A 'select club' struggles on

He had a head full of reasons to bid good riddance to 2005 and so, on New Year's morning, Andy Wilson embraced the cold Midwest dawn.

He was ready to start over.

Within days, he would return to classes at Wright State University outside Dayton, Ohio. He was eager to renew a relationship with his young daughter. Six months after leaving the service, he wanted to push the pain of Baghdad further behind.

"I felt a little energized. I felt like I had put a lot of stuff behind me," he said. "I was getting ready for church. . . . And I go downstairs and turn the computer on and all of a sudden I had an instant message."

It was from an old comrade still in Iraq. There were unconfirmed rumors around camp, he wrote, that a mutual friend had been killed in action.

Wilson typed the soldier's name into his computer's search engine and, within seconds, knew that Sergeant Dominic R. Coles, was gone.

"It was right there on CNN," he said.

Like Jeremy Regnier, the soldier from Littleton, N.H., killed in October 2004 as he rode with Wilson in a convoy, Coles was manning the gun of an armored vehicle when it was attacked in Baghdad.

In an instant, Wilson's newfound buoyancy collapsed. Five days later, as he walked into a small, utilitarian conference room at the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Dayton, he was back in the dark place he knew too well.

Like the other vets in the overheated room, he was there for group counseling he had come to value and to need. They were people, like him, who hadn't yet found a way to put war in its place. He felt he could be honest with them -- an honesty masked with boyish jibes and shoulder jabs.

Dr. Darshan Singh Sehbi, the psychiatrist who facilitates these sessions, saw right through Wilson's garrulous facade.

"He's holding," Sehbi, who is treating Wilson, said quietly from the other side of the room. "Just holding. . . . I can see he's smiling. That may be his real self. But any minute, something can happen."

And as the group settled down to business, Wilson reported that something had.

He told of Dom Coles's death, and the room fell into an intensely-focused silence. Around the circle, legs bounced up and down in the near-perpetual motion of restless leg syndrome -- a common side-effect of war trauma.

"I started shaking," Wilson said, describing his first reaction to the e-mail. "I didn't know what to do. I'm like, what a way to start the [expletive] year. . . . I'm scared to death."

Wilson said he had already talked about it with Kevin Regnier, Jeremy's father.

"I called him and I felt like [expletive] calling him to cry about losing a friend," he said. "But he was real cool about it. He was very supportive. . . . He's more of a dad than my own father ever was to me, and I thank the Lord for him."

There was a pause. And then the room echoed with others' stories.

Dan, slender and soft-spoken, said the support group has become his family, as he struggled against the urge to isolate himself. One group member, he said, had told him: "If you keep going this way all you're going to do is wind up in a hole with dirt on top of you."

"I believe that," he said.

James, bearded and burly, threw down his cap and glasses, and said an ongoing child custody dispute had pushed him to the brink. "I was going to blow my [expletive] head off and I couldn't do it," he said.

Jack, in a tan work shirt with his name stenciled in blue over one pocket, sobbed uncontrollably, recounting a recent phone call from the mother of a service comrade who asked for details about how her son was killed.

"I didn't know what to talk about, but she had the right to know," said Jack, who had tried to save the man's life on an Iraqi battlefield. "If I didn't open up, I'm afraid of what tomorrow might hold. I let these things eat at me."

And then Will Thiery, a Gulf War veteran who co-founded the support group seven years ago, explained why he had been uncharacteristically absent the week before.

Lying in bed a few days ago, Thiery said, he pulled out his pistol and pointed it at his head. The ex-Marine said he survived only because the gun malfunctioned.

"These are the soldiers who did a job that most of us cannot do," Dr. Sehbi said softly as the session concluded. "Our freedom depended on them. When they come back, when you talk to them, they're smiling. If you don't hear them, you would never know what is inside them."

When Dustin Jolly returned from Iraq, he'd gotten some advice from Jeremy Regnier's parents, who were there to greet their son's First Cavalry comrades. They implored him to see a doctor for help with what he'd been through.

But Jolly, now back in his Indiana hometown, had his own plan: to hook up with the Army reserves. If he could be around people who understood what he'd been through, he thought, maybe his demons would gradually retreat.

