#2 When Suicide Becomes Inevitable

Our 2nd pick for you also looks at a group of Americans left behind. It’s a story out of the New York Times on a marine battalion with a high suicide rate. These men now consider suicide a combat fatality after the fact. When these men seek help for PTSD and suicidal thoughts they’re told to wait years for ill-equipped therapists. As in battle these soldiers have come to rely only on each other, using a google doc and social media they try to combat more suicides by watching out for each other and physically showing up when someone posts something considering. These men served our country and have come home with traumatic memories no one knows how to handle. They need people to listen to their stories and offer more support. This is an important read and a call to action.

“When the suicides started, I felt angry,” Matt Havniear, a onetime lance corporal who carried a rocket launcher in the war, said in a phone interview from Oregon. “The next few, I would just be confused and sad. Then at about the 10th, I started feeling as if it was inevitable — that it is going to get us all and there is nothing we could do to stop it.”

*****

In interviews, many Marines from the battalion said they received effective care at the V.A. But many others said they had quit the treatment because of what they considered long waits, ineffective therapists and doctors’ overreliance on drugs.

Six of the 13 Marines from the battalion who committed suicide had tried and then given up on V.A. treatment, discouraged by the bureaucracy and poor results, according to friends and relatives.

*******

For years leaders at the top levels of the government have acknowledged the high suicide rate among veterans and spent heavily to try to reduce it. But the suicides have continued, and basic questions about who is most at risk and how best to help them are still largely unanswered. The authorities are not even aware of the spike in suicides in the 2/7; suicide experts at the Department of Veterans Affairs said they did not track suicide trends among veterans of specific military units. And the Marine Corps does not track suicides of former service members.

Feeling abandoned, members of the battalion have turned to a survival strategy they learned at war: depending on one another. Doing what the government has not, they have used free software and social media to create a quick-response system that allows them to track, monitor and intervene with some of their most troubled comrades.

The morning after Manny Bojorquez tried to shoot himself in 2012, he opened his eyes to sunlight streaming in his window and found the loaded gun on the floor. Through his whiskey headache, he pieced together that his gun had jammed and that he had passed out drunk.

A week later, he stood alongside more than a dozen other Marine veterans at Mr. Markel’s funeral in Lincoln, Neb. The crack of rifles echoed off the headstones as an honor guard fired a salute.

Mr. Bojorquez offered his condolences to Mr. Markel’s mother after the funeral. He thought about how life seemed increasingly bitter. The thrill of combat was gone. Only regrets and flashbacks remained.

Mr. Markel’s mother pressed something into Mr. Bojorquez’s palm at the funeral, a spent brass shell casing from the honor guard. Promise me, she said to him, that you will never put your mother through this. Mr. Bojorquez promised.

That began a three-year odyssey in which the deaths of his friends weighed on Mr. Bojorquez, who tried repeatedly to get help from Veterans Affairs but ultimately gave up.

“I was lost then. I still am kind of lost,” he said in a recent interview. “I was just trying to look for something that wasn’t there. I was trying to look for an answer that I don’t have — that no one does.”

*******

In Afghanistan, after the men of the 2/7 realized the scope of their mission, they began calling themselves “the Forgotten Battalion.”

In the spring of 2008, they deployed from their base at Twenty-Nine Palms, Calif., to an untamed stretch of Afghanistan surrounding the city of Sangin.

Their job was to pacify a Taliban stronghold the size of Massachusetts that had never been controlled by coalition troops, or anyone else. Opium poppies grew in fields as vast as those of corn in the Midwest. Roads were pocked with the rusting hulks of Soviet tanks destroyed in a different war.

The Marines were spread out in sandbag outposts, hours from reinforcements, and often outnumbered. With the Pentagon focused on the surge in Iraq, equipment was scant. There was no dedicated air support, few mine-sweeping trucks, often no refrigeration. The only reliable abundance was combat.

“Machine guns, mortars, rockets, RPGs, I.E.D.s, constant fighting. It was like the Wild West,” said Keith Branch of Austin, Tex., who was a 20-year-old rifleman who patrolled a village called Now Zad. 

In that village alone, two Marine platoons fired more than 2,500 mortar rounds, called in 50,000 pounds of explosives from aircraft and killed 185 enemy fighters, battalion documents show.

Many of the Marines had deployed to Iraq just eight months before. At least two had been shot by snipers and one was hit by a grenade in Iraq, but they were redeployed to Afghanistan anyway. All three later killed themselves.

By the end of the deployment, 20 Marines in the battalion had been killed and 140 had been wounded. Many lost limbs. Some were badly burned; others were so battered by blasts that they can scarcely function day to day.

Others returned unscathed, but unable to fall in with civilian life. Members of the battalion say what they brought home from combat is more complex than just PTSD. Many regret things they did — or failed to do. Some feel betrayed that the deep sacrifices made in combat seem to have achieved little. Others cannot reconcile the stark intensity of war with home’s mannered expectations, leaving them alienated among family and friends. It is not just symptoms like sleeplessness or flashbacks, but an injury to their sense of self.

