The Good Soldier

"I think we are showing that multiple deployments is tough on soldiers and their families," Graham adds. "But I think the good part of this is that we have a system in place where we talk to soldiers and tell them we are always open. We tell them it is a sign of strength, not weakness, to come forward and say they need some help. We are changing the culture. It takes time, but I think we are making some progress in that area."

"You need to be completely re-evaluated for a traumatic brain injury," Pogany tells him. In fact, does he have time to go to Fort Carson's traumatic brain injury clinic right now? No need to worry about making an appointment; people at Fort Carson are used to Pogany's unannounced visits.

The staff sergeant will make time. "The Army uses you and uses you," he says, "and then throws you out."

Pogany knows exactly how that feels.

Pogany says he doesn't like talking about his past, his voice betraying no hint of an accent, no hint of growing up in Germany as Georg-Andreas, the son of an expat Hungarian insurgent who fought against the Soviets in his country's failed 1956 revolution. It took months for Pogany's girlfriend, Jen Collins, to learn about his time in the military, about how, after he emigrated to the United States as a college student and studied criminal justice at the University of South Florida, he joined the Army and was trained as an interrogator. And it's been years since he's signed off his e-mails with the Special Forces' motto, "De oppresso liber" — liberator of the oppressed — which he started doing, even though not a Green Beret himself, after he was assigned to the 10th Special Forces Group at Fort Carson in 2001. Instead, Pogany prefers to quote from the Bodhisattva or The Art of War, or tell a wry joke adorned with a few choice selections of his still-vibrant barracks vocabulary.

But driving through Fort Carson after dropping off the staff sergeant at the clinic, it's hard to escape his past. The brick office buildings, the "GI Jolt" coffee shop in the base strip mall, the fenced-off trucks and cargo containers waiting to be shipped to the desert thousands of miles away — everything comprised by "greatest home town in America," as the guards at the entrance gates are required to call it — bring back memories. Last week at the Army hospital, for example, Pogany ran into Lehman, the Green Eggs and Ham guy, whom he hadn't seen in years. Lehman said he was messed up, that he had PTSD and a TBI, and that he was in trouble with the law.

Pogany knew what Lehman felt like, lost and alone in the middle of Fort Carson. This was where Pogany returned after being charged with cowardice and ordered to complete one menial on-base task after another. It was where he struggled through the diminishing but still debilitating symptoms of his mysterious condition — blurry vision, balance problems, stomach ailments — and tried to make sense of the cowardice charge.

"I never bought into what they were saying," he says. "The question was, 'What happened?' This was not me. I didn't understand what had happened."

To try and figure it out, Pogany called a soldiers' advocate he'd heard of: Steve Robinson, a Gulf War veteran and head of the Washington, D.C., veterans' advocacy group National Gulf War Resource Center (NGWRC), who agreed to help.

"I believe the military realized it was in a different fight in Iraq. It was no longer limited tank battles; it was going to be up-close urban combat, and that was going to create fear in the soldiers, and fear is like a cancer in a war," Robinson says now. "This guy Andrew had an emotional reaction to this broken and destroyed body, and they decided they were not going to put up with it. They said, 'Let's kill this cancer right now.' It had a chilling effect throughout the entire military."

Pogany and Robinson dug in, trying to find out what, exactly, was wrong with Pogany, looking for a smoking gun — and they believed they found it in Lariam, a commonly used anti-malarial drug he'd been prescribed by the military for Iraq that was known to cause serious psychiatric side effects in some people. Military officials told Robinson they weren't prescribing Lariam in Iraq, but Pogany still had the blister pack of Lariam they'd given him; he'd taken three pills, the third on the day of his breakdown.