"I thought time would help, and it would go away after I got home," Jolly said. "I was thinking if I ever want to go back into active duty, I didn't want that on my record that I was seeing a counselor for head problems."

But staying tethered to military life was a mistake. And, almost instantly, he knew it. When it came time to report for weekend duty in Fort Wayne, he found himself anxious, dripping in perspiration. He was irritable and scared. When some reservists boasted of service in places much less threatening than the Baghdad highway he had once patrolled with Wilson and Regnier, Jolly stewed in anger at their braggadocio.

"It shoots pain through Dustin," his wife, Carman, said. "You can see it all over his face."

Jolly sent a note to his Reserve commander, telling him he could no longer serve. "I know people there will not understand," he wrote. "Which I don't expect them or you . Just like I know most people have not cleaned their buddies [remains] up with newspaper. . . . I think about that kind of stuff all the time. I would be of no use to you or the unit right now."

As the holidays approached, the infrequent side jobs he worked to help make ends meet dried up. His $369-a-week unemployment checks ran out.

On Christmas Day, he sat up to watch 2-year-old Aaliyah open her brightly wrapped presents. And then he was back in bed, shaking and crying under the covers.

He thought about Regnier and his best friend, Sergeant Chad Rosenbaum, killed within weeks of each other in Iraq. He had nightmares about a family he had seen on the streets of Baghdad, bloody victims of a suicide bomber.

"There was glass in the lady's face," he said. "A little kid had been killed."

The child, he knew, was no older than Aaliyah. As Carman hugged Dustin that holiday morning, she said she could feel the terror under his skin.

Their marriage had ruptured once and their relationship could be tempestuous still. Dustin knew his symptoms wore on Carman. He screamed and prowled the house in his sleep. Sometimes he urinated in bed.

"There's a lot of girls who wouldn't put up with that," he said. "You know how that makes you feel as far as being a man and peeing the bed? What makes me do stuff like that?"

With the rent due and bills piling up, Jolly applied for food stamps and welfare. A county assistance agency paid his landlord $400 for one month -- financial aid he needed and appreciated.

He had resisted help from the Department of Veterans Affairs. Its doctors made him feel unwelcome and, until now, he had not applied for the disability payments he was sure he was entitled to.

"I did that military stuff and everything and then I came back and it's really like I'm farther behind than all my buddies who just stayed here and worked," he said. "That's what I don't understand."

He applied for jobs without results. And he knew, even if he found full-time employment, his headaches would keep him away from work some days.

"Now it's at the point where something's got to be done," he said. "I've tried everything I know to do."

As winter wore on, during one of his last appointments with a private physician before turning to the VA for medical care, he told Dr. Warren Ralph that the images from the day that Regnier was killed still tormented him.

"Maybe if I had driven faster or slower it would have helped," he told the doctor in a small examining room in Bloomington. "There's a lot of questions I ask myself that I don't have the answer for."

Ralph, a crusty, plain-spoken veteran of Korea, assured Jolly that eventually those questions would pack less power.

"You belong to a real interesting and select club," the doctor told him. "Membership is tough to get in and even tougher to get out. . . . There's no way of going back and bringing all that baggage with you all the time. And you have to somehow, somewhere learn to put that in a compartment -- a room -- and leave it there."

Days earlier, Jolly had dealt with one burden he carried. It was a package, still stained with battlefield grime, that he had held close for 15 months.

"It's like my final link to Jeremy, you know?" he said.

Early on a frigid Saturday morning, Jolly drove his black Mustang past the fraternity houses and frozen quadrangles of Indiana University and into the lot at the Bloomington Post Office.

Inside the box he brought to the counter were some things Jolly had carefully squirreled away for Regnier's family.

A pack of Marlboro cigarettes, a canteen cover, and CDs with the music of Toby Keith, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Jeremy's patrol cap, his rucksack, some empty M-16 cartridges. A military headband emblazoned "Regnier."

The CDs reminded Jolly of the music that was playing that night over the Bradley Fighting Vehicle's intercom. He remembered Eminem's voice hammering through his headset even after the bomb went off.

"It was freaky," he said. "The song was playing and it wouldn't shut off."

Jolly scribbled Kevin Regnier's address in Littleton, N.H., on the taped-up box.

