During the past decade, some 4,000 men have been exposed while posing as combat warriors to fool women, scam federal benefits and reap undeserved praise. But the latest fake veteran to be uncloaked and convicted will carry an unofficial military rank to prison: “Captain Obvious.”

Pinellas Country Sheriff's Office

Danny Crane

Danny Crane, 32, earned that colorful moniker from the man — an actual wounded veteran — who used his two basement computers and a loose, national network of fellow amateur sleuths to unravel Crane’s lies and ultimately hand him to federal prosecutors. Crane, who lived in the Tampa area, was sentenced March 14 to one year and one day in federal prison.

“His uniform was all wrong. The discharge papers he posted online were wrong. His mannerisms were wrong. The only thing he had right were his tattoos. He was Captain Obvious,” said retired Army Staff Sgt. Fred Campbell, one of 10 veterans who operate a virtual detective agency called Guardian of Valor.

“For four months, I was eating, sleeping and crapping Danny Russell Crane. My wife was getting sick of hearing about it,” said Campbell, who lives in Tennessee and has paralysis on one side, sustained as a result of his military service. He is not paid for his online investigation work. “Most of these guys do it for the hero worship. They see the accolades veterans get. So they just wake up one morning and say, ‘Hey, I was a member of the Black Sheep Squadron!’”

Crane, who served less than three months in the Army — never in combat — conned the Department of Veterans Affairs out of $7,000 by claiming he was half blind, had once been shot in the back, suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and had 24 metal plates inserted in his face. In public, he routinely wore two Purple Hearts, a Distinguished Flying Cross and an Air Medal — none of them earned. Assistant U.S. Attorney Amanda Kaiser said Crane concocted the persona of “the most decorated man in Florida.”

“But in our world, the Danny Crane case is not unusual,” said Mary Schantag, a Marine widow who lives in Missouri and operates the Fake Warriors Project. Since launching that veteran-vetting venture on a shoe-string budget in 1998, Schantag said her nonprofit group — along with partners at similar sites — has revealed more than 4,000 hoaxers who falsely claimed military service or battlefield glory. It’s unclear how many of those 4,000 frauds later were prosecuted. A VA spokesman said such cases are not tracked by the agency.

“We had 22 phonies in 1998. I can get 22 in 48 hours right now,” Schantag said. “It’s all day, every day.”

Courtesy Guardian of Valor

When Danny Crane appeared in public wearing Ray Ban sun glasses and a Class A Uniform, veteran-hoax hunters knew he was almost certainly a fake. That look is not military protocol. Crane was sentenced earlier this month to a year in federal prison.

Yet she complained that federal and state agencies often choose not to pursue charges against the bogus veterans, saying: “The lack of prosecution and substantial penalties drives us all crazy.”

'Out of sync'
The Supreme Court last June struck down the federal Stolen Valor Act, which prohibited people from falsely claiming they had been awarded a military honor. A majority of justices ruled that invented battlefield brags should be protected by the First Amendment right of free speech. The behavior becomes criminal fraud, however, if the mock vets obtain money or gifts from charities or from the government by using their ruse.

Like Campbell, Schantag is intimate enough with military protocol to be able to quickly spot imposters who may post their boasts on social sites like Facebook or who show up to speak at veterans’ ceremonies. For example, Crane simultaneously wore a Class A Uniform and Ray Ban sunglasses, which Schantag called “out of sync.”

Courtesy of Mary Schantag

Before his passing last year, Chuck Schantag, a Marine corporal wounded in Vietnam, spent more than a decade working with his wife to expose fake veterans.

And like Campbell, she uses Internet background searches and files Freedom of Information Requests with government agencies to corroborate a suspicious veteran’s claimed history. She also taps her personal connections with Navy SEALS, Army Special Forces, even military chaplains to double check her detective work.

“We make sure everything is square before we put these guys out there as frauds,” Campbell said. “We make sure they are 100 percent full of crap before we say anything negative toward them. We don’t do it to say, ‘Ha, Ha, I just took this guy down.’ We do it for the 18- and 19-year-olds who have lost every limb on their body but still go on.”

Last year, Schantag’s husband, Chuck, a Vietnam veteran wounded in 1968, passed away. Ferreting out military scammers had become one of his life’s passions. He was trying to sniff out an apparent new fraudster when he died. That case remains under scrutiny.

“He wanted history to be right,” said his widow. “He was a Marine through-and-through. For every lying Marine we found out there, that guy was messing up his Corps.”

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Kate Singh / Clark County Historical Museum

Victoria Parker's tattoos honor five soldiers in her unit who were killed in Iraq during her second deployment there.

The five men are not her brothers. But that’s what she calls them.

The five initials are not for her children. But many who spot her non-sleeved left arm ask if the tight stack of black letters represents her kids. The question bothers her.

