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Seven months in Iraq, six years back home: A soldier's war on two fronts
A story of how a innocent man is transformed into a disturbed man who is now in prison
Reference:
The war at home: A soldier's war on two fronts - CNN.com
Please read the full article on CNN this is a 3-4 page article
May 22, 2011 9:00 a.m. EDT
Click to play
The war at home
The first time I met Spc. Shane Parham, his face was wrinkled with sadness. Beads of sweat met Iraqi dust and curved down his sunburned skin like the swampy Alcovy River in his native Georgia.
He was in the checkout line at Baghdad's Camp Striker commissary, only two months into his Iraq tour. But already, he'd witnessed war's brutality.
I thought of that first meeting recently as I peered at Parham through a 2-inch thick slab of glass in a prison visitation booth. The cinder-block walls, drab like the Iraqi desert, closed in on him.
Gone was his Army uniform. Instead, he wore tan prison garb, his hands bound in cuffs. His nails were long, his beard scraggly. He was not allowed to trim or shave for fear he might turn sharp instruments against himself, though he had once been chosen to man an M203 grenade launcher.
Tears trickled out of his tired blue eyes, no longer bright and full of promise.
He was a hero, honored by the governor of Georgia. Now the former sheriff's deputy was sharing quarters with thieves, addicts, even murderers.
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Spc. Shane Parham was brawny, proud. He had policing and patriotism pulsing through his veins.
I'd met him in July 2005, in the midst of a raging insurgency in Iraq. He was a soldier's soldier, used to carrying loaded guns and wearing bulletproof vests. Brawny. Proud. Someone who hunted the game and fowl he put on the Sunday table.
He'd arrived in Iraq ready to fight, heady with adrenaline. But now, four of his friends were dead.
At first, he couldn't even talk about what had happened. But in time, he would unload his tale of loss, sitting in a tent with head in hands, struggling for words to describe the unspeakable.
I knew it would be a long time before he healed. But neither of us could have predicted he would end up behind bars.
His yearlong tour cut short by injury, Parham only served seven months in Iraq. But, as he learned, it's not the length of time at war that can change a man, but what he experiences.
He came back to tiny Social Circle, Georgia, and tried to restart life, like the 2.2 million others who've returned from Iraq and Afghanistan. Of those, 43,000 came home without limbs or with other physical wounds, according to icasualties.org, which tracks combat deaths and injuries. One in five struggles on the inside.
They come back scarred by hidden wounds, such as post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury. They fight the war on a second front, in the cities and homes of America.
A Department of Defense task force last year acknowledged the enormous physical and psychological demands placed on service members in two of America's longest-running wars. The group reported that more than 1,100 members of the armed forces took their own lives between 2005 and 2009, though it's not clear how many had been deployed. But the number represents an average of one suicide every 36 hours.
There are no definitive statistics on how many soldiers wind up in court because of their troubles. But the anecdotal evidence is strong: From New York to California, from Colorado to Georgia, veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq have been charged with crimes as serious as murder.
The re-entry counseling now required of returning soldiers warns that alcohol and drug abuse and domestic violence are precursors of even more dangerous behavior, especially when support systems erode.
But for many veterans, like Parham, the warnings aren't enough.
In Iraq, he could not come to terms with what he had seen and done. In Georgia, he could not stop thinking about it.
"I just got so twisted up. I was angry and too embarrassed to ask for help," he said from the other side of the visitation window.
Six years ago, I had watched him gear up in full battle rattle. He looked menacing with grenades and ammo hanging from his flak jacket and night vision goggles strapped to his helmet. He climbed up into the gunner's hatch of his Humvee as his platoon rolled out in the darkness of night.
Every time, the soldiers prayed before leaving Camp Striker. They never knew what lay ahead, whether they would live or die.
Now, Parham, 35, rose from his metal seat at the Newton County Detention Center to return to a jail cell the size of a pickup bed. Here, too, he did not know what lay ahead. He didn't know whether he would survive an enemy within.
Six days, and eight dead
It was late July 2005, and the Baghdad summer was melting even the hardiest Georgia boys.
Parham and his friend, Sgt. Bill Jones, waited ahead of me in a slow-moving cashier line at the Camp Striker PX. We had just come back from a practice run for a memorial ceremony for four soldiers killed July 24 by a massive bomb hidden in the road.
I recognized Parham from the honor guard. His commanders picked him for that solemn duty because of his experience as a sheriff's deputy in Walton County, Georgia. "I'd like to talk to you about what happened," I said tapping him on the shoulder. "Did you know the four guys who were killed?"
He said they were all from his company. Then, he whipped out a small notebook and an all-weather Army pen and took note of the number of my tent: 535. It was one of hundreds that dotted Striker, a transient camp adjacent to the Baghdad airport and home to the 48th Infantry Brigade.
The Georgia guardsmen had not seen combat since World War II. But in the Iraq war, with no military draft in place, the citizen soldiers of the National Guard were heavily relied upon. Many were like Parham -- law enforcement officers whom the U.S. Army considered perfectly suited for a war in which counterinsurgency operations meant mixing with the local population to develop trust, just as police do in the United States.
Parham had policing and patriotism pulsing through his veins. His father served in Vietnam, then made a career as an Atlanta policeman. His grandfather fought in World War II.
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Parham (with his mother, Vikki) had enlisted in the Army National Guard once before -- when he was only 16.
This was his second stint as a soldier. He'd enlisted in the Guard once before, when he was 16. At 18, he got a job as a jailer and worked as a police officer before becoming a sheriff's deputy. He re-enlisted, like so many Americans, after the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001.
His wife, Wendy, had feared he would be sent overseas. But he insisted; he couldn't bear the thought of not being able to tell his daughters that he had done all he could to defend his country.
What mattered most to him were family, God and country -- in that order.
I wanted to ask Parham a thousand questions. What had he seen out there, beyond the heavily guarded gates, in the villages where friend was indistinguishable from foe? What did it feel like to lose a buddy to an unknown enemy?
"Nice meeting you," he said, tucking his notebook back in one of the many pockets of his uniform. He put his booney hat back on his head and walked out of the Striker PX.
The following evening, I watched him at the memorial. The entire battalion was there, on rickety wooden bleachers and plastic chairs. Each soldier walked up to the four dog tags dangling from upended rifles and four pairs of desert boots representing the men who had died.
Parham wore his game face and fired his M-16 ceremoniously in salute to the dead. He showed no sign that he was mangled inside.
Days later, death visited Parham's company again. Four more were killed on July 30 in the same cruel fashion.
One minute, the three-Humvee convoy was on routine patrol on a road near the base. The next, a thundering boom tore away the guts of the third vehicle. When the smoke settled, the only thing that was recognizable was the engine block and the front and rear axles.
Parham was out on patrol with his squad when a frantic young lieutenant's voice crackled over the radio.
"It's not here. I can't find Anderson's truck," he said, referring to Sgt. 1st Class Victor Anderson, who just three days before had eulogized his fallen soldiers.
Anderson's was the third and last vehicle in the convoy. It was blown to bits by a 500-pound bomb.
Parham's squad rushed to the scene. The brigade commanders ordered them to stand by while Army explosives experts ensured there were no other bombs in the area. Only then would it be safe for Parham and the others to recover the bodies of their friends.
Hours passed. Maybe nine or 10. Maybe more. Night turned into day.
When he returned to base, Parham knocked on my door. The air was thick with heat and the acrid fumes of Baghdad burning. He rolled in like a shamal, the blinding desert dust storms that hold Iraq hostage in the summer. He smelled like an infantryman -- of sweat, blood, cigarettes and spent ammo.
He barely fit into the folding camp chair, heaving from side to side, his rifle still slung over his shoulder.
"I don't know where to begin," he said.
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Parham saw and did things in Iraq that troubled him. At home, he could not forget.
"I seen some bad things. Bad. I mean, I can't describe it."
He was fighting tears.
"I just want to get back to see my girls," he said, avoiding what he wanted to say.
Bailey was 7; Cammi, 5. Laynni was just a baby, growing up without her daddy beside her. If only he could return to his 54 acres on Clegg Farm Road and spend the rest of the summer trout fishing with his daughters.
But his tour had just begun.
He cradled his shaven head in his hands, the way a mother holds a newborn. An uncomfortable period of silence passed. I didn't know whether I should break it. Finally, he did.
"I had to shoot the dogs," he said.
"Dogs?" I fumbled to understand.
He meant the stray dogs that were gnawing at his friends' body parts, strewn about the road with bits of Humvee and fuel. He could not forget the smell; he recognized the odor from a plane crash in Walton County many years before. Charred human flesh.
He put on gloves so he could pick up the pieces and put them in body bags for their final journey home. The night before, he'd had dinner with these guys, joking about getting blown up, trying to overcome the grief that had befallen them after the first four died.
In the days ahead, I visited Parham's platoon in their tent. They were surrounded by eight empty canvas cots, each stripped of sleeping bags and all of the things that once belonged to ordinary men from Georgia -- a truck driver, a cop, a construction worker.
The survivors shifted on their cots and scanned the dusty canvas innards of the tent. They were all like Parham. They'd seen their share of the thorny side of life. But they had never seen "crap like this."
Jones told me his men were balancing grief and anger. All they wanted was to get the bastards who killed their friends.
Many years later, in jail, Parham would say he did not realize it then, but the Iraq war instilled malice and hatred in his heart that drove him to do things for which he could never forgive himself.
Or worse, God would never forgive him.
That, he believed, was why he lost everything.
