Nick Cutter's Death Exposes Neglect Scandal at Miami VA Hospital

"Nick, you've had too many to drive," said Danielle's friend, Jenna Uram. When her boyfriend offered to call the couple a cab, Nick became enraged. He pulled a .32-caliber Kel-Tec handgun from his pocket and pointed it at Angel Rodriguez. The laid-back Wednesday night had become electric.

"He has a gun!" Danielle screamed. Angel reached for the weapon, and the two men went tumbling to the bar floor. A bouncer and bartender helped hold Nick down until the cops arrived.

The August 26, 2010 incident at the Blue Boar was just the beginning of Nick's downward spiral. Welcome-home parties soon gave way to something sinister. As his paranoia devolved into full-blown posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the lines between South Florida and Samarra began to blur dangerously. Nick would turn to drugs to blunt his pain, and he'd fall further than his family could have imagined.

Perhaps if Nick had been sent to prison for the bar brawl, his life would have progressed differently. Instead, a judge took pity on the recently discharged soldier with PTSD and dropped the charges. His girlfriend, however, was terrified. Danielle dumped him, leaving only his mother, Mary Zielinski, to notice the worrying changes in her son.

At first, Mary thought God had given her a second chance at motherhood. She had given birth to Nick when she was only 20 years old and then left him and his sister after suffering a mental breakdown. Now her oldest child had returned from the war and needed her help. "I finally had the time and the money to take care of him," she says. "He was my plan."

But that plan would be tested. Nick had spent 15 months in Iraq on a razor's edge, chugging caffeine and pulling double watch duty. Now seemed like the time to make up the sleep deficit. Instead, he stayed up late watching movies, anything to keep from going to bed. When his mom woke up in the morning, he was often just getting back from a six-mile run on no rest.

Sometimes she would find him passed out in a chair. It was the only way he could sleep, he said, because it reminded him of the seats inside the Humvees in Iraq. Whenever Nick did close his eyes, he was visited by terrible nightmares. His mom would wake up to the sound of her son screaming orders to a phantom platoon or sobbing as friends died over and over again in his arms during his dreams.

The flashbacks could come at any moment. When high school friends flew in from Illinois and took Nick to dinner in South Beach, they initially thought he was recovering well. Then a passing car blew a tire. Nick grabbed a steak knife, flipped the outdoor table, and screamed for everyone to get down.

Nick also began to disappear. He would say he was going to the mailbox and return hours later, either talking a mile a minute or slurring his speech. A journal he later kept for therapy sheds light on how his addiction began.

"I started drinking very heavy when I came back," he wrote. "I also started ­smoking weed at night to be able to go to sleep. But I found out that it was a temporary solution to the problem. So I thought since I'm having nightmares when I sleep, why sleep? Just stay up. So I started using coke."

Items around the house began to go missing. When Mary's iPod vanished, she confronted her son. He said he would return it when his disability check arrived and he could buy it back from the pawnshop.

By early 2011, Nick's drug habit was so bad the decorated soldier was stealing from strangers. On January 16, he picked up an older woman at a bar on Ocean Drive in Boynton Beach. But as the two were walking to a motel, Nick grabbed her purse and began running. When a police dog found him 15 minutes later, he was hiding in the bushes with the purse in his hands.

Once again, the charges were dropped. But the second arrest was a wake-up call for Mary. She began taking her son to the West Palm Beach VA hospital for treatment.

They gave him pill after pill — pills for his pain, pills for his nightmares, pills to fall asleep — until Mary had to keep a detailed list of his medications. He slept more but began sleepwalking. He put on weight and stopped shaving.

Nick wasn't the only member of his platoon who was struggling. In the two years since returning from Iraq, two battle buddies from Patrol Base Olson had killed themselves — one by bullet, another by drug overdose. Ronnie Campbell, one of Nick's best friends from Iraq, lived in Brevard County, and he and his wife would occasionally visit Nick. When his wife left him, however, he plunged into a severe depression. Just days before he was supposed to meet up with Nick and other vets from the 232nd Engineer Company, Campbell killed himself.

Nick confessed to having suicidal impulses of his own, but the VA programs seemed to help. When Rainy's high school graduation arrived in May 2011, Mary flew up to Illinois for a week, calling Nick every day to make sure he was getting treatment.

