I talked yesterday with Capt. Peter Aleria, the chaplain with the 14th Engineer Battalion. We discussed the death of Spc. William Dix, the subject of one of the stories in our Sunday package about suicide.

Aleria, an Orthodox priest, had been traveling and couldn’t reach me in time to get his comments into the paper, but they’re rather insightful.

Here’s what he had to say on the effect on other members in the unit:

“The effect on the soldiers is different. The impact is different. If someone dies in combat, they have somebody to blame for the death – an enemy other than the troops. But the difficult thing with suicide is that it’s internal. It’s blaming the self. And then there’s a stigma. It’s a tough thing to resolve.

“Soldiers said, ‘I would have done something had I known something was wrong.’ That’s a very hard thing to deal with. It took a while to recover (from Dix’s death).”

Aleria was the third person to discover Dix’s body. The first two were junior enlisted soldiers (a 22- and 24-year-old), and the soldiers had drastically different reactions.

“One was absolutely shaken, and the other one was like stone. He was just shocked. You could see, you cpould feel, you could smell what could happen in front of you. And the best remedy at the time was when I gave the last rites. At that moment, the soldier who was shaking became, at least for a while, a little bit better. For the other, the prayer we did was very helpful and allowed him to release some emotions.”

A Washington National Guardsmen who landed a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter amid a sandstorm and firefight in Iraq to evacuate wounded American soldiers earlier this year will be awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.

Chief Warrant Officer Noel Larson of Olympia will receive the award at a ceremony Friday at Fort Lewis. The Distinguished Flying Cross is awarded for heroism or extraordinary achievement during a flight operation.

Larson, serving with the 1st Battalion, 140th Aviation Regiment, was the pilot and mission coordinator aboard a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter providing support to a raid by coalition forces near Balad on March 25, according to a National Guard press release. The troops suffered casualties during the raid, but a thick sandstorm prevented medical evacuation helicopters from landing. Larson and his crew offered to act as an emergency medevac for the injured.

They landed amid the firefight and sandstorm, loaded the wounded onto the helicopter and choppered them to a hospital. The Black Hawk crew then returned to their original destination to continue providing reconnaissance for the troops below.

U.S. Army photo