Vengeance and hope
The soldiers in Parham's platoon were allowed to go home early on a three-week leave that usually came midway through deployment. Parham returned to the serenity of life in Social Circle and dreaded the day he would have to return to Iraq.
So much had changed since the brigade's departure in May. His ideals of fighting an honorable war had fallen to the wayside. This time when he got back on the plane, he knew well the dangers he faced.
Our long conversations began when he resurfaced at Striker. Summer was gone and the 80-degree September evenings seemed chilly. Soldier and journalist occupied a splintered picnic bench plopped down on a field of gravel.
He smoked Marlboro after Marlboro and interspersed stories of line dancing with taking aim at suspected insurgents. It was a curious mix of fun and horror. But that's how his mind worked. Here, there, and back to here.
Anger coursed through him. He talked about avenging the deaths of his eight comrades.
He thought it was unfair that he had been trained to kill, only to find that in Iraq, the enemy was invisible.
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Parham snapped photographs of children in Iraq. He called them a bright spot amid war's darkness; they reminded him of his daughters.
"I looked for an enemy everywhere, whether there was one or not," he would tell me later. "Some of us got pretty vigilante. It was our way of survival."
Before I left Iraq that fall, Parham gave me a CD filled with photographs he shot with his point-and-shoot camera.
Snapshots of Iraq's children popped up on my computer screen. They were dirty and malnourished and dressed in tattered dresses and pants.
He said the kids reminded him of his own. One day, he thought, maybe his girls would meet the kids of the men who killed his buddies. One day, he thought, the madness of war would end.
The enemy in sight
In October, I flew back home to Atlanta. A few days after I left Baghdad, Parham experienced the battle of his life. I would find out about it a year later during a conversation over lunch.
He was reluctant to tell me details.
"I don't want to get anyone in trouble," he said. "You gotta understand why we did what we did."
He was struggling to come to terms with the way his unit had treated suspected insurgents, their desire for vengeance. That was no way to fight a war, he said.
Restraint had always been Parham's priority as a law enforcement officer. He had never used unjustifiable force. But in Iraq, he adopted a different ethic, shaped by the nature of the war.
"There were many times over there I could have used restraint," he told me. "But I chose not to. I was so angry."
Alpha Company Humvees regularly patrolled Al Salam, a village on the outskirts of Baghdad. On this day, a platoon got ambushed in the center of the village.
Parham's squad was conducting house-to-house searches in the area. They dropped everything and rushed to help the guys under attack.
Finally, there was an enemy in sight.
Parham's men engaged with insurgents on rooftops. They hunkered down near their vehicles in a hail of AK-47 fire.
Some, like Nick Hamerla, had never been shot at before. He was only 20 and looked up to Parham. He wanted to go back home and become a law enforcement officer, too.
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Nick Hamerla (second from left) looked up to Parham (third from left) and wanted to become a law enforcement officer like Parham when he returned from war.
Hammer, as he was called, thought Parham had taken the deaths of the eight soldiers especially hard and become more withdrawn than his comrades. He said that after those horrific July nights, Parham never joked with him as he had during months of training at Fort Stewart and in their first few weeks in Iraq.
The firefight at Al Salam that day went on for an hour, though it felt endless to Alpha Company. Shots rang out from every corner of the village, even from the mosque minaret.
All Parham could hear was that familiar snapping sound of bullets. All he could see was the dirt flying off the ground.
Parham fired a lot of rounds. Everyone did. The soldiers were convinced the insurgents were using women and children as shields.
"Imshi! Imshi" Parham shouted to a woman in Arabic, meaning "get back."
Hamerla was trying to get more ammo from his Humvee when he got caught in the fire. He dropped his rifle and hugged the dirt.
"Hammer!" Parham yelled.
Desperate, Parham took out his grenade launcher and lobbed a lethal round to a rooftop where snipers were taking aim at his squad. Everything went quiet. The shooting stopped.
Hammer was OK. So were the rest of the guys.
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Parham holds his daughter Bailey in a photo taken while he was a sheriff's deputy. Later, in Iraq, he would say he hoped his kids would one day know those of his enemies.
Alpha Company soldiers said no civilians were killed that day but Parham believed they were.
"Thou Shalt Not Kill." It's in the Bible. Parham thinks he killed the innocent, that he took something precious from another man.
He thought of his own wife and daughters. He did not know it then, but soon he would see his family. The reunion would take place with Iraq still raging in his head.
Page 2
On a winter's day, Wendy Parham drove her husband from a Georgia military hospital back home to Social Circle, Georgia. He stared out the window at the tall pines that line Interstate 20 -- and cried.
Wendy thought he was overwhelmed by the greenery after so many months in the Iraqi dust. He kept searching the road, watching for other cars. He cringed when they hit a bump or saw dead animals, which were used as booby traps in Iraq.
At home, he couldn't sleep through the night. Sleeping meant his guard was down. And that meant nightmares.
Sometimes, he encountered dead insurgents in his dreams. But when he pulled the scarves off their heads, he peered into the faces of his fallen friends.
Thousands of other veterans were struggling with post-combat stress issues. Spc. Shane Parham was not alone, but he felt that way.
He had left behind the battlegrounds of Iraq, but the war at home was just beginning.
The Army sent him back to Georgia in December 2005 for medical treatment, halfway through the yearlong Iraq tour of his Army National Guard brigade. He had suffered a severe knee injury when his Humvee hit a bomb crater in the road and rolled over. Parham, a gunner, was sticking out of the hatch; it was all he could do to keep from being ejected.
He arrived at Eisenhower Army Medical Center at Fort Gordon wracked with guilt. He was safe in Georgia, he thought, while his buddies were still risking death on the roads of Iraq. Eight had died in just six days in July 2005.
Parham underwent the first of two surgeries. But his kneecap, like the rest of him, would never be the same.
Before he could even settle back into life's routine, the governor summoned him to the state Capitol in Atlanta to represent his brigade. In his 2006 State of the State address, Sonny Perdue saluted Georgia's men and women still serving in Iraq. He asked Parham to stand in the legislative gallery as everyone applauded his heroism.
Parham didn't really want to be there. He had hoped to come home and slink into the shadows. The governor should have recognized his buddies killed by insurgents' bombs, he thought.
Wendy stood by his side, proud of the man he had become. Like him, she was focused on getting back to the life they had made together.
They had met more than a decade ago at a restaurant called Cowboys, where he taught line dancing. Only 18, Parham was smitten from the very first sight of the tall, dark-haired beauty, four years older than him.
"Mama," he said, when he arrived home that night. "I just met your future daughter-in-law." And he made a pledge: "God, if you let me be with her, I will never let her go."
They married six months later, in 1995, and built a house on the family farm, atop a hill just down the road from his parents.
Parham cherished being back among the lush fields and woods of Georgia. He'd always said he was a simple country boy; didn't need much to keep him happy.
From his spot on the hill, he couldn't even see another house, let alone people. He liked the solitude and the quiet of the night when the only sound was the chirping of crickets.
Sometimes, he propped up his head with his hands on his pillow and watched his wife and baby sleep.
Wendy was grateful her husband had made it home safely. But in the months after the governor's ceremony, she began to notice the ways he'd changed.
He'd always had a short temper, she thought. But now his anger was amplified. He used to love
cutting up with people. But he began keeping to himself. He didn't even go to the girls' softball games or to church anymore.
She missed the man who laughed at the dinner table and was the center of attention at family gatherings. Crowds, he said, made him nervous.
In June 2006, after his brigade came home, Parham was honored again with eight other Walton County soldiers, most of them law enforcement officers. The ceremony took place in Monroe, the hometown for his Guard unit.
He told me that he dreamed of climbing back into a sheriff's patrol car like his buddies. But his knee was a problem. Besides, he no longer trusted himself with a gun.
He was done playing God.
"I didn't want to be responsible for whether someone lives or dies," he said. "Iraq was too much of that."
He also knew he could not be fair to everyone. He left Iraq with an admitted prejudice against Muslims. In them, he saw his friends' killers.
"You had to hate them all to do your job effectively," he said. "You became bitter to what you thought was your enemy."
Parham self-medicated with alcohol. He went on drinking binges and picked fights in bars. His mother, Vikki, didn't know how to help her only son.
"His body came back but his mind was still over there," she told me one afternoon. She picked up a baby picture of Shane and gazed at it.
"You look at his eyes now, and it's like he is looking right through you."
Iraq played like reruns of a horror movie in his head. He told his father: "Daddy, God is going to punish me one day."
His body came back but his mind was still over there. You look at his eyes now, and it's like he is looking right through you.
--Vikki Parham, Shane's mother
Mike worried for his son. "Don't turn into an alcoholic. Don't be like your daddy," he said about his own return from the war in Vietnam.
Parham knew his father had taken a bullet, but Mike had never talked much about what he saw there. Mike's mother, Bonnie Faye, had comforted him, as well as her husband, who served in World War II, when nightmares followed them home. The Army had told her husband, her son -- and now her grandson -- to kill. And she believed the consequences were evident.
When Parham was a little boy, he had asked his grandpa: "How many Germans did you kill?"
"I hope I didn't kill any," he replied.
Parham wrestled with the thought that he would not be able to give the same answer to his daughters. A battle in Al Salam, a village on the outskirts of Baghdad, haunted him. He believed Iraqi civilians were among the casualties.
Some days, he escaped to the north Georgia mountains, where he liked to drive along the banks of the Tallulah River. But part of him always remained along the Euphrates, hiding in papyrus and palm groves, waiting for a kill.
