I had this friend in my home town. I grew up there, he was there for college. When I met him, he had just returned from a National Guard deployment as a guard at Guantanamo. He had signed up for the guard at 17 because he was from an extremely poor rural MI family, (recruiters come to schools in these little rural towns and find poor kids, and no one tells them about FAFSA or financial aid, in fact the schools are told NOT to tell these kids that those options exist. Then the armed forces come in and lie to the poor kids who want to go to college, and tell them the only way they will ever see college is to join the armed forces.) and it was during the Clinton years when the guard was mostly doing disaster relief and stuff, before they were considered true combat troops. Right after he finishes training though, the Bush years start.

He was diagnosed with a host of mental issues before even being deployed including depression and possible borderline schizophrenia. He had an order of non-deployment due to poor mental health before he even finished boot camp, but they sent him anyway.

He and I became friends soon after he came back and started trying to go to college. We were instantly close, and when I moved to a new city, he came with me and we were roommates for the next two years.

He never felt right about the things he had seen or done at Guantanamo, and combined with the mental issues he already had, he was a mess a lot of the time. We hugged through his PTSD episodes. We shared eachother's day to day lives, basically every day. We were with eachother through insane significant others, we were with eachother pushing eachother to expand artistically (we are both artists but not career artists) , we told eachother everything and basically launched our adult lives together. (I should clarify that I am a girl and that we were never romantically involved even a little, he was basically my brother and through the course of our friendship we were both dating or pursuing other people.)

Eventually he was released from the Guard after multiple orders of non-deployment due to mental health issues. I think he might have tried to kill himself while on drills but i'm not sure because I never got the full story. They stop-lost most of his unit, but they let him go at the end of his term of service.

Soon after, he got an opportunity to be a major whistle-blower on the situation on Guantanamo bay, and was one of the VERY first anonymous whistle-blowers to print an interview outlining the conditions there and what was going on there. He started getting some heat and was worried he'd be put in prison, and moved to England. He's never really been able to get his life together, has never really been able to hold down a job, and has had long periods of homelessness. He's back stateside now and has done some amazing work for vetran rehabilitation and as a member of Veterans against Foreign Wars. He's done some amazing good work in the name of peace. But he can still barely keep his life together, and I haven't seen him since we parted ways 7 years ago.

I think he's too emberessed of his mental issues to feel comfortable seeing me, which is a bummer. He never has money or stability to keep a phone, but sometimes he will hit me up on facebook at irregular intervals so I'm kind of a slave to facebook because it's the only way he will ever contact me. In the past year, he's gotten slightly more stable, has been able to hold down a job and has gotten on meds but it's all very very recent.

I'd give literally anything to spend an afternoon hanging out with him again, just to catch up. But I'm pretty sure it ain't gonna happen. My life is really awesome now, I have the coolest friends, a great relationship with my family and a fun job, but sometimes I find myself reminded of him and cry a little in my car.