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June 9, 2004 | 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 harrowing montage 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.

As they talked, Pogany worried aloud about his wife back home, that he hadn't cashed his military travel voucher, that he didn't understand what the hell was happening to him. He wondered why he started shaking and vomiting uncontrollably after seeing what was left of an Iraqi who had caught a Bradley's 25 mm round in his torso.

Pogany recounted that after he saw the body, he had a smoke and went to bed, but woke up 20 minutes later and dashed to the latrine to vomit. He shook all night, didn't sleep, hallucinated that the roof was coming down on him. In the morning, he knew something was wrong. He went to his Special Forces team sergeant. Pogany, who was not a Green Beret but a military intelligence soldier who had been assigned to work for the elite 10th Special Forces Group unit as an interrogator, knew he was viewed as an outsider by the Special Forces team. The team sergeant (due to Army regulations, Pogany cannot reveal the name of any person in his unit) was clearly unsympathetic to the new guy's complaint. He told Pogany to pull himself together, gave him two Ambien, a prescription sleep aid, and ordered him to sleep.

Later that day, Pogany was still shaky and told the team sergeant he needed help. The sergeant called him a coward and threatened to cite him for violating some provision of the military justice code. Eventually, Pogany was taken to the Tikrit compound and saw a chaplain, who recommended a chat with a Combat Stress Control Team member.

Forsythe listened as the sky grew dark and reassured Pogany that what he was experiencing was absolutely normal. Pogany cried several times.

No worries, Forsythe told him. It would be OK. It happens all the time.

Forsythe talked Pogany through a few stress-reduction techniques. Deep breathing. Thinking about things he liked to do. Listening to music. Calling his wife. Reading a book. They were both from Florida, and Forsythe said the inspector general on the compound was a Dolphins fan. They could maybe watch a game together. They talked for a few hours.