Young veterans still at war

Chantelle Squires was a film student when her neighbor Earl Simmons returned from the front lines of the Iraq war.

Simmons was a sniper, the designated marksman for his company. He had crouched in the desert, gripped a gun and faced death.

At the time of his return, Squires was 19 and described herself as self-absorbed and distracted from the conflict abroad. But Simmons, returning from his tour of duty at 20, was already a veteran, decorated with experiences he will never forget.

Simmons' homecoming was nearly three years ago, and Squires has since been creating a feature-length documentary called "Reserved to Fight."

The film takes a look at what happens when four local soldiers return from fighting in Operation Iraqi Freedom — and how each slowly develops symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

"You hear a lot of war stories, and it's usually from older guys who fought in the war 30, 40 years ago," Squires said. "But when I thought about how it was somebody my age over there, it blew me away."

Squires recruited two friends, Coby Cox and Manju Varghese, both graduates from Brigham Young University who are working in the film industry, to help with the project. Individually, members of the team have edited movies such as "The Work and the Glory," produced films in the festival circuit and worked on several PBS documentary series.

Now that Squires, Cox and Varghese have invested three years and a substantial amount of their own money into "Reserved to Fight," the team is using their Web site — www.reservedtofight.com — and local cottage meetings to help raise the rest of the $250,000 needed for postproduction. They aim to air the documentary this summer on PBS and make presentations on college campuses across America to spread their message to where they think it counts most — the soldiers' peers.

"A lot of these guys went off as teenagers, young adults, and they come back as adults, and then they're faced with questions from their peers, like, 'Did you kill anyone?' " Cox said. "I mean, how do you answer that? 'Yes, I did, and yes, I killed innocent civilians'? They've all had to do things that they're not proud of, but that's not really what this is all about. It's about the fact that these guys . . . all have to go back to normal jobs, back to their families, back into society, and then they feel this gap, because there isn't a lot of understanding for them."

The documentary follows Earl Simmons, from Lehi, Chris Nibley, from Provo, Mark Patterson, who was activated as a BYU student, and Matt Jemmett, from Clearfield, since their return on May 28, 2003. All four were Marine Reservists and members of Fox Company, one of the first reserve units to be activated in Utah since the Korean War.

At the beginning, Cox said the film was just about the soldiers' adjustment to "normal" life, but after about a year, as their stories unfolded, deeper scars revealed a conflict still raged within the young veterans. Cox and Squires noticed that all four suffered patterns of anger, depression and nightmares — all symptoms of PTSD.

"It's time to recognize the emotional scars that happened to these guys," Cox said. "It's no longer just the physical scars that we need to be concerned with. We can't afford to lose another generation to this, and I think that's what's keeping us all really passionate right now."

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E-mail: achoate@desnews.com