Kevin DunneFrom USA Today August 3:
The bombs along the Baghdad road exploded one after the other, leaving one soldier unconscious and another screaming from his wounds. Staff Sgt. Kevin Dunne's squad was under attack. Rifle and machine gun fire pinned them down. Then shots from a sniper.
Dunne yelled orders, but he and his squad were at a disadvantage.
Dunne says he couldn't hear well enough to tell where the sniper fire was coming from. "I had no idea," he wrote in an e-mail to USA TODAY.
In the four months before the April 7 attack, the chief physician at Fort Hood, Texas, had warned that Dunne's hearing was so bad that he should be removed from combat duties. Others in the Army overruled him and sent Dunne back to Iraq for his third combat tour.
Now, a member of Dunne's squad — Sgt. Richard Vaughn, 22, of San Diego — lay dead from a sniper's bullet. "He was lying in the middle of the street motionless," Dunne wrote. "I blame myself a lot for not being able to identify the threat simply because of the way I heard the shots."
Hearing loss is one of the most common ailments that affects troops sent back to combat, according to the Pentagon and government researchers. One in four soldiers
serving in Iraq or Afghanistan have damaged hearing, the Army says. In addition, a recent study from the RAND Corp. reported one in five combat veterans suffer post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or depression. Back pain, leg injuries and other muscular-skeletal problems are the top ailments of troops in the war zone, says Ellen Embrey, deputy assistant secretary of Defense for force health protection and readiness.
Dunne, who in Iraq was part of the 4th Infantry Division at Fort Hood, is now back home.
Besides his hearing problems, he shows signs of PTSD and has severe back problems.
After more than five years of war marked by multiple deployments, many combat veterans are developing long-term health problems, raising the risk that ailing troops are being sent back into combat.
