![]() ![]() As a journalist, I talked to dozens of soldiers as the losses continued after the unit returned home. From a distance, I saw pieces of the unit’s story from beginning to end. I met DeLano because my husband had worked with him as a civilian and later as a soldier. As they worked to keep their fellow fighters alive, they both fought to do the things that they hoped would keep them strong and resilient long after they left the battlefield. They both knew soldiers who had attempted to kill themselves, and still more who had thought about it. In the months and years that followed, Stewart and DeLano continued to see loss after loss of soldiers they’d deployed with to suicide. But within 12 months, at least four soldiers had taken their own lives. ![]() They completed their mission abroad, and Stewart brought 684 of them home. ![]() The command system, out of Stewart’s control, left many of the men feeling as if their leadership didn’t care about them even as they fought for their lives in Afghanistan. Jorge Oliveira - a New Jersey guardsman attached to their unit - died in combat. Stewart’s first soldier, a member of DeLano’s platoon, died from cancer during the unit’s 12-month deployment. Loss had bound together Stewart and DeLano in the years after they returned home. He and Stewart had served together when they deployed with the 182nd Infantry Regiment to Afghanistan in 2011: Stewart as battalion commander, DeLano as a private. And DeLano, as an enlisted soldier, sometimes worked more intimately with soldiers in pain than a field-grade officer could. Stewart often helped his soldiers through adversity. He had no reason not to believe what DeLano shared. While the treatment kept him from drinking at the brewery, the food truck selling tacos wasn’t off limits, and neither were a few late-night episodes of Cobra Kai back at Stewart’s home just a town away.ĭeLano had driven more than an hour to reach Stewart - and with a clear purpose, Stewart thought. When he told his chain of command about his cancer treatment, he moved to an armory closer to where he lived. But because of the pandemic, DeLano spent most of the year working from home. “They said I’m going to make it through,” DeLano said.ĭeLano still worked for the Guard full time at an armory nearly two hours away from his Middleborough home. Both are assigned to the Massachusetts National Guard’s Delta Company, 1st Battalion, 182nd Infantry Regiment. Chris DeLano, center, and David Liu, right, perform maintenance on chainsaws used to cut fallen trees and clear roads after winter storm Nemo in Plymouth, Massachusetts, Feb. We also share information about your use of our website with our social media, advertising and analytics partners.Army Spcs. ![]() We use cookies to personalize content and ads, provide social media features, and analyze the use of our website. This helps us measure the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns. Microsoft Advertising uses these cookies to anonymously identify user sessions. It also serves behaviorally targeted ads on other websites, similar to most specialized online marketing companies. The Facebook cookie is used by it's parent company Meta to monitor behavior on this website in order to serve targeted ads to its users when they are logged into its services. Google will use this information for the purpose of evaluating your use of the website, compiling reports on website activity for us and providing other services relating to website activity and internet usage. The purpose of Google Analytics is to analyze the traffic on our website. Security (protection against CSRF Cross-Site Request Forgery) Stores login sessions (so that the server knows that this browser is logged into a user account) which cookies were accepted and rejected). Storage of the selection in the cookie banner (i.e. being associated with traffic metrics and page response times. Random ID which serves to improve our technical services by i.e. Server load balancing, geographical distribution and redundancy ![]()
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