When she returned, Nick picked her up at the airport. But something wasn't right. He was disheveled and silent. As soon as they got home, he disappeared. While Mary was unpacking, she heard a strange clicking noise. She followed it to Nick's room, where she found him slicing his own neck with a knife, its metal edge clacking against his dog tags.

"Honey," she said, "put the knife down." Mary tried to calm him, but he didn't seem to hear. She dialed 911. After a two-hour standoff, Nick was Baker Acted and placed in a psychiatric ward. It was the first of seven stays there.

When Rainy moved down from Illinois after graduation, she was shocked at how much he had deteriorated. The stress of having a suicidal brother stirred panic attacks of her own, but her brother just laughed at her. "You think you're stressed?" he said. "Try having people shoot at you."

After a few months in South Florida, Rainy couldn't live with the anxiety any longer. She moved back to Illinois and never spoke to her brother again.

Mary, meanwhile, saw that her son wouldn't survive without more help. She took a course to become his caretaker and badgered the West Palm Beach VA hospital until it admitted Nick to the Mental Health Intensive Case Management (MHICM) program. He was given an apartment close to the hospital. A team of nurses made sure he took his meds and attended therapy every day.

But the outpatient program also provided Nick ample opportunity to get high. He was still snorting coke to stay up and smoking weed to evade his nightmares.

Finally, in September 2012, Mary told Nick she had good news. The Miami VA hospital had agreed to allow him into its residential rehabilitation treatment program, the only 24/7 program for veterans in the state.

With three 90-day courses devoted to overcoming social problems, PTSD, and drug abuse, Miami's VA medical center marketed itself as a troubled soldier's salvation. Mary was sold. "Do you trust me, honey?" she asked her son. "This is what you need. They are going to help you."

Mary Zielinski first felt a pang of doubt while driving down I-95. As she and Nick followed the interstate south, Miami's VA hospital rose on the western horizon. Compared to the gleaming new facility Nick had attended in West Palm Beach, the Miami VA looked like a ruin. It was drab and ancient. It was also more than three times the size.

Nick and Mary had traveled to Miami with the belief that it was his best chance at recovery. In reality, the hospital was arguably the worst of Florida's seven VA medical centers. It was half a century old, deeply in debt, and plagued by scandal. When Nick stepped out of his mother's Chevy Cruze on October 1, 2013, he knew the fifth floor would be his new home. He had no idea it would also be his grave.

Miami's VA system was founded in 1942 when the government commandeered the Nautilus Hotel — where Mount Sinai Medical Center now stands in Miami Beach — to house wounded soldiers. In 1946, returning troops transformed the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables into a veterans' hospital. It served as Miami's VA until 1968, when the current building was completed next to Jackson Memorial Hospital.

For decades, the Bruce W. Carter Center was the gem of the nation's VA system. But its luster began to fade in the 1980s amid federal cutbacks. In 1989, the Miami Herald reported the hospital was $1.7 million in debt and had turned away at least 2,444 veterans.

Over the next 20 years, the hospital's debt would balloon to $30 million. Then, in 2009, the VA's own Administrative Investigation Board revealed that the hospital had used improperly cleaned colonoscopy equipment on 2,500 veterans. Blood tests found that five of the exposed veterans were now positive for HIV, eight for hepatitis C, and one for hepatitis B.

The scandal was a public relations disaster for the already-reeling hospital and its director, Mary Berrocal. That same year, the West Palm Beach VA hospital had been voted best in the nation. Miami was nowhere close. Patients were bolting Miami for Palm Beach, taking with them millions in federal funds. On November 16, 2011, the Miami VA removed Berrocal, and four months later, Paul M. Russo — credited as the man behind West Palm's success — took over.

Under Russo, the Miami VA hospital appeared to have turned a corner. Debt was down, patients were up, problems were unheard of, and a $33 million renovation went off without a hitch.

If there was any hint that Russo's miracle wasn't what it seemed, it was buried in a newspaper clipping one year after he had left the West Palm Beach hospital.

"VA Hospital Employees, Patients Charged With Selling Pills" read the headline in the August 18, 2011 Sun Sentinel. A federal investigation that had begun shortly after Russo's departure had uncovered widespread drug dealing. At least 18 employees and patients were caught stealing thousands of pills and "selling [the] drugs in the hospital's stairwells and parking lots."

The findings would be echoed by an eerily similar report in Miami three years later, when Russo would be in charge and Nick would be a patient.