“Something happens over there,” said Mr. Havniear, whose best friend from the battalion tried suicide by cutting his wrists after returning home, but survived. “You wake up a primal part of your brain you are not supposed to listen to, and it becomes a part of you. I shot an old woman. I shot her on purpose because she was running at us with an RPG. You see someone blown in half, or you carry a foot. You can try, but it is hard to get away from that.”

After Mr. Bojorquez returned home, he started having a recurring nightmare. He was patrolling with his squad when bomb blasts killed everyone but him. As the dust cleared, he looked up to see enemy fighters surging forward. He often sat up in bed, thinking he was choking on his own blood.

*****

“They may have 10 times the risk, they may have 100 times, and we don’t know, because no one has looked,” said Michael Schoenbaum, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

On one mission, Mr. Guerrero, then a 20-year-old lance corporal, was a machine-gunner atop a truck at the lead of a supply convoy. He said he was good at finding I.E.D.s and over six months had spotted almost a dozen that the battalion was able to avoid. But one day, the truck hit a big one, and the explosion flung him against his gun turret.

Mr. Guerrero crawled from the smoking vehicle, his head spinning. He watched his sergeant’s Humvee roll in to help. Then suddenly, another blast swallowed the sergeant’s truck in smoke. The truck shot up 10 feet and came down with a crash, falling to its side. Then, chaos. The driver was trapped and screaming, with his arm caught under the wreckage. A medic in the back was pinned by a seat crushed against the truck’s ceiling. The sergeant was dead.

Before Mr. Guerrero could get to his feet to help, enemy fire started thudding into the ground around him. He spotted his machine gun in the dirt, where it had landed after being blown out of the truck, and with his vision still blurred, he began to return fire.

Two other Marines, Cpl. Jastin Pak and Lance Cpl. Tanner Cleveland, scrambled into the wreckage. Mr. Pak crouched over the driver, shielding him until a line of Marines could lift the truck enough to free his arm. Mr. Pak and Mr. Cleveland emerged covered with blood, clutching the wounded, then went back for the remains of the sergeant. The platoon was out of body bags, so they stuffed the sergeant’s remains into a sleeping bag.

When it was all over, Mr. Guerrero picked up a cigarette that had been blown out of one of the trucks and lit it. After he exhaled, he noticed it was spotted with blood. He smoked it anyway.

Since that day, Mr. Guerrero has blamed himself for the ordeal and has tried to kill himself three times. Mr. Cleveland, 26, of Chicago, also tried suicide, and Mr. Pak, of Oceanside, Calif., hanged himself in November.

“You come back and try to be a normal kid, but there is always a shadow on you, a dark shadow you can never take away,” Mr. Guerrero, now 28, said in an interview at his home in San Diego.

“Now, when I meet someone, I already know what they look like dead. I can’t help but think that way. And I ask myself, ‘Do I want to live with this feeling for the rest of my life, or is it better to just finish it off?’ ”

******

Cpl. Clay Hunt had been a sniper in the battalion. After he got out of the Marine Corps in 2009 after his second tour, his disenchantment with the war grew, and he sought treatment from Veterans Affairs for depression and PTSD.

He became an outspoken advocate for young veterans, speaking openly about his problems and lobbying for better care for veterans on Capitol Hill. In 2010, he was featured in a public service message urging veterans to seek support from their comrades.

At the same time, Mr. Hunt was fighting to get adequate care at the V.A., encountering long delays and inconsistent treatment, according to his mother, Susan Selke of Houston.

Friends said Mr. Hunt had felt directionless. “There is so much isolation and lack of purpose. We came home from war unprepared for peace, and we’ve had to find a new mission,” said Jake Wood, who was also a sniper in the 2/7. “He struggled to do that.”

Mr. Hunt shot himself in his apartment in Texas in March 2011. He was 28.

After years of lobbying by his family and veterans’ groups, Congress in February passed the Clay Hunt Suicide Prevention for American Veterans Act, which provides additional suicide prevention resources for Veterans Affairs.

“When he died, all the guys, we couldn’t understand it,” said Danny Kwan of San Gabriel, Calif., an ex-corporal who served two tours with Mr. Hunt. “He had done exactly what he had been fighting against.”

At the time of Mr. Hunt’s suicide, Mr. Kwan was fresh out of the Marines. One night when he was drunk and despondent over a recent breakup, he put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. He jerked the gun away as it fired, sending the bullet through a wall.

“At the last moment I decided I wanted to live,” Mr. Kwan said. “We all have our demons. Some more than others.”

No one knows whether the battalion’s suicide rate is abnormally high or a common trait of fighting units hit hard by combat, because no one monitors troops over time. In an era of Big Data, when algorithms can predict human patterns in startling detail, suicide data for veterans is incomplete and years old by the time it is available. The most recent data is from 2011.

The Department of Veterans Affairs and the Pentagon say they have introduced a new system, called the Suicide Data Repository, that is faster and more complete.

“Might that be a good idea? It might be a good idea,” he said. “But it’s not in our ability to achieve. It’s not our mission.”