From the top of her booming bicep — where “M.G. 27 JAN 07” is positioned — to the bottom of the bulge — where “B.E.” rests — Army Reserve Drill Sgt. Victoria Parker’s limb permanently honors the five fellow soldiers in her unit who were killed in Iraq during her second deployment there. Images of those those tattoos also went on display Tuesday as part of “Vet Ink,” an exhibit at the Clark County Historical Museum in Vancouver, Wash.

“The motto is: ‘Always remember, never forgot.’ I told them I would always remember them. And by putting it on my arm, I remember them every day. I think about them every day,” said Parker, 27, who lives in Vancouver. Her largest, accompanying tattoo depicts the “fallen soldier battle cross” — a helmet poised on a standing rifle placed inside empty, unlaced boots. That was inked from a photo she snapped of the memorial shrine set up for Army Sgt. Blair Emery (“B.E.”), killed in a roadside bomb attack in 2007 in Taji, just north of Baghdad.

“The tattoos helped me cope and move on and still honor their memories,” Parker said. “It’s no longer painful.”

“Vet Ink” is the brainchild of Susan Tissot, executive director of the museum, located in a city rich with Army roots. Before the Civil War, then-Capt. Ulysses S. Grant was quartermaster at the Columbia Army Barracks in that town. Vancouver has also served as home to part of the 104th Infantry Division.

Kate Singh / Clark County Historical Museum

Tattoos on the back of Jeremy Hubbard.

“The Army is very prevalent in everything we do — there are a lot of veterans here, a lot of Army personnel and our former mayor was a colonel in the Army. My father-in-law is a retired Naval officer,” Tissot said. “It’s a very personal exhibit.

“I knew the tattoos told a story," she added. "It’s a very touching story." 

“Vet Ink” spans military members who served from the 1950s through to today’s armed forces — 11 veterans (or active members or reserves) spanning every branch but the Coast Guard. Each panel details their time in uniform as well as when and why they decided to get tattooed.

Some of the images, like those gracing Parker’s arm, represent the “memorial” category of ink art that recall the fallen or a certain battle. Among military tattoos — a tradition that sprouted among Navy sailors generations ago but now are commonplace among post-9/11 veterans — are the other three classes: “patriotic” (flags, eagles), “spiritual” (a star, a cross, the Virgin Mary), and “identity,” (a specific unit, battalion or division), according to Kristina Wells, the museum’s collections manager.

“There’s been an interesting evolution in what tattoos the military would even accept. Our Vietnam veteran in the exhibit and one of the other 1960s service guys who took part didn’t get their tattoos until they were in their 60s. It was less accepted by the military back then,” Wells said. “If you were tattooed, you maybe wouldn’t even be accepted into the Army and Marines (during that era).”

Later, military regulations were relaxed, and banned tattoos on the neck and face.

Kate Singh / Clark County Historical Museum

Christian Nippolt-Vetter.

The ink also once carried something of a “hidden” code, especially in the Navy, according to the museum. For example, the image of a sparrow or swallow signified having traveled 5,000 or more miles. Tattoos of pigs or roosters were good-luck charms meant to prevent drowning because those animals often were carried in wooden crates, which would float if the ship ever sank.

For Parker, the tattoos also serve as a shorthand account of her combat experiences for any other veterans who spy them — an “automatic understanding” and a “unifying symbol.” She said she and fellow veterans can read one another’s service history from their ink.

But for those who haven’t served, she said, there is often misunderstanding.

“I get a lot of people asking me if they’re my kids. That’s frustrating and hurtful,” Parker said. “The female veterans, we’re so invisible. People don’t assume we’re veterans at all.”

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Mark Rankin / U.S. Army file

A bulldozer dumps a load of trash into a burn pit just 300 yards from the runway at Bagram Airfield. A law signed by President Barack Obama will create a registry of U.S. service members who may have been sickened or killed by burn pits used throughout Iraq and Afghanistan.

An American flag dangles from the Torres home, the sign of a long battle won: a new law — signed Thursday by President Barack Obama — creating a registry of U.S. service members perhaps sickened or killed by burn pits used throughout Iraq and Afghanistan to destroy waste ranging from batteries to body parts.

But amid occasional smiles over the first step to formally identify the toxic effects of what’s called “this generation’s Agent Orange,” there were tears, too, in that house near Corpus Christi, Texas. Resident Le RoyTorres, 40, a former Army captain, is one of the ill veterans who will land on that list.

“It was a big victory. It justifies the need for health care. And now we know we’re not alone,” said Rosie Lopez-Torres, Le Roy’s wife, who said she “knocked on a lot of doors” in Congressional hallways to push the bill, which passed Dec. 30. The law requires the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to assemble the registry and report back to Congress. 