It had been a long time since Nick felt this good. It was Friday evening, May 31, 2013. The government had just awarded him 100 percent disability, meaning Uncle Sam now owed him almost $40,000 in back pay. He planned to spend it on a vacation for his sister to make things right between them. Most important, after eight straight months in the Miami VA hospital's various rehab programs, he was just ten days from going home.

Nick shoved $300 in his pocket and strolled to the sign-out desk. No one asked where he was headed, but he volunteered the information anyway. "I'm gonna go get high," he said, according to a police report.

Although Nick and Mary had been told Miami's VA hospital was a leading rehab center, the program was in fact awash in drugs and short on controls. Investigations would later show the staff failed Nick by ignoring evidence of his drug use inside the hospital. Even worse, VA staff hid the truth about Nick's drug use and his death from his own mother.

"They were supposed to save my son," Mary says. "Instead, they killed him."

Philip Nall remembers the moment Mary and Nick walked into the waiting room. It was October 1, 2012. Mary toted a huge red purse stuffed with her son's never-ending paperwork and pills. Beside her sat Nick. His once-trim frame now carried 50 extra pounds. Sporting a prickly goatee, he looked more like Mary's husband than her 27-year-old son.

Nall was a bowling ball of a man. The stocky former marine hailed from the tiny Central Florida town of LaBelle. He had fought Manuel Noriega's troops in the jungles of Panama in 1989 and had struggled with PTSD ever since. Like Nick, he had been overcome by nightmares, guilt, and depression. He had tried to kill himself, abused alcohol and cocaine, and wound up here. This was Nall's third swing at rehab in four years.

"Welcome to the club, buddy," he said with a meaty palm to the newbie's back.

The fifth floor of Miami's VA hospital was split into three 90-day programs, each with unwieldy military acronyms. Nick and Phil found themselves in the Psychosocial Residential Rehabilitation Treatment Program (PRRTP). There were similar programs for substance abuse (SARRTP) and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD RRTP).

There were roughly 20 vets in each program, all of whom lived, ate, and slept at the hospital. Every morning and afternoon, they gathered in small groups and then met with one doctor after another: psychiatrists, psychologists, general practitioners, drug addiction specialists. The only constant was that they almost never saw the same doctor more than once.

"Every time, Nick would have to tell them his whole story all over again," remembers Mary, who often sat in on the sessions. "It got to the point where he didn't want to bother anymore."

His meds changed even more often than his doctors. "Omaprazole, gabapentin, cyclobenzaprine, propanol, olanzapine, naproxen, venlafaxine, hydroxyzine, and lorazepam," Mary wrote at one point. And that was just his morning regimen. "I was taking 200 milligrams of trazodone, and he was taking twice that," Nall says, referring to a powerful antidepressant. "[It] would have knocked out a horse."

Then there was the morphine. The drugs would often make Nick so woozy that he would pass out while sitting in the TV room. And the nurses were nowhere to be found. Not even the security cameras worked. "Most of the staff didn't give a shit about us," Nall claims. "They just stayed in the back and watched TV."

Despite his heavy dosage, Nick still had occasional flashbacks. He would wake Phil while screaming about insurgents surrounding the building. Phil would talk him down until Nick passed out again.

Talking was the one thing that did seem to help. Nick kept a trauma log that he discussed with his doctors. It was full of fear and guilt. "I was very scared of all the mortars coming in and the rounds hitting all around us," he wrote of an attack on his base in Iraq. "Afterwards I believed I should have taken a hit so I could have fit in with the rest of the guys, instead of feeling on the outside looking in."

More than anything, however, it helped to talk to Nall. The Panama vet had also seen buddies die in combat, only to return home and have one son stillborn and another paralyzed in a car accident. He too had been driven to drugs by PTSD and personal tragedy. Nick trusted the burly, bald-headed marine. He told him about the friends he had lost in Iraq, as well as the ones he had lost since he returned. And he talked about the people he had killed, including a young Iraqi girl he mistakenly thought was strapped with a suicide vest. "It just seemed like everything he was going through, I was going through," Nall says.

But stories opened old wounds, whose pain demanded to be dulled. The VA made it easy. Rehab residents were required to check in only every two hours and had weekends free. Several times, Nick and Phil signed out and sauntered down the street to a Honduran bar. Before they knew it, they were back at the VA hospital and doing blow in the bathroom.