*******

Once a fearsome team leader in a deadly sector of Sangin, he was now working as a night manager at a sandwich shop. He was one of several men from the battalion who had changed their lives radically in search of peace, growing a bushy beard and taking a vow of nonviolence.

“Real talk, guys, let’s make a pact, right here,” Travis Wilkerson said. “I don’t want to go to any more funerals. Let’s promise to reach out and talk. Get your phones out, put my number in. Call me day or night. I’m not doing this again.”

His twin brother, Tyler Wilkerson, who had served in the same platoon, stood next to him. After the Marines, he had become a Buddhist and joined Greenpeace. He said he agreed.

Then a three-tour former corporal named Elias Reyes Jr. stepped forward. He had a long ponytail and a degree in philosophy from the University of California, Los Angeles. He was hoping to attend medical school.

Enough of this, he said. One by one, the others joined the pact.

Just over a year later, Mr. Reyes killed himself. In combat, he had been flattened by explosions several times and seen friends maimed and killed.

Back home, he was getting counseling at the V.A., family members said, but faced delays and struggled to find a therapist who he felt understood him. In April 2014, he hanged himself in his apartment.

As the news rocketed across Facebook the next day, Mr. Cleveland, who had tried suicide, thought, “It’s to the point now where it’s like, ‘Who is next?’ ”

******

Less than two weeks after the Google spreadsheet was created, a text message popped up on the phone of a Marine veteran named Geoff Kamp. It was just after 11 p.m. on a Wednesday in November.

Mr. Kamp, who had turned in early to be up for his shift with the Postal Service, reached for the phone next to his bed, read the text, turned to his wife and said, “I’m going to be gone for a while.”

Photo

 
Charles Gerard, a member of 2/7, by Wildcat Creek, a place he likes to visit near his home in Rossville, Ind.CreditTodd Heisler/The New York Times 

An hour earlier, a 27-year-old Marine veteran, Charles Gerard, had changed his Facebook profile photo to an image of a rifle stuck in the dirt, topped with a helmet — the symbol of someone killed in action. In a post, he wrote: “I can’t do it anymore.”

After surviving an ambush in Afghanistan where several Marines were injured, Mr. Gerard said, he was treated for PTSD by the Marine Corps. But when his enlistment ended in 2011, so did his therapy. He tried to continue at the V.A., but long delays meant it was two years before he got any treatment, and even then, he said, he found it ineffective.

He moved back to rural Indiana and worked at factories, but his anger frayed ties with his friends and family. News that comrades from the battalion had killed themselves pushed him deeper into despair. The night he changed his profile picture, his girlfriend had left him.

Within minutes, the battalion’s response system kicked in. Mr. Havniear in Oregon spotted the Facebook post and called a Marine in Utah who had been Mr. Gerard’s roommate. They called Mr. Gerard immediately but got no answer. Mr. Gerard was parked in his pickup by a lake outside of town with a hunting rifle in his lap.

Desperate to head off another death, they opened the Google spreadsheet and found Mr. Kamp, 90 minutes away. Within 10 minutes, he was in his truck, speeding north through the late autumn corn stubble.

Mr. Kamp had never met Mr. Gerard. But he, too, had been injured in a firefight, and been dogged by guilt and anger afterward.

“Every one of the guys that’s died, I see myself in them,” he said later in an interview at his home. “It’s like you are always just one bad day away from that being you.”

At the lake, Mr. Gerard propped his rifle against his head, closed his eyes and pulled the trigger. There was a click, then nothing.

He took a deep breath and checked the chamber. It was loaded, but the round was a dud.

He decided the universe was telling him it was not his time to die. He tossed his remaining ammunition in the lake and drove home.

A few minutes later, Mr. Kamp knocked on the door.

They talked on the couch most of the night about relationships, work, mortgages, combat, guys who did not make it home and the cold feeling after Afghanistan that you are alone even when surrounded by other people.

“We’ll make it through this,” Mr. Kamp told him.

Mr. Kamp eventually called the sheriff’s office for help, took the rifle for safekeeping and stayed until paramedics took Mr. Gerard to the veterans hospital in Indianapolis.

In March, members of the group used their informal network to intervene with another battalion member in Louisiana. The jury-rigged system is far from ideal, they said, but they are determined to make it work.

Mr. Gerard’s experience shows, however, that the system is only as good as the V.A. treatment it is intended to connect to. The night he went to the psychiatric ward at the Indianapolis veterans hospital, he said, he waited and waited for a doctor to see him. After 24 hours, he gave up and checked himself out.

“There was no one there for me,” Mr. Gerard said in a quiet voice during a recent interview at his home after a 12-hour night shift at an auto plant.

He looked pale and gaunt, a far cry from the tan and muscular Marine in photos from Afghanistan. Garbage and unwashed dishes were piled up around him. The curtains were drawn.

He crushed out a cigarette. The V.A.? “I’ve had nothing to do with them since,” he said.

Where to Call for Help

The Department of Veterans Affairs maintains a hotline for veterans in crisis that operates 24 hours a day. Call 1-800-273-8255 and press 1. Online, visit veteranscrisisline.net/chat, or send a text message to 838255.

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