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This War

May 18th, 2008 at 10:00 am by Susie

(AP) Last month, Marine Staff Sgt. Travis N. “T-Bo” Twiggs went to the White House with a group of Iraq war veterans called the Wounded Warriors Regiment and met President George W. Bush.

Twiggs had been through four tours in Iraq, one in Afghanistan and months of therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder in which he said he was on up to 12 different medications.

“He said, `Sir, I’ve served over there many times, and I would serve for you any time,’ and he grabbed the president and gave him a big hug,” said Kellee Twiggs, his widow.

About two weeks later, Travis Twiggs went absent without leave from his job in Quantico, Virginia.

He and his brother drove to the Grand Canyon, where their car was found hanging in a tree in what appeared to be a failed attempt to drive into the chasm.

The brothers carjacked a vehicle at the park Monday. Two days later they were at a southwestern Arizona border checkpoint, and took off when they were asked to pull into a secondary inspection area, Border Patrol spokesman Michael Bernacke said.

Eighty miles (130 kilometers) later, the car was on the Tohono O’odham reservation, its tires wrecked by spike strips.

As tribal police and Border Patrol agents closed in, Twiggs, 36, apparently fatally shot his 38-year-old brother, Willard J. “Will” Twiggs, then killed himself.

Pinal County Sheriff’s spokesman Mike Minter said no motive has been established. But Kellee Twiggs said the decorated Marine would still be alive if the military had given him enough help.

“All this violent behavior, him killing his brother, that was not my husband. If the PTSD would have been handled in a correct manner, none of this would have happened,” she said in a telephone interview from Stafford, Virginia.

Posted in War Stories

4 Responses to “This War”

on 18 May 2008 at 3:06 pm1orson

That’s a tragedy.

If you want to learn a bit more on the nature and treatment of Iraq PTSD, check out the story in the current issue of the New Yorker. It’s online. I believe the title is “Virtual Iraq”.
on 18 May 2008 at 4:04 pm2Derik

Perhaps if we didn’t have to kill so many overseas, this violence at home could also have been averted.
on 18 May 2008 at 7:24 pm3Phydeaux

We’ll be counting the casualties of Bush’s war for a long, long time.
on 11 Jun 2008 at 3:58 am4Bill Babbitt

Does anyone know how I can reach Kellee? My brother Manny Babbitt was a Marine who serve in Vietnam. Manny had PTSD and killed a p-erson during a flashback in 1980, he was executed in California in 1999. Manny never got the help he needed after two tours of duty in Vietnam.

Please assist if you can………
Bill Babbitt

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This War

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