“But because of (our) finances, because my husband can’t work, today was also one of the toughest days for us,” Lopez-Torres said Wednesday. “Today, he was in tears. I’m not going to sugar coat that. How do I convince this once-strong, 6-foot-tall man who never missed a day of work: ‘You are the same man.’ But as the head of the household, he said: ‘You don’t understand what this has done to me.’ So it’s hard. But we still hang that flag on our porch. This has nothing to do with the military. This has to do with the contractors.”

After a lung biopsy, Le Roy Torres was diagnosed in 2010 with constrictive bronchiolitis, an irreversible disease that squeezes off airways. In 2007 and 2008, he was stationed in Balad, Iraq — home to what may have been largest military burn pit — the size of 10 football fields. Torres, for a time, performed his daily calisthenics near the dark plumes emitted by the smoldering crater.

Forced by breathing problems to later retire from his post-Army job as a highway patrolman, Torres is one of thousands of veterans who have filed more than 50 lawsuits against defense contractors hired to handle waste management in the war zones. The Motley Rice law firm is representing Torres and other veterans and their survivors in one of those class-action suits.

Attorneys allege the contractors — including KBR, Inc. and its former parent company, Halliburton — mismanaged the burns and exposed American troops to poison fumes. Last July, KBR’s lawyers argued that 55 such cases should be dismissed, in part because employees from the Houston-based company served “shoulder-to-shoulder” with service members, which should grant KBR the same immunity given to government entities and personnel, such as soldiers.

Service members, however, have complained for a decade that burn pits scattered across Iraq and Afghanistan were making them sick with cancers and other diseases, and were killing some young troops. In 2007, Army and Air Force health inspectors went to Balad and measured airborne, cancer-causing dioxins at 51 times the “acceptable levels.” They determined the cancer risk for people serving at the base for more than one year was eight times higher than normal. In 2008, the Military Times reported that single burn pit might have exposed tens of thousands of troops to dioxins and toxins such as arsenic.

What has been the health toll on U.S. troops? That’s what the new registry is designed to calculate, said Paul Rieckhoff, founder and chief executive officer of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, a group representing more than 200,000 former service members.

“This is something we’ve been fighting for, for years. It will be one database where doctors can go and look at the common symptoms. It also will help verify the problem quicker so vets can get the care they need,” said Rieckhoff, who served as a first lieutenant and infantry rifle platoon leader in Iraq during 2003 and 2004. He has experienced respiratory problems, although he cannot pinpoint the cause. “I don’t know too many people who weren’t exposed to a burn pit sometime during their deployment. They were constant.”

The smoking landfills typically contained damaged Humvees, unexploded ordnance, gas cans, mattresses, rocket pods, plastics, medical waste and amputated body parts, and they often were ignited by jet fuel.

The act does not mandate new VA benefits for veterans who chronically inhaled the vapors, Rieckhoff said. But the registry is expected to help private and government doctors document health conditions potentially related to burn pits, and perhaps hasten many diagnoses.

“It will help us get to the bottom of what’s causing so many vets to be sick,” he added. “We don’t know what toxic exposure is going to be (shown). It could be our generation’s Agent Orange (the defoliant used in Vietnam, later shown to be carcinogenic). But it’s important that you start with data. Data will be a critical part of identifying the problem and then creating good treatment. I’m glad we didn’t have to wait decades like the Vietnam veterans did around Agent Orange.”

Le Roy Torres, for example, has been given a 10 percent disability rating by the VA, said his wife, who calls that ruling “a joke” because “he served for 22 years, lost his childhood dreams, his career, just turned 40 and is unable to work because of his lung disease which also has affected his heart.” The Torres family is fighting the VA for a higher disability rating and, thus, higher compensation for his service-related symptoms. 

Before the lawsuits and the law, a handful of military families launched their own, online registries for service members, veterans and their survivors so they could report their symptoms and mark how closely they had served to one or several of the burn pits. 

As Le Roy Torres struggled harder to breathe, he and his wife launched BurnPits360.org. The site lists 11 service members who descended from full health to terminal cancer after serving near a burn pit. That roll includes Air Force Sgt. Jessica Sweet, who died of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) in 2009 at age 30. She served in Afghanistan. Also listed is Army Staff Sgt. Steven Ochs, who died from AML in 2008 at age 32. He served in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

One of the registry's primary goals is to determine if there are tangible links between the deaths of service members like Sweet and Ochs and their exposure to the burn pits.

“How many have been affected? Every week I get an email from someone who has passed,” Rosie Lopez-Torres said. “We started our registry because we weren’t going to wait on the Department of Defense and VA. Our list of people who have self reported their data — whether it’s the loved one of a fallen hero who lost the battle with toxic exposure, or someone who is fighting the battle — is well over 1,000 people. They are from all over the country.

