Just one month before Minnesota Navy medic David A. Cedergren, 25, was scheduled to come home from his tour in Iraq in 2004, he was found unconscious in an outdoor shower. He was pronounced dead shortly after and his family was told he died of natural causes. More >>

More than 1,000 members of the Minnesota Army National Guard are scheduled to deploy in February, the military announced today.

The 1,037 soldiers leaving are from the 34th Red Bull Infantry Division. The soldiers are headquartered in Rosemount, Faribault, Stillwater and Inver Grove Heights. The Guardsmen will be responsible for military operations involving 16,000-person multinational task force operating in the southern third of the country, covering about eight of Iraq's 18 provinces.

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A father deployed in Iraq gave his daughter the surprise of a lifetime. On Thursday afternoon, 11-year-old Siri Jordan's grandma told a little white lie, telling her they were going to pick up one of her college friends. Turns out Jordan's dad, Dan Jordan made a surprise visit home after four months deployed in Iraq.

The video of the surprise is making the rounds on national TV and blogs across the country. Check it out after the jump.

4 months
Siri Jordan

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The New York Times published a story about local veteran Tony Klecker this month as part of its series on PTSD, alcoholism, and the domestic causalities of war. Lizette Alvarez writes:

Most nights when Anthony Klecker, a former marine, finally slept, he found himself back on the battlefields of Iraq. He would awake in a panic, and struggle futilely to return to sleep.

Days were scarcely better. Car alarms shattered his nerves. Flashbacks came unexpectedly, at the whiff of certain cleaning chemicals. Bar fights seemed unavoidable; he nearly attacked a man for not washing his hands in the bathroom.

Desperate for sleep and relief, Mr. Klecker, 30, drank heavily. One morning, his parents found him in the driveway slumped over the wheel of his car, the door wide open, wipers scraping back and forth. Another time, they found him curled in a fetal position in his closet.

Yet only after his drunken driving caused the death of a 16-year-old cheerleader did Mr. Klecker acknowledge the depth of his problem: His eight months at war had profoundly damaged his psyche.

"I was trying to be the tough marine I was trained to be — not to talk about problems, not to cry," said Mr. Klecker, who has since been diagnosed with severe post-traumatic stress disorder. "I imprisoned myself in my own mind."

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Amid several new reports pointing to the heightened problem of soldier suicides and increased levels of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in troops returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan, an army official said Wednesday that suicides increased 13 percent from 2006 to 2007.

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I've spent a lot of time in Iraq. Most of it before the invasion, some of it after. I was last there on assignment for a small newspaper out of Kansas City just two weeks after Baghdad fell. I flew into Amman, Jordan and stopped in at a hotel that had become a sort of staging ground for journalists heading into Iraq. I dropped by a lobby bookstore--which, in 2003, was filled with a shockingly useful collection of scholarly books on the Middle East. I asked the kind middle-aged woman who staffed the counter which of these books were selling best. They weren't selling, came the reply. The overnight war reporters, it seemed, were in too much of a hurry to be curious. And, with clear and honorable exceptions, it showed in their reporting.

I stopped reading much of the "on-the-ground" reporting from Iraq two years ago (again, with some exceptions) at about the time that much of the reporting reporting became painfully redundant--narrowed as it was to the reporter reporting on the trials of reportage.

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The L.A. Times reported on a RAND study released this month discussing the psychological impact of guerrilla warfare on soldiers and the failure of the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs to keep pace in the wake of the wars on terror. The study shows one in five veterans suffer from psychological problems and that many are not getting adequate care. More >>

Hundreds of veterans will travel to Washington, D.C. this weekend to speak out against the U.S. occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan in an effort to expose what Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) and other peace groups are calling “the human consequences” of failed U.S. military strategy and war policy in the Middle East.

“We broke it, we bought it,” says former army specialist Steve Mortillo in a graphic IVAW video released this week. “But, we’re buying it with American lives. Just what do you think the purchase price is for that damage?"

"There is no forgiveness in my book for someone who sits here in America and orders Americans into battle to die and makes money off of it and profits hand over fist and lies through their teeth to keep it going. I mean at some point it becomes enough.”

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A helmeted Abbas Mehdi with his South African security guards in Baghdad (Photo courtesy Abbas Mehdi)

As St. Cloud State sociology professor Abbas Mehdi moved into his Green Zone office last year--the beginning of his six months of service in a cabinet-level position in the Iraqi Government, General David Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker were preparing for testimony before congress and a leaked U.S. Embassy report was bouncing around the internet, first obtained and published by The Nation.

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The Minnesota National Guard was a key component of the "surge" in Iraq. 2,600 of them recently wrapped up a 22-month tour. On paper, 1,161 of them were serving a 729 day tour, extended for the surge to 22 months. A 730-day tour would have triggered the GI Bill and earned the soldiers money for school back home. But the Pentagon's not paying. Deployments were written for 729 days, and that's that. Now some of the soldiers are speaking out.

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