Julie platner biography

By Chris Bragg

It was nearing the nightly 9 p.m. curfew in Baghdad when Josh Middleton saw the headlights approaching.

A lone truck came up the road where Middleton’s platoon stood waiting. Someone from the platoon waved a flashlight, instructing the driver to stop. The driver, mistaking the gesture for another vehicle’s headlights, continued.

The soldiers fired.

There were no weapons or bombs in the truck, but there were four unarmed men.

“One guy had his head sprayed open with bits of skull everywhere,” says Middleton, who served as a medic for the man Army platoon. “The other guy had a small hole in the middle of his head, like a third eye.”

Middleton pulled the driver, still alive, out of the truck. It was December, and the weather mild, but the man dripped with sweat, which mixed with blood from the wound near his intestines.

“He looked at me like I was going to finish him off,” says Middleton.

Instead, Middleton tried to apply bandages &#; until he heard a gurgling sound, and feces started to pour from the open wound.

It was Middleton’s first night on the streets of Baghdad. His unit stayed in the field for two more days, and “I had [crap] all over me the whole time.”

For Middleton, 22, nights like this live on.

Compared to other conflicts, the death toll for U.S. soldiers in Iraq has been low &#; just under in over three-and-a-half years.

But the war has affected many soldiers in other, more subtle ways. Besides the nearly 21, wounded, many of whom live with debilitating physical handicaps, thousands more carry with them invisible mental scars.

More than one-third of the soldiers returning from Iraq, including Middleton, seek treatment for mental health disorders sustained in combat, according to a comprehensive survey last year by the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research.

For many, going home doesn’t mean the war