“The hardest thing for us is trying to figure out the finances day to day, and hearing (from the government) ‘just wait’ on your retirement check,” she added. “He’s hearing, ‘wait, wait, wait’ but he’s having to provide for his family. And he’s looking at his life and saying: “What am I going to do now?’”

Christopher Lee / Getty Images Europe

Lt. Brad Snyder, blinded in Afghanistan after stepping on an IED, spent his first "Alive Day" winning gold at the 2012 Paralympic Games in London.

One year to the day after Lt. Brad Snyder lost his vision to a bomb explosion in Afghanistan, he swam ferociously across a pool. Then he stood atop a podium at the London Paralympics, wore gold around his neck and beamed to the national anthem, savoring the moment but seeing none of it. 

Exactly eight years after Tammy Duckworth lost her legs to a rocket-propelled grenade in Iraq, she met the Army medic who revived her inside a mangled helicopter. Amid that reunion, she had an extra reason to smile: Six days before, Duckworth had won a seat in the U.S. Congress.

During the otherwise dark anniversaries of their devastating combat injuries, both veterans chose to cherish the warm light of survival on what has come to be known, throughout the military, as “Alive Day.”

Their numbers are growing more slowly though still rising: Seventy American service members were wounded in Afghanistan during December, according to new Department of Defense figures. That made 2012 the third-bloodiest year of that war in terms of the tally of U.S. troops hurt in action — 2,951.

“Choice — that word means a lot here,” said Snyder, 28, a former Navy bomb-disposal expert. “‘Choice’ puts everything on a level playing field. Each of us faces a plethora of daily choices — when to get up, what to eat for breakfast, what to say to your family before leaving for work. You can choose to be positive. Or you can choose to be a victim.

“You can choose to move forward with grace. Or you can choose to succumb to negativity.”

How Snyder capped his initial Alive Day made some people cry, including his mother who watched from poolside. It made thousands more cheer at London’s Olympic Aquatics Centre. Twelve months after stepping on an IED, he dove blindly into water for the 400-meter freestyle Paralympics final. He won by nearly six seconds — an eternity in competitive racing.

Slideshow: Blinded warrior has visions of gold

Lt. Brad Snyder lost his sight in an IED explosion in Afghanistan in 2011. In September, the Navy officer once again represented the U.S., this time at the London 2012 Paralympics.

Launch slideshow

“Every (survivor of severe combat wounds) flirts potentially with a much more dismal outcome,” said Snyder, one of more than 50,000 U.S. troops wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. “To be in a situation where you can still do something great, that’s the way I look at Alive Day.”

But the concept isn’t an easy mental fit for every disabled veteran, admitted Snyder, who lives in Baltimore and who will remain a Naval officer for a while longer. During a recent public-speaking event, he chatted with former service members and discovered that “some of them just don’t even acknowledge Alive Day exists. Some look at this as a day when they only wear black, mope around and think about how miserable they want to be.”

The notion of trying to transform the anniversary of a nearly-fatal battle injury into an annual day of triumph was hatched before the Vietnam War, said Dr. Sydney Savion, a retired military officer, applied behavioral scientist and author of “Camouflage to Pinstripes: Learning to Thrive in Civilian Culture.” She is based in Texas.

Alive Day, Savion said, is “on some level, mind over matter." But she believes the concept serves as an effective mental-health salve and can be part of a path to lasting recovery.

“One of the most important things a veteran can learn to do in life is to reframe negative events that have happened to them. This is not to deny the close escape from death or the permanent wounds, sanitize them or hide them,” Savion said. “Instead, look at them like creating a piece of art. Michaelangelo once said, ‘I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set it free.’ Even the ugliest events, when looked at with fresh eyes, (can carry) newfound meaning, opportunities and answers.”

Many veterans try, through reunions, phone calls, emails and letters, to retain the tight camaraderie they formed with their unit buddies. Alive Day, Savion added, offers another way “to rekindle that connection.” 

“If things are going to turn out well for any veteran, one thing (that) is paramount is redefining who one is and repurposing one’s life,” she said. “One must mentally and emotionally surrender the old situation and experiment with new ways of being, doing, (and) thinking.”

Duckworth, a former Army chopper pilot, this week took that advice to Capitol Hill. In her second bid for Congress, she won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives on Nov. 6, serving the suburbs north of Chicago. She was sworn in Thursday.

Getty Images

Newly elected Congressional freshmen Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., arrives to pose for a class picture with other new members of the 113th Congress on the steps of the U.S. Capitol on Nov. 15, 2012, in Washington D.C.

The Monday after her election victory — her most recent Alive Day — Duckworth met the man who pulled her back to consciousness after she and her co-pilot managed to land their damaged, smoking Black Hawk helicopter in 2004.