Cocaine could be purchased right across the road, Nall says. Sometimes new arrivals would bring it in with them. Prescription pills were openly swapped outside at the bus stop. When VA police suspected Nick of possessing drugs, he simply hid them in a bush outside the hospital.

Nall says VA staffers knew about the drug abuse but didn't care — an opinion later backed up by a scathing internal investigation. Drug tests were always at the same time on Sundays, so it was easy to clean up for a couple of days beforehand. And even if patients pissed positive, the punishment was just staying in the next weekend.

Nick tested positive for amphetamines four times within his first two months in the PRRTP, but the VA did nothing because some of his medications could have caused false positives. He failed a Breathalyzer test near the end of his first 90-day program and then refused to take one the next weekend.

Instead of kicking him out or calling the cops or his mother, the VA simply transferred him into the PTSD program. When he popped positive again for coke in his new program, staffers told him drug use would "not be tolerated." But it was. He tested positive for cocaine and alcohol a few weeks later, and the VA put him in the mental health unit to detox. Then it promptly transferred him to another rehab program.

It's unclear why Nick was allowed to remain in the programs when other vets were discharged. Nall, for instance, was booted for refusing to let a nurse watch him pee into a cup. Ultimately, the decision was left up to Miami VA administrators.

With Nall gone, things got worse for Nick. Once in the substance abuse program, he immediately tested positive for cocaine. He admitted he had left the hospital on a two-hour pass, withdrawn money, and bought some coke. His weekend passes were revoked. Then he failed another drug test. His weekend passes were re-revoked.

On May 31, despite failing almost a dozen drug tests and supposedly forbidden to leave the hospital, Nick was nonetheless awarded a two-hour pass. He had just received his 100 percent disability notice. He planned to take Rainy to Butterfly World in Coconut Creek and meet Phil in Costa Rica. But first he was going to get high — one last time.

Nick staggered back into the VA hospital just after midnight and slumped into his usual position in the TV room. When two of his roommates found him passed out, they dragged him to his bed. Had staffers checked on him, they would have noticed he was lying with his feet on his pillow.

When his roommate woke up at 5:30 a.m., he saw Nick sitting upright on his heels as if praying. His head was tilted forward. A bologna sandwich lay nearby on the floor. He was as white as the walls of the hospital.

By the time Miami Police detectives arrived seven hours later, Nick's body had already been stripped, tagged, and placed inside a body bag. His belongings had been dumped into a trash bag for his mother to retrieve. When someone from the VA finally called Mary, there was no mention of the drugs or the broken security cameras or the failed procedures.

Instead, Mary was told that her son had choked on a sandwich.

Philip Nall lounged on a pristine beach in Costa Rica and dialed his best friend's number. When Nick didn't answer, Nall texted Mary. An hour later, his phone rang. All Mary could say before choking up was, "Nick is dead."

The tragedy would devastate Phil and Mary, sending each into depression. Yet neither one knew that the hospital that had promised to save Nick had played a major role in his death. It would be almost a year before the truth would surface, just as the nation confronted a wider scandal within the VA health-care system.

Nall had flown to Costa Rica to continue his rehab, but the Central American paradise became his personal drug den after he learned of Nick's death. He spent the remainder of his money on as much booze and cocaine as he could ingest. He would have been stranded there, at rock bottom, had Mary not paid for him to fly back to South Florida.

She too had been mourning in her own way. After picking up the trash bag full of Nick's belongings, Mary had bought herself and her dead son a flight to Illinois. While the rest of Nick's family attended a raucous wake, his mother mostly stayed in her room.

Something didn't add up, she thought. For months after Nick's death, Mary made herself sick with questions. But when she called the VA for answers, officials said they couldn't comment on an open investigation.

For years Mary had made it her mission to save the son she once abandoned. Now that he had left her, she didn't know what to do. His death had dredged up her own dark memories of abuse. Even worse, she was diagnosed with Crohn's disease and had to have surgery. By Christmastime, she was so weak and pale that her parents feared she would follow her son to the grave.

Finally, on March 27, the VA released an internal investigation titled "Unexpected Patient Death in a Substance Abuse Residential Rehabilitation Program, Miami, FL." An unnamed male patient had died from "acute cocaine and heroin toxicity," the report said.

The report listed almost a dozen rules broken by Miami VA staff in the leadup to the patient's death. Staff employees didn't search patients for contraband, inspect their bags, or conduct surprise drug tests. Video cameras were broken. Record-keeping was lax. Worst of all, investigators caught VA employees eating lunch or watching television instead of watching over their patients. As a result, recovering drug addicts were allowed to come and go as they pleased.

