BUCKHANNON, W.Va. -- Thursday afternoon, the big, quiet men changed out of their lined flannels and coveralls and left the mine early, four hours before the end of their shift. A sign in the Sago bathhouse, posted a week earlier shortly after fire boss John Boni committed suicide, directed the men to their next stop, a group counseling session. There, they could talk about the trauma they'd all survived and rarely acknowledged.

OK, Paul Avington thought. If the folks at International Coal Group, owner of the Sago mine, asked him to go, he would oblige. But he wouldn't say much. Maybe if Ron Grall, the one talker among them, spilled enough feelings, Mr. Avington could say his part with just a few head-nods. He agreed to the counseling session, mostly because his job inside the mountain had felt joyless since mid-March, when the mine reopened. This allowed him to cut a few hours from his workday.

Every day, he worked on the beltline, hauling coal. The tedium bothered him, but the memories bothered him more. He walked daily through the Second Left section, where, on Jan. 2, an explosion trapped 13 men, killing 12 of them.

"I think about it every time I'm in there," Mr. Avington said. After the accident, most accounts talked about the one survivor. One, that's what they always said on television. But 29 men had been under that mountain. Those working that day near the First Left section, about 1,000 feet away from the Second Left, felt seven or eight seconds of hurricane-strong wind that pelted them with debris. A few weeks ago, one of the miners found a half-piece of Denver Anderson's hard hat, ripped apart by the force.

These 16 men, figuring they'd never make it out, climbed to the surface before the first minister or politician or camera crew arrived. They became, in that sense, the one part of the story that escaped. All they got were the scars.

Mr. Avington, 59, with a gray beard and thick hands, followed the directions to the session. It had been planned, he figured, simply because of the suicides: Mr. Boni's on Sept. 23, and Bill Chisolm's on Aug. 29. Mr. Chisolm had worked above ground at Sago, as a dispatcher, but the men knew him just the same.

Mr. Avington swung his brown Ford pick-up, with the black Sago ribbon on the back, into the gravel parking lot.

A strange place for counseling, he thought. He was two miles outside Buckhannon, in front of a house with white siding. A local realty company used the spot as its headquarters. A hand-drawn sign inside directed miners to the chairs that had been set up for them.

Mr. Avington knew all of men there, same as he'd known John Boni. "A good man," the guys said of Mr. Boni, which meant he seemed a lot like them, at least before things became complicated. He was a fair boss, quiet and calm, never combative. The two counselors inside the white house talked about Mr. Boni, and the men shared their surprise about his suicide. They agreed that Mr. Boni, who'd retired after the Sago accident, never talked about himself enough to give a clue this was coming.

With loved ones, he kept phone conversations short. He preferred life face-to-face. Even more so, he preferred life on the golf course, where a seven-iron could do the talking. He belonged to Barbour Country Club, a nine-hole spot guarded at the entrance by a trailer. He played with his usual foursome of friends, or with his son-in-law, or with his only grandson, even when November rolled around and the sky threatened snow.

So who knows why he shot himself? He left no note. His daughter, Dawn Magrini, wished not to connect his death to Sago, though he'd lost his best friend, George "Junior" Hamner, on the other side of the blast. Mr. Boni, 63, of Volga, faced difficult questions during the Sago investigation. He'd detected low levels of methane in the mine days before the explosion, and though he'd notified a supervisor, nothing came of it.

Just a footnote?
Still, Mr. Boni knew the risks of his job. He'd seen them first-hand. Years before, he lost four toes during a rock fall. As a teenager, his girlfriend lost her father in a mining accident. When she heard the news that day, she ran barefoot through the neighborhood until she found John. Later, Vickie became his first wife.

"My father knew the dangers," Ms. Magrini said, "because he had lived through it."

Almost 1,000 people attended Mr. Boni's visitation. But most of the miners declined to go. Mr. Avington didn't show up, for reasons he doesn't know.

"I guess I should have gone," Mr. Avington said.

They were together, all 16 men, before sunrise Jan. 2. The next hours would cast them off in different directions, some toward new jobs, others toward new fears, but that morning, they changed into their work clothes and waited for the mantrip to carry them almost two miles into the mine. Mr. Avington sipped a cup of coffee. Roger Perry talked with his brother-in-law, a miner who'd soon be trapped deeper underground. Mr. Boni received instructions about a pump he had to fix.

Just before 6:30, the men working at First Left stopped at the switch in the tracks. Mr. Perry hopped out of the cart to flip the switch so the crew could proceed to their spot in the mine. The 13 guys at Second Left had gone in, minutes ahead.

Then everything happened. A blast of hot air and rubble and dust roared from deeper in the mine. "Something is blowing up," one man screamed. The air hit the men so hard it hurt. Owen Jones lost his hard hat. Debris shredded the skin on Mr. Anderson's face.