Diagnoses, and denial
Shortly after Parham returned from Iraq, doctors at the Atlanta Veterans Affairs hospital diagnosed him with post-traumatic stress disorder. About 20 percent of all the men and women who served in Iraq and Afghanistan have PTSD, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs.
The symptoms commonly include sleep disturbance, nightmares, anxiety, irritability, anger and depression.
Parham could check all of the above. Several doctors confirmed that Parham's PTSD was severe.
He also suffered a traumatic brain injury in a rocket explosion near his tent at Camp Striker. He remembered bleeding from his ears and going deaf for three days. Doctors later told Vikki about her son's frontal lobe injury. Think of his brain as a coffee cup that's been shaken vigorously. Some of the coffee spilled out; the rest settled back not quite the way it was before.
Blasts are the leading cause of death and injury among U.S. soldiers in Iraq. The intense pressure in a blast zone can rattle the brain, as delicate and mushy as Jell-O, and result in concussions that range from severe to so mild that they are frequently undiagnosed in initial examinations.
In documents submitted to a Georgia court, the VA's Dr. Stephen Byrd said Parham suffered from "severe PTSD and depression coupled with neurologic impairment due to brain injury that renders him, if not treated, at high risk of both suicide and loss of control of anger."
The VA considered him 100 percent disabled, according to his medical records. He needed antidepressants, mood relaxers and sleeping pills to get through the day.
He didn't talk much about his war experiences. Who would want to hear about how it felt to smell the charred flesh of your friends, or to pull the trigger with impunity?
I can't find beauty anywhere. The power of this place has a profound effect on my emotions.
--In a letter Parham wrote from Camp Striker, Baghdad
He did tell Wendy and his parents that he believed he had killed a woman and her children in a firefight outside Baghdad.
"He said he took somebody's wife and children from them," Wendy said. "It took over him."
Parham felt like an infectious disease; he kept to himself so as not to taint others. Too ashamed of his problems to keep up regular counseling sessions at the VA, he did what a lot of soldiers do. He withdrew even more.
At first, Wendy told herself time would heal her husband. Eventually, she tried to tell him that he needed to help himself. He said she was nagging.
So many military marriages disintegrate after a soldier returns. Parham was determined not to become one of those statistics. He knew that sometimes he scared his wife, but he thought he could keep it together enough to hold on to what mattered most -- his family. They were his sanctuary.
Anger and ghosts
Despite his demons, he began a new life on his farm.
In Iraq, he'd learned about Islamic customs and practices and, though he despised Muslims, he decided he could make a lucrative business by raising goats and sheep and selling them to halal meat suppliers.
Almost a year after his return home, Parham took me to a halal meat operation off Interstate 20, where livestock were slaughtered in ways prescribed by Islam. He seemed proud of his business strategy. At least one good thing could come out of his time in Iraq, he thought.
He had also met Mobin Shah, a Muslim man from Fiji who helped him understand that Islam was not what he had seen in insurgents.
Parham allowed Shah, whom he affectionately called Mo, and 60 of his Muslim friends to slaughter goats on his farm for the holy month of Ramadan.
But when the Muslim owner of the halal meat supply company failed to pay Parham a $2,000 bill, the old rage took over. It drove him to get in his truck, hurtle down the highway and shoot seven of the man's sheep.
When he told me what he had done, I thought for the first time that he needed help. His troubles began to surface more and more.
One night, he was eating dinner at Ryan's Steakhouse in Athens when a stranger came up to his table and introduced himself. Jeff Brunson, the man said.
Brunson's son Gus was one of the eight Alpha Company men who died in Iraq. The elder Brunson recognized Parham from a photograph. He asked if he'd known his son.
"Yes, sir," Parham answered. "He was a good man."
Jeff Brunson wanted Parham to tell him what the U.S. military had not.
"Did Gus suffer?"
"No," Parham assured him.
The father's face, his mannerisms, the way he talked -- everything reminded Parham of his friend. It all started coming back. His mind jumped from here to there, and back again.
He smelled that unmistakable odor of burning flesh. He saw all the images he had tried so hard to forget. He felt guilty. Why had Gus died while he survived? Gus had children, too. Why do they have to go through life without their daddy?
Later that night, Parham got into a fight at a bar over something as mundane as what seat he could occupy. He had always been one to pick fights over the smallest things. Now, that came even easier.
At home at 3 a.m., Parham called his friend Russ Mayfield, a police officer in a nearby town. Mayfield rushed over to find Parham sitting in his truck in the dirt driveway that leads up to his house, according to a police report from that night.
He was writing something on a piece of paper. He had a Smith & Wesson 5906 handgun.
By the time Parham stepped out of the truck, other officers had arrived on the scene.
"Shoot me," he said to his friend, Sgt. Kirk McLeroy. "Please, someone, shoot me."
The police report said Parham walked toward McLeroy.
"I'm tired of living with it," he said.
Mayfield managed to grab Parham's gun. But Parham told him he would try it again. Next time, he said, maybe he would do it in Atlanta and make the SWAT team kill him.
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Parham saw and did things in Iraq that troubled him. At home, he could not forget.
I know there's an 18-year-old in Iraq right now who is ... going to come home like me.
-- Shane Parham
A few days later, Parham called me from Peachford Hospital in Atlanta, a mental health facility that treats a range of addictions and psychiatric disorders. I drove up to see him, but the hospital only allowed family members to visit.
That day, I reread a letter he had sent me from Camp Striker the year before. It was on lined writing paper, every letter penned with the precision of a computer font.
"I can't find beauty anywhere," he wrote. "The power of this place has a profound effect on my emotions."
There was talk then of President George W. Bush asking for a surge in troops in Iraq. Parham's words made me ponder how many more men and women would go to war. How would it affect them?
"Remember the State of the State address where I was the guest of honor?" he said when he called me from the hospital. "Well, they didn't do very much for me.
"I know there's an 18-year-old in Iraq right now who is seeing things and is going to come home like me."
In the midst of his own personal hell, Parham was sounding an alarm for others -- for soldiers yet to come home.
Page 3
he war hero's reputation fell hard around parts of Georgia.
Disorderly conduct. Obstruction of an officer. DUI. Since his return from Iraq, the former sheriff's deputy had found himself time and again on the other side of the law.
He was accused of taking a 12-pack of beer out of a convenience store on a Sunday, when alcohol sales are prohibited in Georgia, and almost ran over the store clerk with his truck. Twice, he tried to kill himself.
A year ago, an unexpected message popped up on my Facebook page. It was Spc. Shane Parham's sister, Mandi. Her brother was in jail.
He was incarcerated in neighboring Newton County, so he would not have to deal with former colleagues in the Walton County Sheriff's Office and jail.
They were tired of dealing with him.
Some whispered that his Iraq knee injury occurred during a volleyball game at Camp Striker, not a vehicle rollover. They suggested Parham was an angry man even before Iraq and was using battle scars as a crutch to get away with belligerent behavior.
Some of his fellow soldiers in Alpha company said Parham was making up his Iraq stories in a cry for attention.
Capt. Ty Vance of the sheriff's office said Parham developed an image as a whiner who was leading life with an "I deserve better" attitude. I asked him if he felt sorry for his former colleague.
"Not anymore," Vance said. "Not after the way he's handled things."
Walton County Sheriff Joe Chapman felt his former employee could be a danger to society. He did not question Parham's psychiatric assessment -- post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury -- but said he had been given breaks by his friends in law enforcement. If he had not been a sheriff's deputy, if he had not served in Iraq, Parham would have already been locked up in the state penitentiary. Of that, Chapman was certain.
"There is a point where enough is enough," he said.
I asked if he had reached that point.
"I don't know."
When the latest round of trouble began, prosecutors said they were no longer taking any chances. They believed he was a deadly threat to himself and others.
I had not seen Parham in three years when I visited him in jail last May. I hardly recognized him. He had the same sadness on his face as the day I met him in Baghdad. Only, now he appeared more helpless, like a lost child.
"All my life, I've served - my community, my nation, God. Now, look at me," he said, hanging his head low.
He found his legal troubles humiliating. He was used to arresting people, not being arrested. It was tough to be on the other side, to be handcuffed and shackled and brought to face a judge.
But every time he thought he could clean up his act and get back on track, something happened. He said he couldn't stop his anger from taking control.
He had grown thin, the muscles on his arms deflated. Deep scars marred his face, the kind you might expect a soldier to suffer on the battlefield. But these came from his fights at home.
All my life, I've served -- my community, my nation, God. Now, look at me.
--Shane Parham, in jail in Newton County, Georgia
I thought of what Parham had told me years ago: "Dying is easy. Living's the hard part." He seemed an embodiment of those words now.
If you could see inside his head, you'd know he had suffered physical injury to the brain. But you'd also see Iraq's ghosts clouding every thought.
He had lost eight friends and believed he had killed innocent people. He couldn't stop thinking about it.
The one thing that had kept him going was his family, but now his marriage was disintegrating as well.
Growing distant
He and Wendy had had a fourth child, another daughter who they named Jaz. But Wendy felt her husband was detached, shirking his responsibilities.
She spent hours under the sun helping him tend his livestock. But when they returned to the house, she said, he slunk into a recliner and watched television. Sometimes, he even disappeared for days in the woods while she drowned in homework, softball games, baths, dinner.
"He never even asked me how my day was," she said.
They stuck it out, thinking time would fade Parham's wounds. But Wendy ached for the man she had married, and grew weary of his battles. She felt lonely, abandoned.
"Shane made me feel like nothing," she said. "He was no longer a part of me or my kids."
Everything spiraled out of control on Easter of last year.
