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James Curtis Coons |
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Friday, June 09 2006 @ 08:15 PM EDT
Contributed by: River97
Views: 696
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 This is a story that was never meant to be missed. It took the Department of Defence two years to recognise James as a fatality of Operation Iraqi Freedom. It took the Iraq Page another eleven months. Many sites dedicated to this cause do not list him among the fallen. When reading the following, please realise, when a soldier falls on the field of battle, they earn the right to live forever.
www.washingtonpost.com -- May 30, 2005 -- A U.S. soldier who committed suicide at Walter Reed Army Medical Center nearly two years ago has been added to the official Defense Department tally of Iraq war casualties.
The name of Army Master Sgt. James C. Coons, 35, was added last month to the more than 1,600 other "Fallen Warriors" of Operation Iraqi Freedom who are listed on a public Web site of the Defense Department. A military casualty board ruled in December that Coons's suicide in July 2003, which came after he received a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder and was evacuated from Kuwait, should be considered a casualty of war.
Coons was featured in a front-page story in The Washington Post last year. At the time, military officials said it was Defense Department policy not to count as war casualties soldiers who served in the war and died by suicide outside the combat zone.
As a commander of the 385th Signal Company, Coons led soldiers and set up a communications infrastructure for the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. He received a Bronze Star for his service. Several months later, he complained to doctors about hallucinations of a dead soldier's face. He took an overdose of sleeping pills in Kuwait and was taken to Walter Reed for psychiatric treatment.
Coons was not admitted to the hospital when he arrived in late June 2003. He stayed at Mologne House, a hotel for outpatients on the 113-acre campus. After he missed a doctor's appointment on July 1 and his family made several concerned calls, a hotel staff member found him on July 4, hanging in his room.
"He died because of this war," said his mother, Carol Coons of Katy, Tex. She and her husband, Richard Coons, and their son's widow, Robin Coons, have pushed for answers about his death and asked to have him counted among the war casualties.
"I think it's an open admission that there were mistakes made in how he was handled in coming home," she said. "I hope they have changed that. . . . We don't want this to ever happen again."
While Carol Coons and her family are satisfied that Coons has now been included, she said they are still seeking to change the date of his death, which is listed as July 4. An independent coroner who reviewed Coons's autopsy at the request of The Post said the level of decomposition suggested that Coons had been dead "at least 72 hours."
Carol Coons said the family has received some assistance from Rep. Michael T. McCaul (R-Tex.) in trying to have the date changed.
"For someone to say he died on the Fourth of July, it's an insult to his memory," Carol Coons said last year. "He loved his country." |
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I would like to say thank you for your service and sacrifice for our Country. And to your family, I wish to extend my deepest sympathy.
A grateful citizen