`Jeffrey Was Really Messed Up' [View All]

[Rose Siding]

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When she hugged him goodbye, her brave soldier son - the boy who had grown up respecting the uniform, in the sprawling shadow of Tinker Air Force Base - had crumpled in her arms.

"I don't want to go back," he sobbed. "I don't want to go."

She told him she loved him and that everything would be OK.

And then she did what she was supposed to do:

She left him there.

"I will never forget the look on his face when he looked at me. It eats all over me," says Kay, 57, who works at the deli counter of the local Wal-Mart. "Why didn't I turn the car around, bring him home, and say the hell with them, the hell with the Army?" Her breath catches in her throat. "I didn't know."

No one knew that Jeffrey, 25, would be flown back to Tinker less than two months into his second deployment - in a box. Shortly after noon on Feb. 8, 2005, he shot himself through the mouth with an M-16 rifle at an Army camp in Balad, Iraq, according to the military.

http://www.courant.com/news/specials/hc-mental1b.artmay14,0,4911039,print.story