Soft Spots

Marine Sergeant Clint Van Winkle flew to war on Valentine's Day 2003. His battalion was among the first wave of troops that crossed into Iraq, and his first combat experience was the battle of Nasiriyah, followed by patrols throughout the country, house to house searches, and operations in the dangerous Baghdad slums. But after two years of duty, certain images would not leave his memory - a fragmented mental movie of shooting a little girl, of scavenging parts from a destroyed, blood-spattered tank, of obliterating several Iraqi men hidden behind an ancient wall, of bodies lying on streets, and the feral dogs that fed on them, and of mistakenly stepping on a 'soft spot', the remains of a Marine killed in combat. After his return home, Van Winkle sought help at a Veterans Administration facility, and so began a maddening journey through an indifferent system that promises to care for veterans, but in fact abandons many of them.