Stark
01-13-2010, 04:16 AM
Sgt. Jacob Blaylock flipped on the video camera he had set up in a trailer at the Tallil military base, southeast of Baghdad.
He lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, blew the smoke upward.
"Hey, it's Jackie," he said. "It's the 20th of April. We go home in six days. I lost two good friends on the 14th. I'm having a hard time dealing with it."
For almost a year, the soldiers of More.. the 1451st Transportation Company had been escorting trucks full of gasoline, building materials and other supplies along Iraq's dark, dangerous highways. There had been injuries, but no one had died.
Their luck evaporated less than two weeks before they were to return home, in the spring of 2007. A scout truck driving at the front of a convoy late at night hit a homemade bomb buried in the asphalt. Two soldiers, Sgt. Brandon Wallace and Sgt. Joshua Schmit, were killed.
The deaths stunned the unit, part of the North Carolina National Guard. The two men were popular and respected -- "big personalities," as one soldier put it. Sergeant Blaylock, who was close to both men, seemed especially shaken. Sometime earlier, feeling the strain of riding the gunner position in the exposed front truck, he had switched places with Sergeant Wallace, moving to a Humvee at the rear.
"It was supposed to be me," he would tell people later.
The losses followed the men and women of the 1451st home as they dispersed to North Carolina and Tennessee, New York and Oklahoma, reuniting with their families and returning to their jobs.
Sergeant Blaylock went back to Houston, where he tried to pick up the pieces of his life and shape them into a whole. But grief and guilt trailed him, combining with other stresses: financial troubles, disputes with his estranged wife over their young daughter, the absence of the tight group of friends who had helped him make it through 12 months of war.
On Dec. 9, 2007, Sergeant Blaylock, heavily intoxicated, lifted a 9-millimeter handgun to his head during an argument with his girlfriend and pulled the trigger. He was 26.
"I have failed myself," he wrote in a note found later in his car. "I have let those around me down."
Over the next year, three more soldiers from the 1451st -- Sgt. Jeffrey Wilson, First Sgt. Roger Parker and Specialist Skip Brinkley -- would take their own lives. The four suicides, in a unit of roughly 175 soldiers, make the company an extreme example of what experts see as an alarming trend in the years since the invasion of Iraq.
He lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, blew the smoke upward.
"Hey, it's Jackie," he said. "It's the 20th of April. We go home in six days. I lost two good friends on the 14th. I'm having a hard time dealing with it."
For almost a year, the soldiers of More.. the 1451st Transportation Company had been escorting trucks full of gasoline, building materials and other supplies along Iraq's dark, dangerous highways. There had been injuries, but no one had died.
Their luck evaporated less than two weeks before they were to return home, in the spring of 2007. A scout truck driving at the front of a convoy late at night hit a homemade bomb buried in the asphalt. Two soldiers, Sgt. Brandon Wallace and Sgt. Joshua Schmit, were killed.
The deaths stunned the unit, part of the North Carolina National Guard. The two men were popular and respected -- "big personalities," as one soldier put it. Sergeant Blaylock, who was close to both men, seemed especially shaken. Sometime earlier, feeling the strain of riding the gunner position in the exposed front truck, he had switched places with Sergeant Wallace, moving to a Humvee at the rear.
"It was supposed to be me," he would tell people later.
The losses followed the men and women of the 1451st home as they dispersed to North Carolina and Tennessee, New York and Oklahoma, reuniting with their families and returning to their jobs.
Sergeant Blaylock went back to Houston, where he tried to pick up the pieces of his life and shape them into a whole. But grief and guilt trailed him, combining with other stresses: financial troubles, disputes with his estranged wife over their young daughter, the absence of the tight group of friends who had helped him make it through 12 months of war.
On Dec. 9, 2007, Sergeant Blaylock, heavily intoxicated, lifted a 9-millimeter handgun to his head during an argument with his girlfriend and pulled the trigger. He was 26.
"I have failed myself," he wrote in a note found later in his car. "I have let those around me down."
Over the next year, three more soldiers from the 1451st -- Sgt. Jeffrey Wilson, First Sgt. Roger Parker and Specialist Skip Brinkley -- would take their own lives. The four suicides, in a unit of roughly 175 soldiers, make the company an extreme example of what experts see as an alarming trend in the years since the invasion of Iraq.