Dwyer honors his brother at LI Marathon

It's not exactly easy to run a half marathon, and it's even tougher to do it with 55 pounds of gear on your back.

Yet, that's exactly what Brian Dwyer, a Suffolk County police officer, did Sunday at the Long Island Marathon. Dwyer ran while wearing 55 pounds of battle gear, which he said is nothing compared to the burden many veterans carry after they come home with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Dwyer and his friend, Christopher Delaney, both ran the half marathon wearing fatigues and gear in order to raise money and awareness for Long Island veterans. Dwyer also ran the race in memory of his brother, Joseph Dwyer, who suffered and died from complications form post-traumatic stress disorder after serving in Iraq. They ran with a dozen other members of their group, Long Island 9-1-1 veterans, and finished the race in 2 hours and 45 minutes.

Dwyer became involved in the Long Island veterans support group after the death of his younger brother. Though 11 years apart, the two were close, having grown up in a tight-knit family of six kids in Mount Sinai.

"My brother, Joe, was just your normal, dopey Irish-Catholic boy that went off to war," Dwyer said. "The kind of kid they make a movie out of. He was a good kid with a heart of gold."

Joseph enlisted in the Army the day after the Sept. 11 attacks, and served as a medic in the earliest days of the Iraq War. A photo of Pfc. Dwyer heroically cradling a wounded Iraqi boy was one of the earliest images to come out of the war and won a Pulitzer Prize for Warren Zinn of the Army Times.

Brian said his brother was not the same person when he returned.

"The laughter was gone," he said. "It's a weird injury, PTSD."

One time, Brian said, he remembers asking his brother how many people he treated when he was in the war.

"He told me the ones he remembered was the ones he couldn't, the ones he couldn't save," he said. "That's where he was coming from. He saw stuff no human should have to see."

Joseph battled the disease for years and died of a drug overdose in 2008.

Delaney, a Lindenhurst resident and a Coast Guard reservist, returned from Iraq in January of last year. He ran the half marathon last year in full gear to help raise money for the Long Island Veterans 9-1-1 group. This year he did it again, wearing the uniform of Steve Clark, the founder of the group who recently died from cancer.

All told, the group raised more than $200,000 last year to help local veterans, Delaney said. The nonprofit charity helps veterans from any war with things as basic as rent assistance to helping lend support for those suffering.

Said Delaney: "Right now, we're losing more and more guys to PTSD. These are wounds you can't see. We have so many people suffering from the effects of this. These guys saw something that regular people will never be able to understand. We've got people dying from this right in our own backyard."