They had gathered at the home of Parham's parents for lunch. After the meal, Parham returned
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The war at home
to his house and, according to a police report, discovered messages on his computer suggesting Wendy was seeing other men.
Enraged by his discovery, Parham drove his truck back to his parents' house. He had a gun in his hand.
Wendy's sister, Meredith Owens, who was at the Parhams' that day, called the police to report a family fight.
The police report stated that Parham said his father took his pistol away from him. Parham said he would never threaten his wife with a weapon.
Wendy said, however, that he pulled the gun on her.
"Wendy is dead," Parham said, according to the statement Owens gave to police.
Shane made me feel like nothing. He was no longer a part of me or my kids.
--Wendy Parham
Wendy told me it was true that she had been involved with a man she met many years ago. She was resigned to keeping her marriage together for the sake of her children but had looked for love elsewhere.
But on that day, she said, she realized the marriage was over. Her husband had always had guns in his possession, but he had never threatened her with one.
"He took something from me that day," she told me. "He took my heart from me."
Police did not arrest Parham, but Wendy left the house with their four girls.
Parham drank himself numb and mixed alcohol with his medications. A week after Easter, he went missing from home. Frantic, his mother called the sheriff's department. She said he was despondent about not being able to see his daughters except on weekends. She believed he had taken a lot of pills.
Parham eventually spoke with his mother and drove back home, according to the police report. He had slashed his chest with a knife. His father helped wrap him in towels, and he was rushed by ambulance to a hospital.
He made a scene there, demanding he be allowed to leave the room to smoke. He pulled out his intravenous needle and was bleeding all over the room.
He asked to speak with his friend Lt. Charlie Dalton -- the two men had grown up together. But there was "no reasoning with Parham," he wrote in his report.
Parham asked how many officers it would take to fight him.
"I guess the three of us," Dalton said of himself and two deputies who were there.
"Let's get it on, then," Parham said, according to Dalton's report.
Parham was walking toward the officers when a deputy subdued him with a taser gun.
After several days in the hospital, Parham was allowed to return home. Then, while at a livestock auction, he said, he got a phone call from someone who said Wendy was involved with a family friend.
"If I catch you with my wife, everybody dies. You understand?" That was the message Parham left on the man's phone.
When the man informed police, Parham was arrested for "terroristic threats and acts." It was his second felony charge - the other had been for lunging at an officer after a parking lot altercation two years before.
The man he'd threatened wrote a letter to the presiding judge denying he was involved with Wendy and saying he did not want to press charges. He said he did not think "a man who served as a public safety officer himself or risked his own life to serve our country should be sitting in jail for trying to find out if his wife was out with another man."
The district attorney argued that if freed, Parham was likely to commit serious crimes. The court agreed, and the judge denied him bond until a mental evaluation could be completed.
On day 31 of his incarceration, a day after his 35th birthday, Parham felt he could no longer bear his plight.
He waited until his midday meal had been served. He knew it would be hours before anyone came to check on him again.
He took a sheet from his bed and hung himself.
He doesn't remember what happened, only that he regained consciousness in an ambulance. Prison officials later told him they found him two minutes away from a coffin.
The man he was
Held alone in a cell under suicide watch, Parham waited for a court hearing to determine whether he would remain behind bars or be admitted to a hospital for psychiatric treatment. A state medical examiner had found him incompetent to stand trial.
He was allowed only a Bible and a plastic pen in his cell. He slept on a thin mattress on the floor, without a pillow.
Parham's lawyers argued that their client had yet to be convicted of any crime. They said he was not mentally equipped to function in society; that he deserved another chance, starting with the intensive treatment at the veterans hospital that he should have sought earlier.
"The defendant is an Iraqi war veteran who suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, traumatic brain injury and various other physical injuries as a result of his service to the country," they said in court documents. "He is completely disabled as a result of his injuries."
The defendant is an Iraqi war veteran who suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, traumatic brain injury and various other physical injuries as a result of his service to the country. He is completely disabled as a result of his injuries.
--Defense attorney Lori Duff, in court documents
Acknowledge his service to country by giving him the service he needs, lawyer Lori Duff urged the judge.
"In jail, he's isolated," she said. "I can't imagine anything more stressful than that."
Parham broke down in court that day. He later told me he wanted his story to be known to help other veterans who were struggling like him.
About 20 percent of service members who've returned from Iraq and Afghanistan test positive for PTSD, studies show. They display the same symptoms as Parham and get into the same kind of trouble involving alcohol, drug abuse and domestic violence. Many are at risk for suicide; some have gone on to commit serious crimes, including murder.
The toll combat has taken on America's military has even led to the creation of "veterans' courts," where service to country and war-related illnesses can be taken into account, though those courts usually deal with nonviolent offenders.
"We are able to make connections that the judicial system has not," said Carrie Bailey, program manager of the Veteran Trauma Court in Colorado.
In Georgia, there are no such courts yet.
The Superior Court judge in Parham's case eventually agreed to release him to a lockdown residency program at the Veterans Affairs medical center in Augusta. I spoke to him by phone over the July 4 weekend after he had already started counseling sessions. He hated it at first and counted time.
"It's been 54 days since I saw my kids," he said.
He was then moved to a 91-day residential treatment program for PTSD in mid-August. Psychologist Miriam Hancock would later report to the court that she met with Parham for 43 sessions, including two attended by his two eldest daughters, Bailey and Cammi.
Hospital staff told me Parham learned to cope with his anger, his paranoia. He said he discovered it wasn't always best to suck it up and go on, as the Army had taught him. He could think in healthier ways and rebuild himself.
When I visited him in Augusta, it was the most hopeful I had ever seen him. He had gained weight; he could even smile again. He was determined to make a new go at life.
He made it into the program because of his troubles, but he considered it a blessing. It was something he should have done a long time ago, he said.
What he liked most was that he was able to talk to other veterans who had served in Iraq, Afghanistan, and even Vietnam. They understood him. He had finally found an outlet for his secrets.
Parham became an inspiration to Dave Werden, another Iraq war veteran enrolled in the VA program. Werden found Parham's frankness about his combat experiences refreshing. He looked upon Parham as a barometer. "If he fails," Werden said. "That means I can fail, too."
In documents submitted to the court, Hancock described Parham as a model student who developed good insight into the nature of his condition and how best to cope with it. She said he consistently accepted responsibility for his past actions.
More incarceration would only mean he would regress, she said. What Parham needed now was family support and routine follow-up visits at the VA for management of his PTSD.
"It is my clinical opinion," Hancock wrote, "that Mr. Parham is not at risk for violence toward himself or others."
In December 2010, the court allowed him to return home with a GPS locator and alcohol-monitoring cuffs around his ankles. If he went near the man he had threatened or drank too many beers, he would go back to jail. He had to pay the monthly $532 for the monitors himself -- expensive for a guy making it on military disability pay. But he was glad, he said, to be able to buy his freedom.
Before Christmas, he persuaded Wendy to move back in with him; to give him another chance. He took her and their daughters out to eat at the Tokyo restaurant in Monroe - the girls enjoyed the tabletop hibachi grills.
He wanted to show Wendy that he could still be involved, as a father and a husband. Any day now, he thought, the monitors would come off his legs and he could settle all his legal problems.
But the optimism quickly faded.
Wendy told him she just didn't love him anymore, that he had changed too much. In her mind, she had moved back in an effort to be civil at Christmas - for the sake of their daughters.
She felt guilty about leaving a man who was so vulnerable -- she knew that family was all he had left.
On a crisp, sun-drenched afternoon two months ago, he sat in his living room with all the blinds drawn, the air saturated with the smoke of Marlboro Lights. Dolls, stuffed animals, dresses lay strewn about everywhere. I could tell that just a short while ago, he had found joy, however fleeting.
Six Christmas stockings still hung from the mantel.
In jail, he's isolated. I can't imagine anything more stressful than that.
--Attorney Lori Duff, urging that Parham receive intensive treatment at a VA hospital
"Listen," he said. There was nothing but the silence he had craved after coming home from Iraq. "I can't stand that."
A profound sadness hung heavy like the smoke in the room.
A few weeks after that visit, Parham was back in jail, again under suicide watch. Wendy had accused him of hitting her in the face. He was charged again, this time with battery.
I went back to the visitation booth, looking at a broken man behind the thick slab of glass.
He told me he was just trying to move Wendy's finger away from his face. He would never hurt her, he said.
But she, like others, no longer believes that. She told me she lived in fear of him. What she felt for him now was only the kind of fondness a woman feels for the father of her children.
She paused, almost incredulous at her words. She never thought she would ever say she didn't love him anymore.
"He just didn't come back the same Shane."
On one of my recent visits, Parham took out a small piece of paper on which he'd drawn a calendar so he could keep track of time in jail. He'd already been there more than a month.
"What day is it today?"
I told him it was May 4, that Osama bin Laden had been killed just days before in a special operation by Navy Seals in Pakistan. "Really?" he said. "That's awesome."
We talked about Iraq, as we always do when we see each other. I showed him a photo on my iPhone of the tent I lived in for four months at Camp Striker. Number 535.
He smiled and remembered the first time he had come to talk to me there. All of it seemed surreal sometimes, he said.
It was hard to look at him - to see the shadow of the soldier he once was. He would turn 36 in a few days, but he seemed much older.
In just two months, the war in Iraq is scheduled to officially end, with the beginning of withdrawal of the remaining 47,000 U.S. troops in July. Parham may be out of jail by then, but I am fairly sure he will still be fighting his personal war.
He admits he's made many mistakes. And he understands that people think he changed after Iraq.
But he told me doesn't know how to be the old Shane anymore. He can't remember what that man was like.