“I don’t remember being in the ER. I just met the flight medic who revived me in the helicopter. We just spent Alive Day together,” Duckworth told NBC News in a recent interview. “He said, ‘You looked up at me. You were completely calm.’ ”

Duckworth often spends her Alive Day with the five men who were aboard the chopper with her in 2004 as they skimmed treetops in Iraq at about 135 miles per hour. The group has sometimes gathered in St. Louis. She sees that anniversary, she said, as a “celebration” — and a moment when she can show appreciation to those who helped save her life.

But Alive Day also provides veterans with a unique bond, she added. After a photo shoot of Congressional freshmen snapped last November, Duckworth met a new lawmaker from California, Paul Cook, who was wounded in Vietnam.

“There’s a subset of us who have seen combat action,” Duckworth said. “That’s the reason I was able to talk to this man. He started talking about walking into a trip wire in Vietnam and wanted to know what hit me, what that was like.’ When you’ve actually not just been deployed, when you’ve both seen combat action, you have this common place.”

Duckworth’s 2013 Alive Day likely will be spent in the House of Representatives. It falls on a Tuesday.

Snyder’s 2013 Alive Day comes on a Saturday. He has resolved to “raise the bar” on the feat he pulled off last Sept. 7. But he knows that will not be easy.

“I want to do something that’s more outstanding or more ridiculous,” Snyder said. “Maybe I’ll climb a mountain or jump out of an aircraft. We’ll see. Certainly, it will be a day about moving forward. I’ll try to make the most of the fact that I’m still here. I’ll enjoy life to its fullest. That’s something I try to do every day — but especially on that day.”

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Courtesy Jesse Holder

Jesse Holder, a 173rd Airborne trooper, was wounded in 2007 while serving in Afghanistan by shrapnel from an RPG round.

Four soldiers, four battles — and, between them — four total inches separate the slim expanse between death and life.

One died because his armor plating wasn’t one inch higher. Three survived by that same tiny fraction, left to mull the unanswerable: "Why am I still here?"

In the final days of 2012, the somber tally of American service members wounded in action in Afghanistan surpassed 18,000 while the number of U.S. military men and women killed there eclipsed 2,040, according to the Department of Defense.

As Jesse Holder can attest, many of those 20,000-plus causalities are here — or are gone — based on a cold geometric fact of war: So often, everything comes down to a single inch.

"I got hit in the neck and I thought I was done," said Holder, a 173rd Airborne trooper wounded in 2007 by shrapnel from a rocket-propelled grenade while in Afghanistan. The round detonated just above and to the right of Holder’s head as he rode in the turret of an Army truck, patrolling a steep-walled riverbed.

"I said, out loud, 'Oh, this is it. I’m going to die right here.' Everybody in the truck was thinking the same thing because of all the blood."

He was airlifted to a makeshift hospital where a surgeon removed the metal fragment. The doctor then revealed that if the chunk had entered Holder’s neck "one centimeter to the left," it would have opened an artery. He likely would have bled to death in the truck. Instead, he was back on the line 10 days later. He never lost consciousness.

"After the fire fight," Holder said, "when you're back at your base talking about it, that's when it usually comes out: 'I was inches away.' You'll hear: 'If that glass shield hadn't been there, or if that tree hadn't deflected the bullet, I wouldn't be here now.'

"During combat, you try not to think about it. But I think that's why, when people come back, some have a hard time," added Holder, who recently published a book, "Chutes, Beer, & Bullets," recounting some of those close calls. "I've been good at compartmentalizing it, and not thinking about it. But I lost a friend like that. It was the one inch that killed him."

'It could have been me'
That buddy was Army Spc. Jacob Lowell, 22, a 173rd Airborne trooper who had been in Afghanistan for two weeks when his unit clashed with enemies armed with small arms and grenades on June 2, 2007.

Courtesy Jesse Holder

Jacob Lowell, left, is pictured with a fellow soldier. Lowell was killed in action after a bullet narrowly missed his protective armor.

"All my friends, all at one time, they got wiped out," said Holder, who was not part of that mission. "A lot of our guys didn't make it home. My good friend did die by a narrow margin. The bullet went right above Jacob’s protective armor."

The feeling dubbed "survivor guilt" is a sentiment that Dr. Harry Croft, a San Antonio-based psychiatrist, has often heard expressed during his conversations with more than 7,000 veterans diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

"I've heard lots of stories, including: 'I was so close, it could have been me.' For some, it's almost like they're saying: 'I feel worse about that than if I would have died.' So they bring home this terrible, burdensome guilt," said Croft.

Recovery can be helped by "learning to reframe that event — not to forget it, but to be able to understand it in a different way," Croft said. 

