When the envelope arrived, Windy Horner was talking with her husband, Nick _ Windy on a cell phone, Nick in the Blair County jail.

Windy did not recognize the return address. She feared hate mail; her husband is charged with killing two men and robbing a sandwich shop, and she blames his actions on post-traumatic stress disorder from his service in Iraq, but others do not agree.

"Just because horner went to iraq," read one reader comment on a newspaper Web site, "doesnt mean he shouldnt get what he deserves!!!!!!!"

Now, she wondered: Should she open the envelope? Go ahead, Nick said.

The note was from a complete stranger, a woman named Laurie Claar. It was written on a card decorated with a rainbow and flowers, bearing the message, "Caring Thoughts Are With You."

"I'm not sure what to say to you all except I understand and you all are in my prayers," Claar wrote. "And I don't think bad of Nick as he needs help to deal with PTSD."

Her words reached a young couple sorely in need of encouragement.

"Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. Nick, this is wonderful," Windy said, crying. And Nick, too: "I could hear him tearing up in his voice. It was like, 'Maybe we're not alone in this.'"

They were not. Claar, too, had been devastated by the war come home.

And so began the unlikely friendship of Claar, a 49-year-old grandmother of five, and Horner, a petite blonde the same age as Claar's youngest daughter. Windy Horner has been invited to spend Thanksgiving with Laurie Claar and her family; they are grateful for each other's company.

They are linked by tragedy, yes, but also by a shared conviction that the military does an excellent job of keeping troops alive during combat _ but not so well at keeping them healthy afterward.

___

On April 26, Laurie Claar sat in the darkness next to her son's grave, cradling a doll she dressed in the clothes he had worn as a newborn. She was waiting for the clock to strike 11:04 p.m.

Exactly 25 years before, Matthew Claar had been born.

"I just had to be there at that time," Claar said tearfully. It comforted her, she said, to remember a time when she could still protect her son.

More than seven months before his mother's vigil, fueled by guilt and PTSD, the Marine Corps veteran had pulled the trigger on the 9mm pistol in his mouth.

In Iraq, the young Marine hunted house to house for insurgents, including one Matt shot several times. "Even when Matt told me that, he was shrugging it off," said Matt's father, Roy "Bud" Claar Jr. "But I could see in his face there was more to it than he was letting on."