The words of Staff Sgt. Darrell Ray Griffin Jr. leap off the pages of this week’s U.S. News & World Report. It’s as though the Fort Lewis soldier has come back from the grave to personally narrate the stories of his gruesome battles in Iraq.

Griffin left behind journals and e-mails about his Army experience. In one passage he tells of a day when he encountered one dying child and bleeding Iraqi villager after another. Finally, a grade-school-age boy wound up dying in the arms of a dead man. “I witnessed so much carnage on this particular day that words and descriptions of the horror would become trivial in attempting to paint a picture of what I saw,” Griffin wrote later.

Throughout two tours of duty, Griffin’s inner landscape was altered by this war’s violence. Had he survived, Griffin likely would have joined the ranks of U.S. military members returning home with symptoms of psychological trauma. He also may have developed full-blown post-traumatic stress disorder, which has afflicted many war veterans.

These troops suffer vivid flashbacks of the horrors of war, lose their sense of connection to their family and friends and feel a recurring sensation of danger, resulting in insomnia, nightmares and irritability. They may explode easily and find it impossible to concentrate. This anxiety disorder often shows up within three months of returning from war but may not surface until later in life.

Last week a new Institute of Medicine and National Research Council report said the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs uses outdated and uneven methods of assessing veterans for this disorder. It also criticized the VA’s methods for setting disability compensation levels.

Men and women like Griffin make unfathomable sacrifices to fight this war. We owe those who survive combat the proper care that will allow them to re-enter civilian life as fully as possible.

Even before his first tour of duty ended in April 2005, Griffin wrote to his father, “I will not be right for some time when all of this is over. I have done some things that will haunt me for a long time to come and pray that G-d will forgive me for having done them.”

His fellow soldiers deserve scientific, evidence-based assessment and treatment when they return home with the bloody images of this war still tormenting their minds. They need therapists trained in the current best practices. In addition, the VA must give special attention to the needs of female members of the military who are more likely to return from war traumatized by sexual assault.

Today mental health experts look ahead and predict PTSD cases will burgeon as soldiers return home from Iraq and Afghanistan. They forecast a significant public health crisis for years to come.

Griffin died after a sniper’s bullet hit him March 21. Yet his words live on to point out the terrible emotional costs of this war. We cannot ignore them.