Therapy can include coaxing veterans to talk about — and eventually accept — the notion that "in the heat of war, a lot of things happen, things you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy," Croft said.

What's more, combat includes the mathematical equation that thousands of deadly projectiles are whizzing back and forth, up and down; some hit vehicles; some hit trees or rocks or dirt; some hit people, and breeze an inch past human flesh.

'There's a reason I'm here'
Former Army helicopter pilot Joe Baginski has lived more than 40 years since a Vietnam mission during which he nearly was wounded or killed so often in the span of just five minutes, he can't even calculate the number of near misses. But he's put his own survival into healthy — and folksy — perspective: "I must have been smiling just right because I never got a scratch."

In November 1968, Baginski, then 21, hovered his chopper at about 75 feet in thick foliage as other men on board dropped crates of ammunition to U.S. soldiers who were running low on bullets amid a battle with a far larger North Vietnamese force. The helicopter's tail rotor spun inches from branches thick enough to bring down the craft. At the same time, North Vietnamese Army troops fired on the chopper. Bullets pierced the floor. The co-pilot was struck in the arm. A sergeant major was hit in the foot. The instrument panel and numerous gauges — directly in front of Baginksi — were obliterated in the barrage. When the ammo drop was complete, he carefully maneuvered the bird up and through the jungle canopy.

"I have no idea how many rounds we had hit on the inside of that helicopter," Baginski said. "But there had to be at least a dozen that struck that instrument panel and fragments were going anywhere. I don't know how close I came but it had to be pretty close."

For soldiers who beat heavy odds to survive harsh battles, finding deeper meaning in their post-military lives can help them deal with nagging wonders about why they came home when buddies did not, Croft said.

"They decide: 'I guess there's a reason I'm here.' That can be the impetus to move forward with life," Croft said. 

That's a sentiment embraced by John Bennett, who was dropped by a sniper's bullet in Iraq in 2005. The bullet entered his right side, shattered two vertebrae, fractured a third, and cost him his colon, his spleen, half his pancreas and his ability to walk.

"An inch to the left, it would have deflected off my ballistic armored plate and I would have been fine. And an inch to the right, it would have hit my liver and it would have more than likely killed me," said Bennett, a former infantry soldier who lives in Cascade, Mont. 

"In the earlier stages of my recovery it was a daily thought: Half inch left and I wouldn't be in this situation. And I still think about it periodically. But, I don't dwell on it," Bennett said. "I am a firm believer in everything happens for a reason. I don't know what the reason was for me to stay alive and be in this wheelchair, but it was for something. Maybe it was to help with articles like this that help others believe they can move forward, no matter what their situation is. Who knows?"

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Why do some people reject the existence of PTSD?

The topic is touchy. Even asking the question is slammed as irresponsible.

“Why on Earth would you try to put out something that states combat PTSD isn't a true affliction? Or even try to debunk it? Or to put questions into the minds of society? In the first 155 days of 2012, we lost 154 men,” Amy Cotta, an author and the mother of a Marine wrote in an email to NBC News. Her message arrived minutes after she learned NBC News was seeking to interview a PTSD denier.

Despite exhaustive scientific studies that have explored the symptoms, causes, diagnoses, and prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder, hardcore skeptics remain.

They exist within the military, where some leaders openly call PTSD a mental weakness, according to mental health advocates. David Weidman, who did two tours in Afghanistan and was diagnosed with PTSD, said all of his senior non-commissioned officers advised him not to seek treatment, instead suggesting he “just put your head down and keep going” in order to maintain any chance at a promotion.

They exist within the veteran community. Kevin R.C. “Hognose” O’Brien, who operates a blog called “WeaponsMan” and identifies himself as “a former Special Forces weapons man,” wrote in July that PTSD was a “quack” diagnosis, “invented” to clump “any odd and many normal behaviors.” He added: “If a vet is wound up tight? PTSD! If he or she is calm? Hypercontrolling due to PTSD! Lose weight, gain weight, maintain weight, those are all PTSD markers. Get in fights? PTSD, natch. And avoid fights? Well, clearly it's .... are you starting to get the idea?” O’Brien declined to be interviewed for this story.

And they exist within medicine. In late September, Washington, D.C. psychiatrist Dr. Joseph Tarantolo authored an op-ed piece titled: “PTSD, The Grand Scapegoat.” In it, Tarantolo described PTSD as a “pseudo-diagnosis” and held that “the PTSDer gets an enormous amount of pseudo-sympathy.” On Friday, Tarantolo’s voicemail message said he was out of the country on vacation.

To Afghanistan veteran Weidman, most people who so stridently dismiss PTSD have simply failed to read the available scientific literature on the subject and are, he said, “uneducated.”

