underneath. it s very hard to separate the two. coming in, when you come around here, take a look at it. you get an idea of how devastated this village is. look at the yards here. look at that red sludge. sitting in there. just completely contaminating the whole area. when you come up here a little more, these are the police lines. right here, the police have set up lines so looters can t get in. they re patrolling them on policemen, patrolling the village, keeping out anyone that wants to come in and steal things. it s hard to imagine, thou, how anyone would want to come into this village to take anything away. it s all so contaminated. unbelievable. thank you, nic. you know, one family member going to war can be a lot to handle. but imagine if your spouse and four children after the call of
that it works on them. it works on their mentality, their mind-set and i believe each and every soldier that comes home from over there has some type or a little bit of them stay and that has to be the posttraumatic stress. we have begun letting the troops in iraq, the people in iraq deal with their own security. the president said he is going to start bringing members home of afghanistan. what s your feeling? my feeling on that is we need to bring all our troops home. we ve lost enough american soldiers and this war will continue long after we come home, so i mean, i believe, you know, we tried to help and it s just a war that we re not going to be able to fix.
the suicide raid rate, ptsd rates continue to rise. have the mental wounds of this war turned into the elephant in the room here? inge it was for a long time. it was exactly that. no one talked very much about it because in part it was a vague diagnosis. you don t have a blood test or a specific imaging test that can diagnose ptsd. and i m sure people didn t want to let on that it was happening. they didn t want to let on. but i think now it s inescapable when you look at the numbers and the impact this has happened. i think it s staggering to sort of think about numbers like how many people have been hospitalized as a result of mental illness as compared to physical wounds? take a look there. i think these numbers here, they say it all. more people now in the past year were hospitalized for mental health issue as compared to physical injuries. these are u.s. troops. keep in mind, don, as you well known, a lot of people, they never come forward. so that 17,000 number is a gross
turned virtually its full attention to that war, shifting mover troops to iraq. analysts say that provided an opening for the taliban. the key question right now is what happens next? this is a war that recent polls show the majority of americans oenz and president obama said he doesn t want to fight this war any longer than necessary. in that vein, he has announced that a troop withdrawal will begin next summer. this long afghan war has produced its share of american heroes, brave men and women who for the past nine years have put themselves in harm s way more than 1200 have paid the ultimate sacrifice. one of these remarkable soldiers was a young man who served a total of 12 tours of duty in both iraq and afghanistan. today, he returned home. martin savage joins us now from savannah, georgia, with their story. reporter: well, the young man is 29-year-old lance vogler. he is an army ranger. and he died in afghanistan last friday. today his body returned here to
immense problems facing u.s. and nato forces. the taliban and can pakistan blowing up vital trucks bound for pakistan. one major campaign under way right now is the taliban birthplace of southern kandahar province. the taliban vowed to defend this area, regardless of the cost. a key strategic issue for the coalition is the fact that the taliban s press eps is felt over vast parts of the country. in some areas, they re much stronger than in others. critics argue that a key turning point in the war occurred very early on when the u.s. invaded, there were no american troops in iran. that invasion didn t happen until two years later. this graphic gives you an idea of what happens next. when the u.s. did invade iraq in 2003, the bush administration