A story of how a innocent man is transformed into a disturbed man who is now in prison
Reference:
The war at home: A soldier's war on two fronts - CNN.com
Please read the full article on CNN this is a 3-4 page article
May 22, 2011 9:00 a.m. EDT
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The war at home
The first time I met Spc. Shane Parham, his face was wrinkled with sadness. Beads of sweat met Iraqi dust and curved down his sunburned skin like the swampy Alcovy River in his native Georgia.
He was in the checkout line at Baghdad's Camp Striker commissary, only two months into his Iraq tour. But already, he'd witnessed war's brutality.
I thought of that first meeting recently as I peered at Parham through a 2-inch thick slab of glass in a prison visitation booth. The cinder-block walls, drab like the Iraqi desert, closed in on him.
Gone was his Army uniform. Instead, he wore tan prison garb, his hands bound in cuffs. His nails were long, his beard scraggly. He was not allowed to trim or shave for fear he might turn sharp instruments against himself, though he had once been chosen to man an M203 grenade launcher.
Tears trickled out of his tired blue eyes, no longer bright and full of promise.
He was a hero, honored by the governor of Georgia. Now the former sheriff's deputy was sharing quarters with thieves, addicts, even murderers.
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Spc. Shane Parham was brawny, proud. He had policing and patriotism pulsing through his veins.
I'd met him in July 2005, in the midst of a raging insurgency in Iraq. He was a soldier's soldier, used to carrying loaded guns and wearing bulletproof vests. Brawny. Proud. Someone who hunted the game and fowl he put on the Sunday table.
He'd arrived in Iraq ready to fight, heady with adrenaline. But now, four of his friends were dead.
At first, he couldn't even talk about what had happened. But in time, he would unload his tale of loss, sitting in a tent with head in hands, struggling for words to describe the unspeakable.
I knew it would be a long time before he healed. But neither of us could have predicted he would end up behind bars.
His yearlong tour cut short by injury, Parham only served seven months in Iraq. But, as he learned, it's not the length of time at war that can change a man, but what he experiences.
He came back to tiny Social Circle, Georgia, and tried to restart life, like the 2.2 million others who've returned from Iraq and Afghanistan. Of those, 43,000 came home without limbs or with other physical wounds, according to icasualties.org, which tracks combat deaths and injuries. One in five struggles on the inside.
They come back scarred by hidden wounds, such as post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury. They fight the war on a second front, in the cities and homes of America.
A Department of Defense task force last year acknowledged the enormous physical and psychological demands placed on service members in two of America's longest-running wars. The group reported that more than 1,100 members of the armed forces took their own lives between 2005 and 2009, though it's not clear how many had been deployed. But the number represents an average of one suicide every 36 hours.
There are no definitive statistics on how many soldiers wind up in court because of their troubles. But the anecdotal evidence is strong: From New York to California, from Colorado to Georgia, veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq have been charged with crimes as serious as murder.
The re-entry counseling now required of returning soldiers warns that alcohol and drug abuse and domestic violence are precursors of even more dangerous behavior, especially when support systems erode.
But for many veterans, like Parham, the warnings aren't enough.
In Iraq, he could not come to terms with what he had seen and done. In Georgia, he could not stop thinking about it.
"I just got so twisted up. I was angry and too embarrassed to ask for help," he said from the other side of the visitation window.
Six years ago, I had watched him gear up in full battle rattle. He looked menacing with grenades and ammo hanging from his flak jacket and night vision goggles strapped to his helmet. He climbed up into the gunner's hatch of his Humvee as his platoon rolled out in the darkness of night.
Every time, the soldiers prayed before leaving Camp Striker. They never knew what lay ahead, whether they would live or die.
Now, Parham, 35, rose from his metal seat at the Newton County Detention Center to return to a jail cell the size of a pickup bed. Here, too, he did not know what lay ahead. He didn't know whether he would survive an enemy within.
Six days, and eight dead
It was late July 2005, and the Baghdad summer was melting even the hardiest Georgia boys.
Parham and his friend, Sgt. Bill Jones, waited ahead of me in a slow-moving cashier line at the Camp Striker PX. We had just come back from a practice run for a memorial ceremony for four soldiers killed July 24 by a massive bomb hidden in the road.
I recognized Parham from the honor guard. His commanders picked him for that solemn duty because of his experience as a sheriff's deputy in Walton County, Georgia. "I'd like to talk to you about what happened," I said tapping him on the shoulder. "Did you know the four guys who were killed?"
He said they were all from his company. Then, he whipped out a small notebook and an all-weather Army pen and took note of the number of my tent: 535. It was one of hundreds that dotted Striker, a transient camp adjacent to the Baghdad airport and home to the 48th Infantry Brigade.
The Georgia guardsmen had not seen combat since World War II. But in the Iraq war, with no military draft in place, the citizen soldiers of the National Guard were heavily relied upon. Many were like Parham -- law enforcement officers whom the U.S. Army considered perfectly suited for a war in which counterinsurgency operations meant mixing with the local population to develop trust, just as police do in the United States.
Parham had policing and patriotism pulsing through his veins. His father served in Vietnam, then made a career as an Atlanta policeman. His grandfather fought in World War II.
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Parham (with his mother, Vikki) had enlisted in the Army National Guard once before -- when he was only 16.
This was his second stint as a soldier. He'd enlisted in the Guard once before, when he was 16. At 18, he got a job as a jailer and worked as a police officer before becoming a sheriff's deputy. He re-enlisted, like so many Americans, after the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001.
His wife, Wendy, had feared he would be sent overseas. But he insisted; he couldn't bear the thought of not being able to tell his daughters that he had done all he could to defend his country.
What mattered most to him were family, God and country -- in that order.
I wanted to ask Parham a thousand questions. What had he seen out there, beyond the heavily guarded gates, in the villages where friend was indistinguishable from foe? What did it feel like to lose a buddy to an unknown enemy?
"Nice meeting you," he said, tucking his notebook back in one of the many pockets of his uniform. He put his booney hat back on his head and walked out of the Striker PX.
The following evening, I watched him at the memorial. The entire battalion was there, on rickety wooden bleachers and plastic chairs. Each soldier walked up to the four dog tags dangling from upended rifles and four pairs of desert boots representing the men who had died.
Parham wore his game face and fired his M-16 ceremoniously in salute to the dead. He showed no sign that he was mangled inside.
Days later, death visited Parham's company again. Four more were killed on July 30 in the same cruel fashion.
One minute, the three-Humvee convoy was on routine patrol on a road near the base. The next, a thundering boom tore away the guts of the third vehicle. When the smoke settled, the only thing that was recognizable was the engine block and the front and rear axles.
Parham was out on patrol with his squad when a frantic young lieutenant's voice crackled over the radio.
"It's not here. I can't find Anderson's truck," he said, referring to Sgt. 1st Class Victor Anderson, who just three days before had eulogized his fallen soldiers.
Anderson's was the third and last vehicle in the convoy. It was blown to bits by a 500-pound bomb.
Parham's squad rushed to the scene. The brigade commanders ordered them to stand by while Army explosives experts ensured there were no other bombs in the area. Only then would it be safe for Parham and the others to recover the bodies of their friends.
Hours passed. Maybe nine or 10. Maybe more. Night turned into day.
When he returned to base, Parham knocked on my door. The air was thick with heat and the acrid fumes of Baghdad burning. He rolled in like a shamal, the blinding desert dust storms that hold Iraq hostage in the summer. He smelled like an infantryman -- of sweat, blood, cigarettes and spent ammo.
He barely fit into the folding camp chair, heaving from side to side, his rifle still slung over his shoulder.
"I don't know where to begin," he said.
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Parham saw and did things in Iraq that troubled him. At home, he could not forget.
"I seen some bad things. Bad. I mean, I can't describe it."
He was fighting tears.
"I just want to get back to see my girls," he said, avoiding what he wanted to say.
Bailey was 7; Cammi, 5. Laynni was just a baby, growing up without her daddy beside her. If only he could return to his 54 acres on Clegg Farm Road and spend the rest of the summer trout fishing with his daughters.
But his tour had just begun.
He cradled his shaven head in his hands, the way a mother holds a newborn. An uncomfortable period of silence passed. I didn't know whether I should break it. Finally, he did.
"I had to shoot the dogs," he said.
"Dogs?" I fumbled to understand.
He meant the stray dogs that were gnawing at his friends' body parts, strewn about the road with bits of Humvee and fuel. He could not forget the smell; he recognized the odor from a plane crash in Walton County many years before. Charred human flesh.
He put on gloves so he could pick up the pieces and put them in body bags for their final journey home. The night before, he'd had dinner with these guys, joking about getting blown up, trying to overcome the grief that had befallen them after the first four died.
In the days ahead, I visited Parham's platoon in their tent. They were surrounded by eight empty canvas cots, each stripped of sleeping bags and all of the things that once belonged to ordinary men from Georgia -- a truck driver, a cop, a construction worker.
The survivors shifted on their cots and scanned the dusty canvas innards of the tent. They were all like Parham. They'd seen their share of the thorny side of life. But they had never seen "crap like this."
Jones told me his men were balancing grief and anger. All they wanted was to get the bastards who killed their friends.
Many years later, in jail, Parham would say he did not realize it then, but the Iraq war instilled malice and hatred in his heart that drove him to do things for which he could never forgive himself.
Or worse, God would never forgive him.
That, he believed, was why he lost everything.
Vengeance and hope
The soldiers in Parham's platoon were allowed to go home early on a three-week leave that usually came midway through deployment. Parham returned to the serenity of life in Social Circle and dreaded the day he would have to return to Iraq.
