Distress signals.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Soldiers face stress after Iraqi war

Terri Jones lost her son Jason Cooper just over a year ago. He was an Army Reservist in the Iraq War. On July 14, 2005, four months after returning home to Iowa, he hanged himself. He was twenty-three.

Jones says Jason wasn't the same when he got back from Iraq.

"He was a really upbeat, happy, funny kid" before he left, she says. "You could tell his smile was gone when he came home."

He also had a hard time paying attention, and the reaction of some of his friends caught him by surprise.

"He was excited to see them," she says, "and he thought they would be, 'Hey, Coop, good to see you.' But instead, the first thing that would come out was, 'Jas, you shoot anybody?' He was so taken aback he didn't know how to answer. He'd just say, 'I don't want to talk about it.'"

Jason was having a lot of nightmares and flashbacks, his mother says. "His girlfriend said he'd wake up in night sweats, and she had to take him out for a walk at three in the morning."

Jones says her son "knew he needed help, but he didn't want to go to the VA." She says he'd gone there the month before, after he hurt his wrist in a motorcycle fall. "When he went to the VA, they didn't have room to treat him that day," she says.

Jones says the military isn't doing enough for soldiers suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. "They are not being taken care of," she says.

The VA denies this.

"We're out there in their faces.... We're all there for them," Victor Tare, a VA outreach specialist in Iowa, told the Des Moines Register, which wrote a long story on Jones. "At no time in the history of America has more attention been paid to veterans."

Now a member of Gold Star Families for Peace, Jones says she's "forming a subchapter support group to help with military families who've had a suicide" after their loved one returned home.

"So far we know of about seventy" such tragedies, she says.

Recently, Jones wrote a letter to Jason. "Jas, Mother's Day came and went, and it was so hard not to hear from you," she wrote. "I still have petals from the pink roses you sent while still in training or all the drawings you loved to make. I carried your military boots in a Mother's Day march in Washington, D.C., to bring our troops home now.... I realized then that I did spend time with you on Mother's Day and even though it wasn't in a way that I would prefer, you will never be gone from me.... I hope you are in a sea of flowers now, honey. No worries, no pain, just happy and enjoying the...