But Weidman acknowledged that different people possess varying degrees of mental “resiliency,” underscoring the slippery nature of diagnosing anxiety disorders. That means, he added, that if an entire platoon collectively endures the same moment of extreme combat violence, not every platoon member will ultimately feel the symptoms of post-traumatic stress. According to the Mayo Clinic, those signs can include “flashbacks, nightmares and severe anxiety, as well as uncontrollable thoughts about the event.”

“There are people who can experience something who have no side effects. It could be that person (who ends up being a denier),” said Weidman, a student at Penn State-Lehigh Valley. “Or it could be the person who is extremely uneducated and chauvinistic, who says a guy who gets diagnosed with PTSD ‘is not being a man.’ You’re going to have a perfect storm within the individual who’s going to be that outlier, who says: ‘It doesn’t exist.’

“Or, it could be the person who actually has post-traumatic stress, who is not seeking help, who is more living up to society’s ideal male image of being strong and being resilient,” he added. “Those people going to make even more noise.”

Mental health experts say the occasional repudiation of PTSD is merely an extension of the larger societal taint associated with anxiety or mood disorders.

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“It comes back down to the stigma of mental illness,” said Jean Teichroew, spokeswoman for the Anxiety and Depression Association of America. “Military members also are afraid to speak out because it’s seen as a weakness. The VA has programs to try to combat that, too. But when you have a sergeant who doesn’t think you should be afraid of a bomb going off near you or seeing a dead body, that’s another issue.”

Still, the rate of diagnosed PTSD cases among Iraq and Afghanistan veterans is higher than the rate of cases associated with men and women who served in past conflicts. That abrupt spike has sparked an ongoing debate within American and British academia as to how common PTSD truly is among military personnel and veterans.

“The suffering of people with PTSD is very real whether we label it an ‘anxiety disorder’ or not. As for the skeptics, some of them may believe that a proportion of veterans without the disorder may report symptoms to secure service-connected disability compensation payments for PTSD,” said Harvard University psychology professor Richard J. McNally. He has penned more then 320 publications on anxiety disorders, including PTSD.

“According to (Department of Veterans Affairs) data reported late last spring, 45 percent of all veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan have applied for service-connected disability compensation, and 31 percent have secured it already. This figure includes all forms of medical problems, however, not just PTSD," McNally said. "The percentage of veterans of World War II and Vietnam who obtained disability compensation is 11 percent and 16 percent, respectively.”

In 2011, the VA listed the three most common service-connected disabilities among veterans receiving federal compensation that year: tinnitus (ringing in the ears) at 10.9 percent, hearing loss at 7.5 percent, and PTSD at 5.3 percent.

Is PTSD being over-diagnosed in post-9/11 veterans?

“Yes. I think it is,” said Simon Wessely, vice dean of academic psychiatry at King’s College in London. “I think that despite the formal criteria, there is a confusion sometimes (about) the normal emotional responses to war — my father still has nightmares about his World War II service in Royal Navy and he is 87, but he doesn't have PTSD.

“I also think that, for example, depression often gets under diagnosed, and substance misuse also,” Wessely said. “Our evidence also shows, for example, that quite often the triggers for what becomes labeled as PTSD is not combat exposure but actually a reflection of problems back home. It is important that we remember that not every mental health problem in theater is PTSD."

Despite the loose diagnoses or cases of outright PTSD fraud, to those in medicine and the military (post and present) who deny PTSD altogether, Wessely offers three final words: “They are wrong.”

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As email becomes the norm and fewer people use traditional mail, the U.S. Post Office in Westminster, Calif.’s Little Saigon neighborhood is an anomaly.

Consider it an unofficial hangout of the world’s oldest, largest, most well-established Vietnamese-American community. It’s a place where nearly 10,000 transactions still take place each month and Global Express Service recently outsold every other U.S. Post Office in the country.

"People feel like this is home," said Raymond Tran, who’s going on his 21st year at the office. "They need help and I’m here to help."

Here, hundreds of customers skip larger, closer and less-busy post offices across Southern California to connect with the Vietnamese-American community in Little Saigon.

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They send care packages around the world, especially Vietnam, and across the country to their Vietnamese relatives. They also send critical immigration paperwork.

For Tran, known for his high-pitched, infectious laugh, becoming a postal worker has been a goal since he was a teenager.

"We left for freedom," Tran said of his escape from Vietnam when he was 14. "We lost communication with my parents, my brother."

Tran spent a year in a refugee camp in Malaysia wondering if his parents, still in Vietnam, survived. He anxiously waited to hear his name during mail call, hoping for a letter from his parents.

Few letters arrived. Tran later learned the letters had been lost in the mail, and he decided then to dedicate his life to making a difference.

"I have a dream in Malaysia that one day I will be a mailman or something to deliver the mail. Everybody happy to get a piece of mail," he said.