Then he looked up and asked quietly: "Do you think they'll be happy to get that?"

Andy Wilson was on a mission that day, too.

As Jolly posted Jeremy Regnier 's effects, Wilson was driving south on a 12-hour journey through Kentucky coal country and Appalachia, bound for Georgia and Dom Coles.

When they were soldiers together, Coles and his wife and kids had been guests in Wilson's house. The men had looked out for one another. And now Wilson said he felt bound to be there for him this one last time.

"It's my job as a soldier," he said. "It's my job to represent everything that he died for. Stood for and died for."

And so as mourners filed into the Unity Church of God in Jesup, Ga., under a sunny, cloudless sky, Wilson was there to hold the doors that opened into a large sanctuary.

Two large pictures of the fallen serviceman looked down from either side of an altar abloom with baskets of flowers.

Just before the service began, Wilson took a seat three rows from the back. Soon, he began to burn.

The pastor called for reflections from Coles's friends, but there was only awkward silence when the first eulogist, and then the second were called. When the pastor invited a third friend to come forward, no one stirred. The funeral program in Wilson's hands began to shake. An uncomfortable murmur moved through the pews.

The pastor moved on to the scheduled reflections from military officers who would testify to the 26-year-old sergeant's mettle as a soldier. He invited a colonel and then a sergeant, both listed in the program, to the front of the large, modern church where Coles's coffin lay under an American flag in a center aisle.

Again, no one moved. Mourners exchanged looks of stunned disbelief.

Abruptly, the pastor moved on to some musical selections. A choir and a soloist performed. And then as the service neared its conclusion, Wilson stood up.

"May I give three to five minutes to reflect on my friend since no one else did?" Wilson asked.

As he strode to the front of the church, a polite applause began to build into something more boisterous.

"My name is Andy Wilson," he began, comfortably cradling a wireless microphone. "I served with Coles. I called him Dom. You-all called him Nick."

Wilson recalled the Thanksgiving dinners he had shared with Coles. He remembered the sports teams Coles cheered for, the cars he drove, the family he loved.

"He had the biggest, cheesiest smile you-all had ever seen," Wilson told the congregation, now a buoyant and smiling sea of nodding heads. "And the thick glasses because you-all knew he was blind, right? I just want to say he was not just my friend. He was family. He was a brother to me. I no longer serve but I'm going to be a soldier until the day they put me down. As was he. And if I could trade places with him, I would. Believe that."

When he was done Wilson stepped out into the blinding sunshine of the church's vast parking lot. Mourners searched him out, shook his hand, patted his back, and gave him hugs.

"That was sweet what you did, hon," Coles's step-aunt told him, throwing an arm around his shoulder. "They should have that on national TV."

On the drive to the cemetery, Wilson, silent behind his sunglasses, played a bagpipe version of "Amazing Grace" on the car stereo and puffed on a thin cigar. At graveside, he stood at attention as rifles fired and a bugler played Taps. Coles's widow, Toni, was handed an American flag folded into a tight triangle and then everyone began to leave.

Wilson walked toward his old friend's coffin. Alone now, he dropped a copper coin into the grave.

It's an inside joke, he explained later. Just something he and Coles used to say to each other to relieve the monotony of their daily Army drills.

"A penny for your thoughts," they'd say.

Three hours into Wilson's long drive back to Ohio, the cardboard box with the Indiana postmark was delivered to Kevin and Shawn Regnier's front door in New Hampshire. Its contents left them unhinged for days.

Andy Wilson heard about it on his cellphone somewhere in South Carolina. Speaking first with Kevin and later with Shawn, he assumed a soft, reassuring tone that would have been familiar to anyone who had listened to him from the pews of the Unity Church of God the day before.

"I heard you got something in the mail today," he told Shawn. "I know you've been waiting on it for a while. Is everything in there you were looking for?"

"I know it's hard to get that stuff," he said, for a moment again the considerate commander of the Chaos 4 squad. "The circle's complete as far as I'm concerned. . . . I know how much you miss him. Trust me, there's not a day goes by that I don't think about that guy."

Thomas Farragher can be reached at farragher@globe.com. Dina Rudick can be reached at drudick@globe.com.