May was the worst month in a year for suicides and potential suicides in the active-duty Army, the Pentagon announced Thursday.

The Army reported 21 potential suicides among active-duty soldiers in May. One of them has been confirmed; the other 20 are under investigation. In the past, most of the cases investigated were confirmed to be suicides.

May's number was the highest for one month since June 2010, which at the time was the worst month in recent memory for Army suicides.

There were also 21 potential suicides among active-duty soldiers in June 2010, but that month also saw 11 potential suicides among the Guard and Reserves. Last month, there were six potential suicides in the National Guard and Reserves, so June 2010 remains worse.

The latest data continue to show that suicide statistics in the Army frequently fluctuate. April saw 16 potential suicides, more than twice the number in March, when seven cases were investigated.

The Army says it's tough to know why suicide cases increase even as the entire Pentagon is trying to solve the problem. But spokesman Lt. Col. Steve Warren said, "a spike in cases does not necessarily mean a trend."

GREENFIELD, Iowa — Joel Klobnak still looks like a proud Marine — from his buzz-cut hair down to the red-white-and-blue prosthetic that replaced the leg he lost in Iraq in 2006.

But he feels forgotten.

The Department of Veterans Affairs slashed his disability pay two years ago over what he says was a misunderstanding. The former Marine is trying to support a family of four on $1,557 a month while he waits to hear whether the government will reinstate full disability pay for his gruesome injury and the mental anguish that accompanied it.

His appeal is trapped in a paperwork backlog that is delaying payments to injured veterans across the country.

“There’s thousands of guys. It’s not just me. It’s a joke,” he said. “I just don’t understand why it takes so long.”

More than thousands of veterans are in his straits. The backlog of veterans’ disability cases has been growing for years, and it now stands around 1 million despite Congress’ repeated attempts to fix the problem.

The VA said earlier this month that it would comment on Klobnak’s case but then said it couldn’t come up with a timely response.

*snip*

Government doctors determined that he couldn’t work because of the pain in his leg and the post-traumatic stress disorder that troubled his mind. The determination entitled him to full disability payments, which amounted to $3,103 a month. But in April 2009, he received a letter telling him his payments were being halved because he missed an appointment with a VA doctor.

Klobnak said he didn’t know about the appointment, which was to review his disability status, because the notice had been sent to an old address.

He believes the pay cut also might have been partly from an offhand comment he made during an earlier VA interview. He told a VA worker that he would like to get back to work within a few months. He says now that he was describing a wish, not an ability, but the distinction might have been lost in the paperwork.

Klobnak appealed the pay cut, and he was granted a hearing in June 2010. He said a veterans’ appeals judge in Washington presided via a video link to the Federal Building in Des Moines. When Klobnak was done explaining his side, the judge told him she would consider the matter and get back to him.

He said he was told to expect a decision in three to six months. It’s been a year.

CAO LANH, Vietnam — Col. Jack Jacobs, a Medal of Honor recipient for "conspicuous gallantry" during the Vietnam War, returns to Vietnam for the first time in over 40 years and meets his former adversary.

All the good guys have families, backgrounds and personalities. The bad guys are faceless.

When you live in close proximity to people, when you are jammed together into small defensive positions, when your lives depend on each other, you know everything about them. They become discrete characters, and each is like no other in the world. They are your family. When they are wounded, you bleed, and when their young lives are extinguished in the violence of armed combat, a piece of you dies as well.

But the enemy is an amoebic mass, a single-minded monolithic inhuman force. Killed in action, they are only a logistical problem, and you get a feeling of them as individuals only when you capture them, scared, wounded and shivering. They are no longer part of the enemy organism, and it is only then they come to life as people.

I recently returned to Vietnam, for the first time in about 40 years, to see my old battlefield in the Mekong Delta. And on that day I also visited a man named Pham Phi Huang.

He and I first met on March 9, 1968, but we never saw each other. He was the commander of a force of more than 250 Viet Cong who had lain in wait for my battalion of South Vietnamese soldiers to walk innocently into the kill zone of a large and deadly ambush.

Another officer and I were with the two lead companies of our battalion. We were with South Vietnamese soldiers, but combat had made us closer than any countrymen could be: We were brothers.

I lost friends, comrades and a lot of blood that day, and it changed me forever.