So much had changed since the brigade's departure in May. His ideals of fighting an honorable war had fallen to the wayside. This time when he got back on the plane, he knew well the dangers he faced.
Our long conversations began when he resurfaced at Striker. Summer was gone and the 80-degree September evenings seemed chilly. Soldier and journalist occupied a splintered picnic bench plopped down on a field of gravel.
He smoked Marlboro after Marlboro and interspersed stories of line dancing with taking aim at suspected insurgents. It was a curious mix of fun and horror. But that's how his mind worked. Here, there, and back to here.
Anger coursed through him. He talked about avenging the deaths of his eight comrades.
He thought it was unfair that he had been trained to kill, only to find that in Iraq, the enemy was invisible.
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Parham snapped photographs of children in Iraq. He called them a bright spot amid war's darkness; they reminded him of his daughters.
"I looked for an enemy everywhere, whether there was one or not," he would tell me later. "Some of us got pretty vigilante. It was our way of survival."
Before I left Iraq that fall, Parham gave me a CD filled with photographs he shot with his point-and-shoot camera.
Snapshots of Iraq's children popped up on my computer screen. They were dirty and malnourished and dressed in tattered dresses and pants.
He said the kids reminded him of his own. One day, he thought, maybe his girls would meet the kids of the men who killed his buddies. One day, he thought, the madness of war would end.
The enemy in sight
In October, I flew back home to Atlanta. A few days after I left Baghdad, Parham experienced the battle of his life. I would find out about it a year later during a conversation over lunch.
He was reluctant to tell me details.
"I don't want to get anyone in trouble," he said. "You gotta understand why we did what we did."
He was struggling to come to terms with the way his unit had treated suspected insurgents, their desire for vengeance. That was no way to fight a war, he said.
Restraint had always been Parham's priority as a law enforcement officer. He had never used unjustifiable force. But in Iraq, he adopted a different ethic, shaped by the nature of the war.
"There were many times over there I could have used restraint," he told me. "But I chose not to. I was so angry."
Alpha Company Humvees regularly patrolled Al Salam, a village on the outskirts of Baghdad. On this day, a platoon got ambushed in the center of the village.
Parham's squad was conducting house-to-house searches in the area. They dropped everything and rushed to help the guys under attack.
Finally, there was an enemy in sight.
Parham's men engaged with insurgents on rooftops. They hunkered down near their vehicles in a hail of AK-47 fire.
Some, like Nick Hamerla, had never been shot at before. He was only 20 and looked up to Parham. He wanted to go back home and become a law enforcement officer, too.
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Nick Hamerla (second from left) looked up to Parham (third from left) and wanted to become a law enforcement officer like Parham when he returned from war.
Hammer, as he was called, thought Parham had taken the deaths of the eight soldiers especially hard and become more withdrawn than his comrades. He said that after those horrific July nights, Parham never joked with him as he had during months of training at Fort Stewart and in their first few weeks in Iraq.
The firefight at Al Salam that day went on for an hour, though it felt endless to Alpha Company. Shots rang out from every corner of the village, even from the mosque minaret.
All Parham could hear was that familiar snapping sound of bullets. All he could see was the dirt flying off the ground.
Parham fired a lot of rounds. Everyone did. The soldiers were convinced the insurgents were using women and children as shields.
"Imshi! Imshi" Parham shouted to a woman in Arabic, meaning "get back."
Hamerla was trying to get more ammo from his Humvee when he got caught in the fire. He dropped his rifle and hugged the dirt.
"Hammer!" Parham yelled.
Desperate, Parham took out his grenade launcher and lobbed a lethal round to a rooftop where snipers were taking aim at his squad. Everything went quiet. The shooting stopped.
Hammer was OK. So were the rest of the guys.
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Parham holds his daughter Bailey in a photo taken while he was a sheriff's deputy. Later, in Iraq, he would say he hoped his kids would one day know those of his enemies.
Alpha Company soldiers said no civilians were killed that day but Parham believed they were.
"Thou Shalt Not Kill." It's in the Bible. Parham thinks he killed the innocent, that he took something precious from another man.
He thought of his own wife and daughters. He did not know it then, but soon he would see his family. The reunion would take place with Iraq still raging in his head.
Page 2
On a winter's day, Wendy Parham drove her husband from a Georgia military hospital back home to Social Circle, Georgia. He stared out the window at the tall pines that line Interstate 20 -- and cried.
Wendy thought he was overwhelmed by the greenery after so many months in the Iraqi dust. He kept searching the road, watching for other cars. He cringed when they hit a bump or saw dead animals, which were used as booby traps in Iraq.
At home, he couldn't sleep through the night. Sleeping meant his guard was down. And that meant nightmares.
Sometimes, he encountered dead insurgents in his dreams. But when he pulled the scarves off their heads, he peered into the faces of his fallen friends.
Thousands of other veterans were struggling with post-combat stress issues. Spc. Shane Parham was not alone, but he felt that way.
He had left behind the battlegrounds of Iraq, but the war at home was just beginning.
The Army sent him back to Georgia in December 2005 for medical treatment, halfway through the yearlong Iraq tour of his Army National Guard brigade. He had suffered a severe knee injury when his Humvee hit a bomb crater in the road and rolled over. Parham, a gunner, was sticking out of the hatch; it was all he could do to keep from being ejected.
He arrived at Eisenhower Army Medical Center at Fort Gordon wracked with guilt. He was safe in Georgia, he thought, while his buddies were still risking death on the roads of Iraq. Eight had died in just six days in July 2005.
Parham underwent the first of two surgeries. But his kneecap, like the rest of him, would never be the same.
Before he could even settle back into life's routine, the governor summoned him to the state Capitol in Atlanta to represent his brigade. In his 2006 State of the State address, Sonny Perdue saluted Georgia's men and women still serving in Iraq. He asked Parham to stand in the legislative gallery as everyone applauded his heroism.
Parham didn't really want to be there. He had hoped to come home and slink into the shadows. The governor should have recognized his buddies killed by insurgents' bombs, he thought.
Wendy stood by his side, proud of the man he had become. Like him, she was focused on getting back to the life they had made together.
They had met more than a decade ago at a restaurant called Cowboys, where he taught line dancing. Only 18, Parham was smitten from the very first sight of the tall, dark-haired beauty, four years older than him.
"Mama," he said, when he arrived home that night. "I just met your future daughter-in-law." And he made a pledge: "God, if you let me be with her, I will never let her go."
They married six months later, in 1995, and built a house on the family farm, atop a hill just down the road from his parents.
Parham cherished being back among the lush fields and woods of Georgia. He'd always said he was a simple country boy; didn't need much to keep him happy.
From his spot on the hill, he couldn't even see another house, let alone people. He liked the solitude and the quiet of the night when the only sound was the chirping of crickets.
Sometimes, he propped up his head with his hands on his pillow and watched his wife and baby sleep.
Wendy was grateful her husband had made it home safely. But in the months after the governor's ceremony, she began to notice the ways he'd changed.
He'd always had a short temper, she thought. But now his anger was amplified. He used to love
cutting up with people. But he began keeping to himself. He didn't even go to the girls' softball games or to church anymore.
She missed the man who laughed at the dinner table and was the center of attention at family gatherings. Crowds, he said, made him nervous.
In June 2006, after his brigade came home, Parham was honored again with eight other Walton County soldiers, most of them law enforcement officers. The ceremony took place in Monroe, the hometown for his Guard unit.
He told me that he dreamed of climbing back into a sheriff's patrol car like his buddies. But his knee was a problem. Besides, he no longer trusted himself with a gun.
He was done playing God.
"I didn't want to be responsible for whether someone lives or dies," he said. "Iraq was too much of that."
He also knew he could not be fair to everyone. He left Iraq with an admitted prejudice against Muslims. In them, he saw his friends' killers.
"You had to hate them all to do your job effectively," he said. "You became bitter to what you thought was your enemy."
Parham self-medicated with alcohol. He went on drinking binges and picked fights in bars. His mother, Vikki, didn't know how to help her only son.
"His body came back but his mind was still over there," she told me one afternoon. She picked up a baby picture of Shane and gazed at it.
"You look at his eyes now, and it's like he is looking right through you."
Iraq played like reruns of a horror movie in his head. He told his father: "Daddy, God is going to punish me one day."
His body came back but his mind was still over there. You look at his eyes now, and it's like he is looking right through you.
--Vikki Parham, Shane's mother
Mike worried for his son. "Don't turn into an alcoholic. Don't be like your daddy," he said about his own return from the war in Vietnam.
Parham knew his father had taken a bullet, but Mike had never talked much about what he saw there. Mike's mother, Bonnie Faye, had comforted him, as well as her husband, who served in World War II, when nightmares followed them home. The Army had told her husband, her son -- and now her grandson -- to kill. And she believed the consequences were evident.
When Parham was a little boy, he had asked his grandpa: "How many Germans did you kill?"
"I hope I didn't kill any," he replied.
Parham wrestled with the thought that he would not be able to give the same answer to his daughters. A battle in Al Salam, a village on the outskirts of Baghdad, haunted him. He believed Iraqi civilians were among the casualties.
Some days, he escaped to the north Georgia mountains, where he liked to drive along the banks of the Tallulah River. But part of him always remained along the Euphrates, hiding in papyrus and palm groves, waiting for a kill.
Diagnoses, and denial
Shortly after Parham returned from Iraq, doctors at the Atlanta Veterans Affairs hospital diagnosed him with post-traumatic stress disorder. About 20 percent of all the men and women who served in Iraq and Afghanistan have PTSD, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs.
