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May 25, 2009

War duty honored

Army psychologist honors war dead

By Dan Linehan

MANKATO — As an Army psychologist in Baghdad, Peter Linnerooth helped the living cope with the mental and emotional scars of war.

But as he spoke in front of a Vietnam Memorial before a crowd of perhaps 200 people Monday, the Minnesota State University psychology professor eulogized the dead.

Because of his background, Linnerooth specifically remembered the 4,962 men and women who died in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“I cannot describe in words what they and their families have sacrificed,” he said. “I cannot tell you exactly what we have lost. We are their larger family, their nation. But I can say it is a great loss, deeply felt.”

He also noted those who died gave everything, “even for cultures that felt alien to them” and for people they did not know.

For a year starting in August 2006, Linnerooth was a psychologist with the 2nd Brigade Combat Team (also called “Dagger”), 1st Infantry Division. With the help of Staff Sgt. Brock McNabb and Spc. Travis Landchild, he conducted more than 4,000 patient visits.

Several times a week, the trauma unit in Camp Liberty would receive soldiers who had lost a limb, or more. One hundred and twelve soldiers in the camp died.

And for each death, Linnerooth would see more patients who asked for help dealing with it.

He learned that remembering fallen soldiers not only honors the dead, “but also brings peace to the soldier who survived and helps return tranquility to their families.”

Linnerooth was attached to a brigade of about 7,000 soldiers but ended up working with more than five times that number at Camp Liberty.

After his brief speech at the memorial, he said the military isn’t providing enough psychologists, both in Iraq and in the federal Department of Veterans Affairs.

There were only four mental health therapists serving a camp of 40,000 soldiers, he said, which would be far fewer than a regular city of that size would support. He suggested calls to representatives and senators might be one way to fix that problem.

But regular people can also honor veterans by being friendly with them.

Linnerooth still fondly remembers the state bureaucrat who quickly and conscientiously helped him sign up for unemployment benefits when he returned from the war jobless but with a family to feed.

A simple “What can I do for you?” goes a long way, he said.

“That would be beautiful.”

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