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Monday, May. 26, 2008

Combat stress takes toll

"My brother was afraid to ask for help. And when he finally did ask for help, the military let him down."

WASHINGTON -- Until the day he died, Sgt. Brian Rand believed he was being haunted by the ghost of the Iraqi man he killed.

The ghost choked Rand while he slept in his bunk, forcing him to wake up gasping for air and clawing at his throat.

He whispered that Rand was a vampire and looked on as the soldier stabbed another member of Fort Campbell's 96th Aviation Support Battalion in the neck with a fork in the mess hall.

Eventually, the ghost told Rand he needed to kill himself.

According to family members and police reports, on Feb. 20, 2007, just a few months after being discharged from his second tour of duty in Iraq, Rand, of Jacksonville, N.C., smoked half of a cigarette as he wrote a suicide note, grabbed a gun and went to the Cumberland River Center Pavilion in Clarksville, Tenn. Just before dawn, he stared out at the park where he and his wife, Dena, had married.

Then he placed the gun to his head and, at age 26, silenced his inner ghosts.

"My brother was afraid to ask for help," said April Somdahl. "And when he finally did ask for help, the military let him down."

Since the start of the Iraq war, Fort Campbell, a sprawling installation on the Kentucky-Tennessee border, has seen a dramatic spike in the number of suicides and soldiers suffering from severe PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder. The symptoms, which can follow major trauma, include reliving the traumatic events, trouble sleeping, and feeling jumpy and depressed.

In 2007, nine soldiers from Fort Campbell committed suicide, three during the first few weeks of October, said a letter to base personnel from Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Schloesser, commander of the 101st Airborne Division.

Fort Campbell spokeswoman Cathy Gramling said that, to the best of her knowledge, that number is correct. The Pentagon said it does not track suicides by military installation.

"As our soldiers fight terrorism, the sacrifices asked of them and their families have increased significantly," Schloesser said in the letter. "Regrettably, under such circumstances, it is natural for our people to feel the stress of these demands and to be overwhelmed at times. Tragically, these pressures too often end in suicide."

Schloesser is currently deployed to Afghanistan.

A recent study by the nonprofit Rand Corp. found that 300,000 of the nearly 1.7 million soldiers who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan suffer from PTSD or a major mental illness. Those conditions are worsened by lengthy deployments and, if left untreated, can lead to suicide, said Lisa Jaycox, one of the study's lead researchers.

Nationally, there's been an upswing in soldier suicides. In 2006, 99 active-duty troops killed themselves. That's the highest rate in nearly three decades, the Pentagon said.

The Army said that more than 2,000 active-duty soldiers tried suicide or suffered serious self-inflicted injuries in 2007, compared with fewer than 500 such cases in 2002, the year before the United States invaded Iraq. Last month, senators sharply criticized the Department of Veterans Affairs after CBS reported that internal VA e-mails suggested the agency has been lying about the number of veterans who have attempted suicide. One internal e-mail put the number at 1,000 a month, more than the 800 a year the department publicly claimed.

Seeing the bones

Soldiers deployed from Fort Campbell have served up to 15-month stints and have fought in such heavy combat zones as Basra, Mosul and Al Anbar province. Some, like Brian Rand, have been deployed three or four times since the war began.

The Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs have grappled with the increase in suicides by adding thousands of additional mental health workers and staff members to help families and troops cope with the effects of prolonged combat. They have also encouraged deployed troops to support each other through a buddy system.

But sometimes troops fall through the cracks.

Rand's family says a culture that often attaches a stigma to troops who seek help with depression and a stop-loss policy designed to keep soldiers on the battlefield ultimately led to his death.