The symptoms commonly include sleep disturbance, nightmares, anxiety, irritability, anger and depression.
Parham could check all of the above. Several doctors confirmed that Parham's PTSD was severe.
He also suffered a traumatic brain injury in a rocket explosion near his tent at Camp Striker. He remembered bleeding from his ears and going deaf for three days. Doctors later told Vikki about her son's frontal lobe injury. Think of his brain as a coffee cup that's been shaken vigorously. Some of the coffee spilled out; the rest settled back not quite the way it was before.
Blasts are the leading cause of death and injury among U.S. soldiers in Iraq. The intense pressure in a blast zone can rattle the brain, as delicate and mushy as Jell-O, and result in concussions that range from severe to so mild that they are frequently undiagnosed in initial examinations.
In documents submitted to a Georgia court, the VA's Dr. Stephen Byrd said Parham suffered from "severe PTSD and depression coupled with neurologic impairment due to brain injury that renders him, if not treated, at high risk of both suicide and loss of control of anger."
The VA considered him 100 percent disabled, according to his medical records. He needed antidepressants, mood relaxers and sleeping pills to get through the day.
He didn't talk much about his war experiences. Who would want to hear about how it felt to smell the charred flesh of your friends, or to pull the trigger with impunity?
I can't find beauty anywhere. The power of this place has a profound effect on my emotions.
--In a letter Parham wrote from Camp Striker, Baghdad
He did tell Wendy and his parents that he believed he had killed a woman and her children in a firefight outside Baghdad.
"He said he took somebody's wife and children from them," Wendy said. "It took over him."
Parham felt like an infectious disease; he kept to himself so as not to taint others. Too ashamed of his problems to keep up regular counseling sessions at the VA, he did what a lot of soldiers do. He withdrew even more.
At first, Wendy told herself time would heal her husband. Eventually, she tried to tell him that he needed to help himself. He said she was nagging.
So many military marriages disintegrate after a soldier returns. Parham was determined not to become one of those statistics. He knew that sometimes he scared his wife, but he thought he could keep it together enough to hold on to what mattered most -- his family. They were his sanctuary.
Anger and ghosts
Despite his demons, he began a new life on his farm.
In Iraq, he'd learned about Islamic customs and practices and, though he despised Muslims, he decided he could make a lucrative business by raising goats and sheep and selling them to halal meat suppliers.
Almost a year after his return home, Parham took me to a halal meat operation off Interstate 20, where livestock were slaughtered in ways prescribed by Islam. He seemed proud of his business strategy. At least one good thing could come out of his time in Iraq, he thought.
He had also met Mobin Shah, a Muslim man from Fiji who helped him understand that Islam was not what he had seen in insurgents.
Parham allowed Shah, whom he affectionately called Mo, and 60 of his Muslim friends to slaughter goats on his farm for the holy month of Ramadan.
But when the Muslim owner of the halal meat supply company failed to pay Parham a $2,000 bill, the old rage took over. It drove him to get in his truck, hurtle down the highway and shoot seven of the man's sheep.
When he told me what he had done, I thought for the first time that he needed help. His troubles began to surface more and more.
One night, he was eating dinner at Ryan's Steakhouse in Athens when a stranger came up to his table and introduced himself. Jeff Brunson, the man said.
Brunson's son Gus was one of the eight Alpha Company men who died in Iraq. The elder Brunson recognized Parham from a photograph. He asked if he'd known his son.
"Yes, sir," Parham answered. "He was a good man."
Jeff Brunson wanted Parham to tell him what the U.S. military had not.
"Did Gus suffer?"
"No," Parham assured him.
The father's face, his mannerisms, the way he talked -- everything reminded Parham of his friend. It all started coming back. His mind jumped from here to there, and back again.
He smelled that unmistakable odor of burning flesh. He saw all the images he had tried so hard to forget. He felt guilty. Why had Gus died while he survived? Gus had children, too. Why do they have to go through life without their daddy?
Later that night, Parham got into a fight at a bar over something as mundane as what seat he could occupy. He had always been one to pick fights over the smallest things. Now, that came even easier.
At home at 3 a.m., Parham called his friend Russ Mayfield, a police officer in a nearby town. Mayfield rushed over to find Parham sitting in his truck in the dirt driveway that leads up to his house, according to a police report from that night.
He was writing something on a piece of paper. He had a Smith & Wesson 5906 handgun.
By the time Parham stepped out of the truck, other officers had arrived on the scene.
"Shoot me," he said to his friend, Sgt. Kirk McLeroy. "Please, someone, shoot me."
The police report said Parham walked toward McLeroy.
"I'm tired of living with it," he said.
Mayfield managed to grab Parham's gun. But Parham told him he would try it again. Next time, he said, maybe he would do it in Atlanta and make the SWAT team kill him.
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Parham saw and did things in Iraq that troubled him. At home, he could not forget.
I know there's an 18-year-old in Iraq right now who is ... going to come home like me.
-- Shane Parham
A few days later, Parham called me from Peachford Hospital in Atlanta, a mental health facility that treats a range of addictions and psychiatric disorders. I drove up to see him, but the hospital only allowed family members to visit.
That day, I reread a letter he had sent me from Camp Striker the year before. It was on lined writing paper, every letter penned with the precision of a computer font.
"I can't find beauty anywhere," he wrote. "The power of this place has a profound effect on my emotions."
There was talk then of President George W. Bush asking for a surge in troops in Iraq. Parham's words made me ponder how many more men and women would go to war. How would it affect them?
"Remember the State of the State address where I was the guest of honor?" he said when he called me from the hospital. "Well, they didn't do very much for me.
"I know there's an 18-year-old in Iraq right now who is seeing things and is going to come home like me."
In the midst of his own personal hell, Parham was sounding an alarm for others -- for soldiers yet to come home.
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he war hero's reputation fell hard around parts of Georgia.
Disorderly conduct. Obstruction of an officer. DUI. Since his return from Iraq, the former sheriff's deputy had found himself time and again on the other side of the law.
He was accused of taking a 12-pack of beer out of a convenience store on a Sunday, when alcohol sales are prohibited in Georgia, and almost ran over the store clerk with his truck. Twice, he tried to kill himself.
A year ago, an unexpected message popped up on my Facebook page. It was Spc. Shane Parham's sister, Mandi. Her brother was in jail.
He was incarcerated in neighboring Newton County, so he would not have to deal with former colleagues in the Walton County Sheriff's Office and jail.
They were tired of dealing with him.
Some whispered that his Iraq knee injury occurred during a volleyball game at Camp Striker, not a vehicle rollover. They suggested Parham was an angry man even before Iraq and was using battle scars as a crutch to get away with belligerent behavior.
Some of his fellow soldiers in Alpha company said Parham was making up his Iraq stories in a cry for attention.
Capt. Ty Vance of the sheriff's office said Parham developed an image as a whiner who was leading life with an "I deserve better" attitude. I asked him if he felt sorry for his former colleague.
"Not anymore," Vance said. "Not after the way he's handled things."
Walton County Sheriff Joe Chapman felt his former employee could be a danger to society. He did not question Parham's psychiatric assessment -- post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury -- but said he had been given breaks by his friends in law enforcement. If he had not been a sheriff's deputy, if he had not served in Iraq, Parham would have already been locked up in the state penitentiary. Of that, Chapman was certain.
"There is a point where enough is enough," he said.
I asked if he had reached that point.
"I don't know."
When the latest round of trouble began, prosecutors said they were no longer taking any chances. They believed he was a deadly threat to himself and others.
I had not seen Parham in three years when I visited him in jail last May. I hardly recognized him. He had the same sadness on his face as the day I met him in Baghdad. Only, now he appeared more helpless, like a lost child.
"All my life, I've served - my community, my nation, God. Now, look at me," he said, hanging his head low.
He found his legal troubles humiliating. He was used to arresting people, not being arrested. It was tough to be on the other side, to be handcuffed and shackled and brought to face a judge.
But every time he thought he could clean up his act and get back on track, something happened. He said he couldn't stop his anger from taking control.
He had grown thin, the muscles on his arms deflated. Deep scars marred his face, the kind you might expect a soldier to suffer on the battlefield. But these came from his fights at home.
All my life, I've served -- my community, my nation, God. Now, look at me.
--Shane Parham, in jail in Newton County, Georgia
I thought of what Parham had told me years ago: "Dying is easy. Living's the hard part." He seemed an embodiment of those words now.
If you could see inside his head, you'd know he had suffered physical injury to the brain. But you'd also see Iraq's ghosts clouding every thought.
He had lost eight friends and believed he had killed innocent people. He couldn't stop thinking about it.
The one thing that had kept him going was his family, but now his marriage was disintegrating as well.
Growing distant
He and Wendy had had a fourth child, another daughter who they named Jaz. But Wendy felt her husband was detached, shirking his responsibilities.
She spent hours under the sun helping him tend his livestock. But when they returned to the house, she said, he slunk into a recliner and watched television. Sometimes, he even disappeared for days in the woods while she drowned in homework, softball games, baths, dinner.
"He never even asked me how my day was," she said.
They stuck it out, thinking time would fade Parham's wounds. But Wendy ached for the man she had married, and grew weary of his battles. She felt lonely, abandoned.
"Shane made me feel like nothing," she said. "He was no longer a part of me or my kids."
Everything spiraled out of control on Easter of last year.
They had gathered at the home of Parham's parents for lunch. After the meal, Parham returned
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The war at home
to his house and, according to a police report, discovered messages on his computer suggesting Wendy was seeing other men.
