"Casualties of a war a world away"

"Casualties of a war a world away"

Elaina Morton is not listed as one of the 2,000 Americans now confirmed killed in Iraq since the start of the war, but she might as well be. In US military parlance the 23-year-old lab technician from Kansas would have been referred to as a "surviving spouse". But three months after her husband, Staff Sergeant Benjamin Morton, was killed by insurgents in Mosul, Elaina picked up a gun and shot herself.

The fact that the military did not issue a press release to announce the death of the former college student who loved her cat, Stinky, and enjoyed hiking, photography and camping, does not make her any less a casualty of the war. Hers is thought to be the first confirmed case of a war widow committing suicide, and as the US toll in Iraq yesterday hit the grim 2,000 landmark her death is proof of the immeasurable emotional toll that the conflict has put on families of servicemen and women.

George Bush yesterday spoke to wives of servicemen at Bollings air force base in Washington, as part of a strategy to confront the death toll head on by portraying the sacrifice in the Iraq war as the best way to keep terrorists from striking the US again. But for many bereaved families the bigger picture the president highlighted has been consumed by the day-to-day struggle of coping with their grief.

Deedy Salie knows the feelings of isolation and desperation that Elaina Morton must have gone through before she took her life. Deedy's husband, David, was killed on Valentine's Day last year when his Humvee was blown up by an improvised explosive device in the restive city of Baquba, north-east of Baghdad. "I was an army wife for nine years, and the army way is 'suck it up and drive on'," she says. But no matter how hard she tried she couldn't just suck it up, and she couldn't just drive on. The pressures put on a family by a very public death, she says, are extreme.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1600777,00.html