Gloria S.'s Profile

Sgt. Jason Knierim was diagnosed with delayed post-traumatic stress disorder and chronic depression in July 2007 and was given an antidepressant but had no therapy between August 2007 and Nov. 30, when he was ordered to a third tour in Iraq.

At the soldier-readiness processing site, his mental illness was flagged, but a major cleared him for combat duty anyway. "I went into her office, she said, 'You're good to go.' She stamped the paperwork," he said.

Since his first deployment, Knierim had been haunted by memories of killing a 7-year-old boy who pointed a toy gun at him. When he arrived in Kuwait to prepare for his third tour of duty, he had a mental breakdown. His superiors took his gun away and put him on a 24-hour suicide watch.

Even after that, "the chain of command wanted to send me to Iraq to get my treatment there. They thought I could get enough treatment in theater," he said. "They told me to get ready to go — they were getting ready to give my weapon back to me."

He said soldiers such as him become a burden to other soldiers.

"We're unstable," he said. "We can't be relied upon to do our job. We're taking up someone else's time, watching us, to make sure we're OK. Someone has to do that when they could be doing something else."

Recently, the Army flew Sgt. 1st Class Jason Dene, the nephew of actress Mia Farrow, from Iraq to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware for surgery.

"He was released from the hospital into the loving arms of the government, who sent him directly back to Iraq," his uncle Patrick Farrow wrote in a letter to the Rutland (Vt.) Herald. "He was put on active duty while he was still on a liquid diet, unable to eat solid food because of a throat hemorrhage due to a botched surgery at a military hospital."

Dene, 37, of Castleton, Vt., died of a drug overdose in his bunk in Iraq on May 25. (Clarification appended, below)

Five years into the Iraq war, the Army has established Warrior Transition Units to help manage a growing number of soldiers with physical and mental-health problems.

But for every soldier assigned to a WTU brigade, another must be sent to Iraq in his or her place.

A Denver Post examination of deployment records, internal e-mails and medical files provided by soldiers from one Army brigade — Fort Carson's 3rd Brigade Combat Team of the 4th Infantry Division — shows that more than 130 soldiers were sent to Iraq last fall despite being classified with medical limitations just before deployment.

In many cases, those limitations went well beyond cavities or missing eyeglasses.

"We'll have some units, entire units, that have served four tours over there," said Tom Berger, senior analyst for veterans' benefits and mental-health issues for Vietnam Veterans of America. "Those are the kinds of things that at least scare me, and they should be scaring mental-health professionals and the (Department of Veterans Affairs) and the (Department of Defense). And it should be scaring the American public because we don't know what's going to happen. We really don't know the impacts of multiple deployments.

"We do know, at least from the research that has been done, the more a person is exposed to those traumatic events and for longer periods of time, there are real problems. But we don't really know. . . .

"This is the first time we've really had to deal with that."

In Vietnam, soldiers served 12-month tours and Marines served 13-month tours. Those who wanted to go back for a second tour signed up. Those who didn't left. When the Army needed soldiers, it drafted more. From 1965 to 1973, 3.4 million Americans were sent to war in Southeast Asia, 2.6 million within Vietnam.

In the current conflicts, the Army, which is doing most of the fighting, has relied on a relatively small core of soldiers.

Through May, about 206,000 soldiers, plus about 63,000 in the Army National Guard and Reserve, had gone to Iraq or Afghanistan at least twice, Army data show.