Disillusionment and Despair

This is one of the most depressing stories out of Iraq I've encountered in a while. Young woman out of Flagstaff, Arizona, talented in foreign languages, volunteers for intelligence duty in Iraq. In the fall of 2003, just as the pressure to produce actionable intelligence on the budding insurgency was intensifying, she is dispatched to "the cage," an interrogation unit in Tal Afar. After only two days at the prison, she objects to the harsh interrogation "techniques" being used. She refuses to continue in that post and gets reassigned. Shortly after, she kills herself with her own rifle.

I can only imagine the disillusionment that a well-brought-up, patriotic young Mormon woman would have experienced when she saw the government that she had been taught to love torture detainees in its custody.