By Shino Yuasa
Fallujah, Iraq - Feeling tired and depressed after being away from home for months, young American soldiers in Iraq say they are not peacekeepers and are ready to go home.
"I think I had enough. It's time for us to go home," said Private First Class Joe Cruz, 18, from the Second Brigade of the army's Third Infantry Division in Fallujah, 50km west of Baghdad.
Cruz, a native of Guam, has been away from his family for nearly a year and said not knowing when he would go home depressed him.
'I think I had enough. It's time for us to go home' "When I get depressed, I just write a letter. I write a lot. Writing a letter relieves my stress," said the shy soldier. In letters, he tells his mother he is fine.
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He is lying.
"I wake up in the middle of the night just to look around. I am always half-asleep," said Cruz, one of 4 000 United States soldiers assigned to keep the peace in this conservative Sunni Muslim city, which has often been a flashpoint since US troops shot dead at least 16 civilians during protests in late April.
Graffiti on one of the walls along the main road of the city reads: "God bless the resistance fighters of the City of Mosques."
Sergeant Robert Meadows, one of six doctors at the brigade's compound, said he treats one soldier a day on average for illnesses related to combat fatigue.
'I don't think you can ever get near that level unless you won another war' "The biggest problem is sleep. Some people just sleep for hours and hours but still don't have any energy to get up," said the 39-year-old doctor from Brooklyn in New York.
Meadows has seen soldiers suffering from symptoms of combat stress including depression, agitation and short temper and said a majority of them are men in their early 20s.
"The most common symptom is depression. Not knowing when we're going home is the worst part," he said. He has prescribed anti-depressants but said the best treatment is just talking to soldiers.
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