Haunted by Iraq War Demons

On June 28, police in Pinehurst, N.C., who responded to Dwyer’s home, said the 31-year-old collapsed and died after abusing a computer cleaner aerosol. Dwyer had moved to North Carolina after living in Texas.

The March 2003 image became one of the most iconic of the U.S. invasion of Iraq: that of a bespectacled American soldier carrying an Iraqi child to safety. The photograph of army Private Joseph Dwyer was used by news outlets around the world.

After being lionized by many as the human face of the U.S. effort to rebuild a troubled Iraq, Dwyer brought the battlefield home with him, often grappling violently with delusions that he was being hunted by Iraqi killers.

Dwyer, who joined the army two days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and who was assigned to a unit of the 3rd Infantry Division that one officer called “the tip of the tip of the spear” in the first days of the U.S. invasion, had since then battled depression, sleeplessness and other anxieties that military doctors eventually attributed to post-traumatic stress disorder.

The war that made him a hero at 26 haunted him to the last moments of his life.

“He loved the picture, don’t get me wrong, but he just couldn’t get over the war,” his mother, Maureen Dwyer, said by telephone from her home in Sunset Beach, N.C. “He wasn’t Joseph any more. Joseph never came home.”

Dwyer’s parents said they tried to get help for their son, appealing to army and Veterans Affairs officials. Although he was treated off and on in VA facilities, he was never able to shake his anxieties.

An April report by the Rand Corp. said serious gaps in treatment exist for the one in five U.S. soldiers who exhibit symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder or depression following service in Iraq or Afghanistan. Half of those who experience the disorder sought help in the past year, the report said, and those who did often got “minimally adequate treatment.”

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