Enraged by his discovery, Parham drove his truck back to his parents' house. He had a gun in his hand.
Wendy's sister, Meredith Owens, who was at the Parhams' that day, called the police to report a family fight.
The police report stated that Parham said his father took his pistol away from him. Parham said he would never threaten his wife with a weapon.
Wendy said, however, that he pulled the gun on her.
"Wendy is dead," Parham said, according to the statement Owens gave to police.
Shane made me feel like nothing. He was no longer a part of me or my kids.
--Wendy Parham
Wendy told me it was true that she had been involved with a man she met many years ago. She was resigned to keeping her marriage together for the sake of her children but had looked for love elsewhere.
But on that day, she said, she realized the marriage was over. Her husband had always had guns in his possession, but he had never threatened her with one.
"He took something from me that day," she told me. "He took my heart from me."
Police did not arrest Parham, but Wendy left the house with their four girls.
Parham drank himself numb and mixed alcohol with his medications. A week after Easter, he went missing from home. Frantic, his mother called the sheriff's department. She said he was despondent about not being able to see his daughters except on weekends. She believed he had taken a lot of pills.
Parham eventually spoke with his mother and drove back home, according to the police report. He had slashed his chest with a knife. His father helped wrap him in towels, and he was rushed by ambulance to a hospital.
He made a scene there, demanding he be allowed to leave the room to smoke. He pulled out his intravenous needle and was bleeding all over the room.
He asked to speak with his friend Lt. Charlie Dalton -- the two men had grown up together. But there was "no reasoning with Parham," he wrote in his report.
Parham asked how many officers it would take to fight him.
"I guess the three of us," Dalton said of himself and two deputies who were there.
"Let's get it on, then," Parham said, according to Dalton's report.
Parham was walking toward the officers when a deputy subdued him with a taser gun.
After several days in the hospital, Parham was allowed to return home. Then, while at a livestock auction, he said, he got a phone call from someone who said Wendy was involved with a family friend.
"If I catch you with my wife, everybody dies. You understand?" That was the message Parham left on the man's phone.
When the man informed police, Parham was arrested for "terroristic threats and acts." It was his second felony charge - the other had been for lunging at an officer after a parking lot altercation two years before.
The man he'd threatened wrote a letter to the presiding judge denying he was involved with Wendy and saying he did not want to press charges. He said he did not think "a man who served as a public safety officer himself or risked his own life to serve our country should be sitting in jail for trying to find out if his wife was out with another man."
The district attorney argued that if freed, Parham was likely to commit serious crimes. The court agreed, and the judge denied him bond until a mental evaluation could be completed.
On day 31 of his incarceration, a day after his 35th birthday, Parham felt he could no longer bear his plight.
He waited until his midday meal had been served. He knew it would be hours before anyone came to check on him again.
He took a sheet from his bed and hung himself.
He doesn't remember what happened, only that he regained consciousness in an ambulance. Prison officials later told him they found him two minutes away from a coffin.
The man he was
Held alone in a cell under suicide watch, Parham waited for a court hearing to determine whether he would remain behind bars or be admitted to a hospital for psychiatric treatment. A state medical examiner had found him incompetent to stand trial.
He was allowed only a Bible and a plastic pen in his cell. He slept on a thin mattress on the floor, without a pillow.
Parham's lawyers argued that their client had yet to be convicted of any crime. They said he was not mentally equipped to function in society; that he deserved another chance, starting with the intensive treatment at the veterans hospital that he should have sought earlier.
"The defendant is an Iraqi war veteran who suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, traumatic brain injury and various other physical injuries as a result of his service to the country," they said in court documents. "He is completely disabled as a result of his injuries."
The defendant is an Iraqi war veteran who suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, traumatic brain injury and various other physical injuries as a result of his service to the country. He is completely disabled as a result of his injuries.
--Defense attorney Lori Duff, in court documents
Acknowledge his service to country by giving him the service he needs, lawyer Lori Duff urged the judge.
"In jail, he's isolated," she said. "I can't imagine anything more stressful than that."
Parham broke down in court that day. He later told me he wanted his story to be known to help other veterans who were struggling like him.
About 20 percent of service members who've returned from Iraq and Afghanistan test positive for PTSD, studies show. They display the same symptoms as Parham and get into the same kind of trouble involving alcohol, drug abuse and domestic violence. Many are at risk for suicide; some have gone on to commit serious crimes, including murder.
The toll combat has taken on America's military has even led to the creation of "veterans' courts," where service to country and war-related illnesses can be taken into account, though those courts usually deal with nonviolent offenders.
"We are able to make connections that the judicial system has not," said Carrie Bailey, program manager of the Veteran Trauma Court in Colorado.
In Georgia, there are no such courts yet.
The Superior Court judge in Parham's case eventually agreed to release him to a lockdown residency program at the Veterans Affairs medical center in Augusta. I spoke to him by phone over the July 4 weekend after he had already started counseling sessions. He hated it at first and counted time.
"It's been 54 days since I saw my kids," he said.
He was then moved to a 91-day residential treatment program for PTSD in mid-August. Psychologist Miriam Hancock would later report to the court that she met with Parham for 43 sessions, including two attended by his two eldest daughters, Bailey and Cammi.
Hospital staff told me Parham learned to cope with his anger, his paranoia. He said he discovered it wasn't always best to suck it up and go on, as the Army had taught him. He could think in healthier ways and rebuild himself.
When I visited him in Augusta, it was the most hopeful I had ever seen him. He had gained weight; he could even smile again. He was determined to make a new go at life.
He made it into the program because of his troubles, but he considered it a blessing. It was something he should have done a long time ago, he said.
What he liked most was that he was able to talk to other veterans who had served in Iraq, Afghanistan, and even Vietnam. They understood him. He had finally found an outlet for his secrets.
Parham became an inspiration to Dave Werden, another Iraq war veteran enrolled in the VA program. Werden found Parham's frankness about his combat experiences refreshing. He looked upon Parham as a barometer. "If he fails," Werden said. "That means I can fail, too."
In documents submitted to the court, Hancock described Parham as a model student who developed good insight into the nature of his condition and how best to cope with it. She said he consistently accepted responsibility for his past actions.
More incarceration would only mean he would regress, she said. What Parham needed now was family support and routine follow-up visits at the VA for management of his PTSD.
"It is my clinical opinion," Hancock wrote, "that Mr. Parham is not at risk for violence toward himself or others."
In December 2010, the court allowed him to return home with a GPS locator and alcohol-monitoring cuffs around his ankles. If he went near the man he had threatened or drank too many beers, he would go back to jail. He had to pay the monthly $532 for the monitors himself -- expensive for a guy making it on military disability pay. But he was glad, he said, to be able to buy his freedom.
Before Christmas, he persuaded Wendy to move back in with him; to give him another chance. He took her and their daughters out to eat at the Tokyo restaurant in Monroe - the girls enjoyed the tabletop hibachi grills.
He wanted to show Wendy that he could still be involved, as a father and a husband. Any day now, he thought, the monitors would come off his legs and he could settle all his legal problems.
But the optimism quickly faded.
Wendy told him she just didn't love him anymore, that he had changed too much. In her mind, she had moved back in an effort to be civil at Christmas - for the sake of their daughters.
She felt guilty about leaving a man who was so vulnerable -- she knew that family was all he had left.
On a crisp, sun-drenched afternoon two months ago, he sat in his living room with all the blinds drawn, the air saturated with the smoke of Marlboro Lights. Dolls, stuffed animals, dresses lay strewn about everywhere. I could tell that just a short while ago, he had found joy, however fleeting.
Six Christmas stockings still hung from the mantel.
In jail, he's isolated. I can't imagine anything more stressful than that.
--Attorney Lori Duff, urging that Parham receive intensive treatment at a VA hospital
"Listen," he said. There was nothing but the silence he had craved after coming home from Iraq. "I can't stand that."
A profound sadness hung heavy like the smoke in the room.
A few weeks after that visit, Parham was back in jail, again under suicide watch. Wendy had accused him of hitting her in the face. He was charged again, this time with battery.
I went back to the visitation booth, looking at a broken man behind the thick slab of glass.
He told me he was just trying to move Wendy's finger away from his face. He would never hurt her, he said.
But she, like others, no longer believes that. She told me she lived in fear of him. What she felt for him now was only the kind of fondness a woman feels for the father of her children.
She paused, almost incredulous at her words. She never thought she would ever say she didn't love him anymore.
"He just didn't come back the same Shane."
On one of my recent visits, Parham took out a small piece of paper on which he'd drawn a calendar so he could keep track of time in jail. He'd already been there more than a month.
"What day is it today?"
I told him it was May 4, that Osama bin Laden had been killed just days before in a special operation by Navy Seals in Pakistan. "Really?" he said. "That's awesome."
We talked about Iraq, as we always do when we see each other. I showed him a photo on my iPhone of the tent I lived in for four months at Camp Striker. Number 535.
He smiled and remembered the first time he had come to talk to me there. All of it seemed surreal sometimes, he said.
It was hard to look at him - to see the shadow of the soldier he once was. He would turn 36 in a few days, but he seemed much older.
In just two months, the war in Iraq is scheduled to officially end, with the beginning of withdrawal of the remaining 47,000 U.S. troops in July. Parham may be out of jail by then, but I am fairly sure he will still be fighting his personal war.
He admits he's made many mistakes. And he understands that people think he changed after Iraq.
But he told me doesn't know how to be the old Shane anymore. He can't remember what that man was like.
including our nation of course stuck in this mess