Thirty-five years later, not losing mail remains a priority for Tran, who is married with two adult children who graduated from Southern California universities.

"Nobody helps me except here," Robert Ho, of Santa Ana, said when asked why didn’t go to a closer post office. "He helped me get my package back. The package lost in the mail was worth $500, and he got it back.”

Nearby businesses also value the unlikely hangout. Michael Vo moved his insurance business next door 20 years ago and said he has no regrets.

Tran’s supervisors also laud his performance and have filled his workplace drawers with awards for outstanding service.

"Customers value the service they get from employees at this office, especially Raymond Tran," U.S. Postal Service spokesman Richard Maher said.

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Residents of Tolar, Texas, attend a candlelight vigil Wednesday at the old Tolar High School football field to honor hometown Army Special Forces soldier Sgt. 1st Class Riley G. Stephens.

When No. 2,000 fell last weekend in Afghanistan, journalists were keeping count. But is the nation keeping up?

Sunday marks the 11-year anniversary of the first American missile strikes against terrorist and Taliban targets inside Afghanistan. The U.S. military death toll has ticked ever slowly upward from the war's launch in October 2001 as a globally watched counterattack to 9/11 through the height of the Iraq War when service members in Afghanistan darkly dubbed their own battleground “Forgot-istan.”

Last Saturday, Sgt. 1st Class Riley G. Stephens, 39, was shot and killed by an Afghan National Army soldier at a highway checkpoint in Wardak Province. The Airborne Special Forces member had three children and a wife. Residents in his tiny hometown, Tolar, Texas, gathered Wednesday night on the local high school football field, burning candles in his honor.

According to The Associated Press, Stephens was the 2,000^th U.S. service member killed in Afghanistan, the type of historic landmark that gets the media’s notice.

/ USASOC News Service

Sgt. 1st Class Riley G. Stephens

But if the simple cold arithmetic of his passing didn’t get your attention, you’ve got company. Although 68,000 U.S. troops remain in that war zone, the majority of Americans have mentally moved along, military experts say, to the point where such tragic notches rarely rate a mention at the supper table and barely raise more than a momentary blip in the Twitter-sphere.

“I don’t think it ranked very high” in the nation’s consciousness, said Michael O'Hanlon, senior fellow with the 21st Century Defense Initiative and director of research for the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution. “Thoughtful people – even if they have made up their minds about the war – they just want to commemorate it the same way we commemorate Veterans Day or Memorial Day. It merits a little bit of response in that regard. But beyond that, it elicits almost no new policy debate whatsoever."

“A 2,000^th fatality does not affect people's (personal) calculus on mission feasibility or the desirability of one policy option over another. It’s just going to be a sad milestone,” O’Hanlon said.

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Perhaps that’s partly because America’s lengthiest war has not generated the fatal pace of past military conflicts. While 181 U.S. service members have been killed, on average, per year in Afghanistan, the annual death rates for American troops in three previous wars were higher to exceedingly higher – Iraq: 498 per year, Vietnam: 4,850 per year, and Korea: 12,300 per year.

The U.S. military plans to finish a withdrawal of most U.S. troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2014.

“Of course, 2,000 fatalities these days really means 20,000 wounded because we’re keeping so many wounded people alive,” said O’Hanlon, who describes himself as “a supporter of the mission” in Afghanistan. “So, I think the numbers are pretty high in many ways."

“The fact that the country has sort of tolerated them, even though we’re still unhappy about still being in this war, is a testament to the fact that they are not huge,” he added. “Most people are not losing sons and daughters and brothers and sisters in this war. And that may explain why we’re still all sort of more or less against it and yet tolerating it. We have a presidential campaign in which there’s no real pressure to get out and yet everybody wants to get out.”

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Beyond that, giving special commemoration to the 2,000th service member to die in Afghanistan seems somewhat disrespectful to the 1,999th U.S. troop to die there -- someone whose life story and profound sacrifice may get far less acclaim. Meanwhile, the first casualties of the conflict get shoved deeper into the nation's collective memory, said Paul Rieckhoff, chief executive officer and founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, a nonprofit group with more than 200,000 members. 

"The larger concern we have is with that general disconnect," Rieckhoff said. "Obviously somebody was just killed in action there and that person should be remembered and celebrated. But we’ve also got to remember there are widows who have been dealing with this since 2001. They still need support and their families need care and their kids need to figure out how they’re going to school. The price those families pay impacts generations." 

"Most Americans aren't constantly thinking about Afghanistan. It’s not always in the papers. It’s at the end of very few news broadcasts. Maybe there is some fatigue in the general population," Rieckhoff said. "But I also think there’s some paralysis: They don’t know what to do about it. So, what we simply try to tell them is just make sure you remember the families."

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