A SAD STORY

I feel so bad for this guy.

Now Roper, 27 and a married father of two, is on the run. This month, days before he was to be released from the Army, he left his blue stucco rowhouse on the base, possibly headed to Texas, where his mother lives, or to Canada, where he was born. No one is sure where he went or why. But he has communicated by e-mail to The Sun in rambling, unpunctuated and uncapitalized messages about his pain.

"im feeling depressed i have nightmares a lot i get this feelings a lot and i never [had] them before the war," he wrote last week. "a lot has changed in my life [and] im a very different man."

"my nightmares," he wrote in a second e-mail, "are about what I did in the war." In yet another, referring to people he killed, he added: "yes i do feel guilty why i dont know."

Acknowledging the kill-or-be-killed mentality of soldiers in war, he wrote, "i know it [was] my friends or my self or them but i still feel guilty."

The Army has sent 478 soldiers home from the Iraq region for psychiatric reasons, said Medical Command spokesman Jaime Cavazos. And the Army is investigating the deaths of at least 11 soldiers as possible suicides, said Maj. Steve Stover, an Army spokesman.

It's a well written piece, even if its not pleasant. Read it all.