"The facility is located in a part of Miami with reported high drug activity," investigators wrote. "Patients who are allowed to leave the unit unsupervised have potentially easy access to illicit drugs."

That report didn't list a date of death or the deceased veteran's name. So it wasn't until a month later, when Mary received a call from CBS 4 reporter Jim DeFede, that she realized the unnamed patient who had overdosed was her own son.

On April 25, DeFede handed her a copy of the damning report on the air. "I trusted them to take care of him," she sobbed on camera. "I feel like I sent him to the dogs."

But the revelations didn't stop there. At the same time Mary was learning about how her son died, Americans were learning about widespread problems within the VA health-care system.

CNN reported that in Phoenix more than 1,400 veterans had been put on secret waiting lists so that hospital administrators would get bonuses based on false reports of efficient care. As many as 40 vets had died while waiting for treatment. The scandal quickly escalated as whistleblowers spoke up about similar secret waiting lists at VA hospitals around the ­country. On May 28, an inspector general report revealed the depth of the crisis. More than 60,000 veterans had never received the appointments they had been promised. Forty-three VA medical centers were under investigation.

On May 30, U.S. Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki stepped down. Florida Republican and House Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Jeff Miller said Shinseki's tenure had been "tainted by a pervasive lack of accountability," adding that "he is not the only one within VA who bears responsibility."

Indeed, an audit released June 9 showed that in Florida, 8,500 new veterans — young men and women like Nick Cutter — had been waiting more than 90 days for an appointment. That number includes 769 at VA hospitals in Miami, Broward, and West Palm Beach.

On June 16, local politicians grilled Russo and his chief of staff, Dr. Vincent DeGennaro, about the delays, but no one pressed them about the parallel drug problems at hospitals in West Palm Beach and Miami.

The politicians did quiz DeGenarro, however, about his questionable resumé. A year before his 2010 appointment in Miami, DeGennaro surrendered his medical license in New York. According to a complaint filed with the Florida Board of Medicine, DeGenarro had badly botched the treatment of a patient suffering from abdominal pain at Holy Cross Hospital in Fort Lauderdale in 2003, ignoring clear evidence of a torn intestine. The patient died.

"I will withstand all of the scrutiny," DeGennaro told reporters after the meeting. In fact, no one at the Miami VA hospital has been punished over the scandal. No one, that is, except for the man who helped reveal it in the first place.

Thomas Fiore is a police detective with the VA for Miami-Dade, Broward, and Monroe counties. In May, he told DeFede that he had complained for years about drug dealing within the Miami hospital but that his superiors ignored him. He also blamed the hospital for Nick's overdose. "Quite honestly,'' Fiore said, "his death could have been prevented.''

In an interview with New Times, Fiore goes even further. He says Russo's priority was to fix the public perception of the Miami VA. "A lot of stuff stopped being reported when the new director [Russo] took over in Miami," Fiore says. As a result, "Miami finally started to get their numbers to increase a little bit, and all of a sudden the problems hit."

Shortly after Russo's appointment in Miami, DeGennaro removed the hospital's controlled substance coordinator. As a result, reports of missing pills at the Miami VA plummeted from 500 in three months to 12 the next year, Fiore says. On paper, the numbers looked great. But in the hospital, patients were stealing, dealing, and selling drugs like never before.

After almost a year of complaining about the worsening conditions at the Miami VA, Fiore was reassigned to desk duty February 5. But it wasn't until he saw DeFede's TV interview that he realized how badly Nick Cutter's family had been misled.

From working at the hospital, Fiore knew that just a few weeks before Nick overdosed, he had nearly died. Nick had gone missing March 3 only to be found by VA police officers in a puddle of his own vomit on the sixth floor and taken to the emergency room. "The family was never contacted about this," Fiore says. "They had no idea."

Instead, all Mary knew about Nick's progress was the letter he read to her over the phone the night before he died. "He continues making good progress towards his treatment goals," wrote Dr. Lester Hartswick, head of the substance abuse program.

"Where in that does it tell me my boy was so bad off?" Mary says of the letter. "If he was failing drug tests, I should have known about it."

Mary was never officially notified that Nick had overdosed on the very drugs from which the hospital was supposed to help him recover. She was never told why her son's body was sent to the morgue before police detectives could perform an investigation. Thomas Fiore thinks he has the answer.

