GARMSIR, Afghanistan—The morning after Chad Wade died, nobody wanted to walk point.
The Marines in Cpl. Wade's squad no longer had to imagine what would happen if they stepped on a buried bomb. Now they had seen it, and the fresh memory of their friend's shattered legs froze them in place.
When their squad leader, Sgt. Albert Tippett, lined them up for their next patrol, no one would pick up the metal detector used by the point man to clear a path through the mines.
It was, Sgt. Tippett knew, the moment his men would either keep fighting or succumb to fear and loss. So he handed the metal detector to the man who was hurting most: Cpl. Wade's best friend.
That moment, and those that followed, epitomize the new approach to combat stress that the Marine Corps wants to institutionalize. Faced with a wave of mental-health problems among returning troops, the Corps is training young Marines—down to corporals and sergeants—to sniff out combat stress among their peers on the front lines and tackle it directly on the field of battle.
"The closer they are to their buddies, and the company they trained and deployed with, the better chance you have of returning them to combat," says Col. David Furness, commander of 1st Marine Regiment.
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