Bad stuff happened in Iraq, stuff Adam Reuter doesn't want to talk about. He doesn't even want to talk about it with his wife, who worried because he was jumping out of bed in the middle of the night.
But when he agrees to talk about the war—really talk about it—he goes right to how the insurgent crumpled after he pulled the trigger. How later, during the firefight, he ended up just a few feet from the corpse.
"He just lay there," Reuter remembers. His eyes and mouth open. His whiskers a few days old. The bullet had gone in his neck cleanly, just to the right of his Adam's apple, but had come out ugly from the back of his head. He was maybe 25, a little older than Reuter. And his blood was pooling, thick and almost black in the darkness.
How can you describe what that was like? Who would understand it? Nobody. So Reuter keeps his mouth shut.
At home in Newnan, Ga., there is no war. "It doesn't cross their minds," Reuter said. "To them, everything is fine."
But after three years, there are at least 550,000 veterans of the Iraq war.
[Excerpt of an article by Christian Davenport, The Washington Post]
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