The force stopped after several seconds, but nothing settled. The miners couldn't see their feet through the dust, many said during interviews with investigators. They scrambled for the intake area, where they could find breathable air. Mr. Jones' carbon monoxide detector blared its warning call, telling them they had minutes to escape. The group followed the tracks as well as they could, leaving the worst area. Mr. Jones thought about his brother, trapped deeper within.

"I'm going to stay in here and see what I can do," he told the other men. Mr. Avington begged him not to.

He refused to listen. As the other men retreated to safe ground, Mr. Jones joined the first small rescue crew and attempted to save the miners from Second Left. By the time he gave up, realizing the carbon monoxide would soon kill him, it was 10:30 a.m. The headaches would stick with him for more than a week, right through the funeral of his brother, Jesse.

Months passed. Sago reopened. The men of First Left learned how their experiences fit into Sago history, near death only a footnote.

"When this all started, all the people, they did a lot of talking about Randal [McCloy]," Mr. Avington said. "Saying he was the only survivor. They didn't talk too much about us. Because, oh, yeah, we felt it."

In large part, that's what they talked about Thursday afternoon. They sipped glasses of water. Mr. Jones and Mr. Perry didn't attend -- both worked now at the Imperial mine -- but neither thought counseling had much benefit, anyway. At first, Mr. Jones had returned to work at Sago, but thoughts about the accident followed him, and he asked for a transfer, saying he could no longer take it.

"Your nerves stay shot," Mr. Jones said. "Every single noise, you jump. Know what I mean? You're on edge all of the time. ... Counseling, I went once. They told me this and that, but I said, 'Just leave me alone.' It don't help you any. You just go on living. If you want to live."

"I wanted to get away from it all, but I can't," said Hoy Keith, another miner. "Too many memories. It brings tears to your eyes. Too many good men. Too many memories."

Not asking for help
Mr. Avington returned to Sago, despite his family's pleas not to. He would work for three more years, he figured, and retire. Still, the blast has shaken his routine. He heads for bed these days at 8 p.m., setting the alarm for 4 a.m., yet he often spends hours tossing and turning before finding sleep. Sometimes, watching The Weather Channel helps. "It's got that music to it," he said, chuckling. Then he sighed, drawing his voice lower. "You know how it goes."

At least before the recent counseling session, many of the surviving Sago miners had chosen to handle their problems by leaning on spouses or fellow miners. Days after the blast, counselors arrived in Buckhannon. The city opened rooms in the Stockert Youth Center on Main Street. Joan Harman, the executive director there, hoped a sign posted outside, plus news releases and notices on TV stations, would spread the word. Grief counselors from a center in Morgantown, W.Va., planned to be there every Tuesday for as long as necessary.

"But only three people showed up, total. All juveniles," Ms. Harman said. The sessions ceased after several weeks. "I guess," she said, "people have a hard time admitting they need help."

The suicides of Mr. Boni and Mr. Chisolm reawakened those in the community to Sago's consequences, even with the funerals and investigations and hearings now over. ICG spokesman Ira Gamm said last week that the company still offered free counseling to the miners. ICG also provided a statement, offering prayers to the families of Mr. Boni and Mr. Chisolm.

Last week, the state provided a $35,000 grant to the Appalachian Community Mental Health Center, based in Elkins, W.Va., to fund counseling in the Sago community. Though federal officials had provided the grant in April, the state mistakenly sat on the money for months.

"There's a worry that we didn't get it mobilized more quickly," said John Law, a West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources spokesman. "Particularly since we have put some distance behind [the accident], people start to have occurrences of post-traumatic stress syndrome. Maybe that didn't happen right after the fact, but now they're having trouble sleeping, and they're wondering why."

"Sago was definitely a trauma," said Dr. William Fremouw, a psychologist at West Virginia University and author of "Suicide Assessment."

"And then you have potential things like survivor guilt: Why did I survive and they didn't? It doesn't make somebody commit suicide out of the blue. But it can be a last straw."

During the summer, before the suicides, Mr. Avington received a telephone call. The Rev. Wease Day introduced himself. He was the pastor at Sago Baptist Church, where, in the days after the accident, families waited for news. Mr. Day, in speaking to the 16 miners who had made it out, noticed an uncomfortable feeling among them, as if they'd been pushed aside.

So he called every one of them, and explained the idea for a memorial. The main section, chiseled into dark stone tablets, would commemorate the 12 who died. Another bench, facing the tablets, would be inscribed with the name of Mr. McCloy.

But what about two more benches? Eight names on each. Paul Avington, Owen Jones, Roger Perry, Ron Grall, John Boni.

"From what I sensed, it seemed like they had been kind of left out," Mr. Day said. "They were in that mountain, too."

On a Sunday in August, they arrived at the monument for its dedication. Some appreciated the gesture, and called it an honor. Others found it strange. Names inscribed in stone generally belonged to dead men.

"But, I don't know," Mr. Jones said. "It's like your spot is already marked for you. You ain't going to live forever. I guess we're all just walking dead men."