could sometimes push aside the battle that killed her son in Baqubah.

There was too much else to worry about in Iraq. There was the time they helped the Marines carry their dead. And the time two bus loads of Iraqi soldiers training at the base were pulled over by armed men at a fake checkpoint on their route home. Every man was yanked off the bus and executed.

A wife worries

In Ahoskie, near the Virginia border and hours from any soldier in his platoon, Stephens downed beers after dark. The men at war on his television screen felt like brothers.

Nothing mattered but Iraq. He talked about his soldiers, told his wife about his young gunner. He told her about his visit with Desen's mother in the garage, how she would look at him and cry.

"He talked about Desens a lot," Rosalie said. "He said, 'Desens, he was so crazy, he would do this and that...'

"Sometimes, he'd stare at the floor and not say anything."

At night, he couldn't sleep more than an hour or two. He talked in his dreams, alarming Rosalie. He woke up shouting, drenched in sweat.

Rosalie reached out to the man she fell in love with across a bar years ago in her native Germany. For so long, she hadn't felt his arms or looked into his eyes or traced her fingers across the "God's Son" tattooed on a sculpted abdomen.