The Good Soldier

"They picked the wrong person to call a coward," says Collins, his girlfriend. "He turned it around and came at them with a vengeance."

As his protracted legal battle wore on, Pogany heard disturbing news that increased his suspicions about Lariam. On March 14, 2004, a 36-year-old Fort Carson soldier who'd just returned from Iraq threatened his wife with a revolver in their Monument home and then, when the police arrived, shot and killed himself. The solder, it turned out, was William Howell, who had been part of Pogany's twelve-man team in Iraq.

In May of that year, Pogany's supervisors agreed to send him to a specialized Naval medical lab in San Diego for proper diagnosis. There, in a doctor's written notes, he received his vindication: "Drug toxicity antimalarials.... Likely Lariam toxicity."

Later, after he'd similarly diagnosed several other soldiers and his findings had reached the press, the doctor changed his tune; he was no longer certain if Lariam was the culprit. But the damage had been done. The Army dropped all charges against Pogany and, on April 14, 2005, he was medically retired because of permanent brain-stem damage due to Lariam toxicity. "Then I was unceremoniously walked to the door and told to take off," Pogany remembers. "I was told to never set foot on the 10th Special Forces Group compound again."

Peace is every step.

The words are written in elegant cursive on a strip of paper pasted inside the windshield of Pogany's Volkswagen, above the dreamcatcher dangling from the rearview mirror and the tangle of wires covering his center console that powers his cell phone — which, as he makes his way across Fort Carson, is ringing constantly, filling the car with a Monty Python ditty: Always look on the bright side of life... An NPR reporter wants to meet with him in Colorado Springs. Pogany, juggling the phone and the steering wheel, schedules it into his electronic calendar.

Always look on the bright side of life... It's the screenwriter who's pitching a movie about Pogany. He's thinking Colin Farrell could star in it, or maybe Matt Damon.

Always look on the bright side of life... A soldier found one of the business cards Pogany distributes around the base; he's hoping Pogany can help him. "Send me an e-mail with everything that happened, including your deployment dates. Do you have any of your medical records? Do you have copies of your mental-health care records?" he says before hanging up. "That will be a new case" — one of the handful he may get today.

This is Pogany's mobile workplace, one he drives to and from Fort Carson several times a week, on workdays that usually begin at 6 a.m. It's an extension of a home office in the basement of his brick bungalow in central Denver that features a heavily armed G.I. Joe doll, faded prayer flags on the wall, bookshelves stocked with veterans' benefits guides and mental-disorders manuals, and boxes and boxes of soldiers' case files. He pulls his VW office over at a barracks building and flashes the ID card hanging around his neck to the guard in the front lobby. He is there to meet with Nicholas.

"Fucking wild," Nicholas, 21, says of the twenty or so roadside bomb explosions he was exposed to in Iraq. "You hear it, but it's more like your ears start immediately ringing. It feels like a very strong, hot wind that knocks you back when they go off." He only realized their lasting toll once he got back from the war and ran a guy off the road in an inexplicable fit of rage. Later, he recounts with a wry laugh, he flipped out during a training exercise and put a gun to a passerby's head. "I just kind of lost it for a while."