Warriors unhinged & abandoned.

A harrowing and ultimately infuriating story about soldiers from a 500-soldier infantry battalion nicknamed the "Lethal Warriors" who've fought in the deadliest places in Iraq and returned to the U.S. deeply, and dangerously, scarred:

After coming home from Iraq, 21-year-old medic Bruce Bastien was driving with his Army buddy Louis Bressler, 24, when they spotted a woman walking to work on a Colorado Springs street.

Bressler swerved and hit the woman with the car, according to police, then Bastien jumped out and stabbed her over and over.

It was October 2007. A fellow soldier, Kenneth Eastridge, 24, watched it all from the passenger seat.

At that moment, he said, it was clear that however messed up some of the soldiers in the unit had been after their first Iraq deployment, it was about to get much worse.

"I have no problem with killing," said Eastridge, a two-tour infantryman with almost 80 confirmed kills. "But I won’t just murder someone for no reason. He had gone crazy."

How long before the Hannity/Limbaugh/Beck/Coulter nut-job brigade targets the author of this series of articles as 'un-American' or 'unpatriotic' instead of focusing their ire on a system that creates killers and then dumps them back into society. Nightmares? Anxiety? Murderous rage? Suicidal desires? Don't ask. Don't tell. Blame the messenger.

Too many men & women we hail as heroes are abandoned to conquer their demons alone once they've left the battlefield. Consider this sickening military mindset, when the mother of a returned soldier warned his sergeant that her son was 'poised to kill':

"It was a dangerous combination. I told them he was a walking time bomb," said his mother, Teresa Hernandez.

His sergeant told her there was nothing he could do. Then, she said, he started taunting her son, saying things like, "Your mommy called. She says you are going crazy."

Bullet in the chest results in emergency medical care followed by rehab. Mental illness results in taunts and insults and tragedy:

Eight months later, the time bomb exploded when her son used a stun gun to repeatedly shock a small-time drug dealer in Widefield over an ounce of marijuana, then shot him through the heart.