"Nicholas Cutter's death was a coverup," he says. "They didn't want people to find out about it. Even I didn't find out about it for a couple of days. Why would they not contact the only certified investigator for the VA unless they wanted to cover something up?"

In a statement to New Times, Russo denied any type of coverup. He dismissed detective Fiore's claims of widespread drug problems at the hospital and said Cutter — not the VA — was responsible for his overdose.

The residential rehab program "is not a locked unit" where patients can be kept from drugs at all costs, he said. "Mr. Cutter's death was a tragedy that will be felt by all who knew him for the rest of their lives... I stand by our staff who worked with Mr. Cutter for nearly nine months to help him battle his personal demons; however, we can always learn and improve, and I am dedicated to ensuring that our staff provides the care our veterans deserve."

(New Times has posted a full Q&A with Russo about Cutter's case at riptidemiami.com.)

That is little consolation for Mary. Neither is the handwritten letter she received from Russo a few days after appearing on television."I was recently made aware this week that our communication to you regarding the coroner's findings in the death of your son was inconsiderate and inadequate," Russo wrote in blue pen. "I personally apologize for this as we did not take the time to call you when we received the coroner's report and for how your son's personal belongings were presented to you. This was terribly insensitive to you and your family, and I am truly sorry."

Mary Zielinski sits at her kitchen table and watches the ghost of her dead son dance on a computer screen. It's a video from his tour in Iraq, one of the many times Nick jumped atop a Humvee and danced to Michael Jackson like the carefree 21-year-old he was. But Mary keeps clicking. Next up are Nick's demons: photos of the carnage he witnessed and committed on behalf of his country. These are the scenes that haunted him. Charred corpses. Dismembered limbs. Dead boys in Barcelona soccer jerseys.

Finally, she scrolls through images of him at the Miami VA hospital. "What makes me angry is that they still think this program works," she says.

She is wracked by regret. Had she known about the rampant drug dealing and lack of staff supervision at the Miami VA, she never would have taken him there. She had the money for a private rehab facility, but she trusted the VA to take care of its own.

Mary recently returned to Illinois for Rainy's wedding and for the anniversary of Nick's death. A few days after the nuptials, Nick's family crowded around his unmarked grave — the VA still hadn't sent his headstone — and released white balloons with messages written on them. "I will find justice for you," Rainy wrote.

Since learning the truth about her brother's death, Rainy has pushed politicians in Florida and Illinois to pass the VA Management Accountability Act. The legislation would empower the VA secretary to fire failing executives. She's also lobbied for changes to Florida's Malpractice Act, which currently allows only the spouse or child of a wrongful death victim to recover damages.

Most of Nick's friends and family members hold out hope that his death will become a rallying cry for fixing the VA. Both Senators Marco Rubio and Bill Nelson have called Nick's death a disgrace, and both have indicated their support for the VA Management Accountability Act.

"There are changes coming at the VA, especially in Miami," Philip Nall says. "Nick's death is going to save lives."

Starting with his own. Nall says his buddy's overdose scared him sober. After Mary paid for his flight back from Costa Rica, she took him to rehab and then drove him home to LaBelle. Nall's wife has taken him back. He now lives on a farm with chickens, pigs, and goats — animals that help keep him sane. "Nick helped me through the worst times in my life," he says, staring out from his front porch at oak trees draped in Spanish moss. "Even in death, he saved me by bringing me back home."

But some of Nick's battle buddies aren't so sure anything will change. "When you're in the military, it does everything it can to take care of you because you are an investment, like a gun or a tank," says one soldier who served with Nick but asked to remain anonymous. "You are taxpayers' dollars at work. They'll care while you're in the fight, but once you get out, you're just another veteran."

Sitting at her kitchen table, Mary Zielinski stares at the photos her son brought home and is simply thankful that his suffering is over. "Just looking at them is difficult," she says, clicking through the blood and gore. "Imagine what it was like to be there..."

On a TV set in the other room, Fox News shows video of insurgents brutally reclaiming Samarra and other cities in Iraq. A commentator calls for Obama to send troops back in.

"There are some times that I think he's better off now, being gone from here," Mary says finally. Then she fishes inside her big red purse and pulls out something small and soft. It is Nick's Operation Enduring Freedom patch.

"When I die, I'll go to Heaven," it says above a map of Iraq. "I already spent my time in Hell."