Thank You for Your Service (11 page)

He ignores them.

“Montana Bear Attack Survivor Played Dead” is another, and that’s the one he reads until he makes a decision to answer his ringing phone.

In Washington, D.C., meanwhile, in conjunction with the release of the suicide report, the army is holding a press conference.

“General, you’ve been looking at this for a long time now. You’ve overseen this report. The army today, your bottom-line assessment: How good a job is the service doing at preventing suicides?” a reporter asks. “Are they doing a better job today than they did fifteen months ago when you started this task force?”

“Well, I happen to believe we are,” says Peter Chiarelli, the army’s vice chief of staff, who has come armed with charts and statistics about the 242 soldiers who killed themselves the previous year.

“Sir, how did the army get so far behind the curve on all of this?” another reporter asks.

“What in simple language does the army need to do?” another asks.

“So everybody understands this is a priority now?” another asks.

“That’s exactly right,” Chiarelli replies, and of all the answers he gives, this is the most wishful by far.

The fact is that suicide prevention, and the wider issue of mental
health, has never been the most urgent of priorities in the army, and if there’s any single person who knows this, it is Chiarelli. Before becoming the vice chief of staff, he was in charge of all the ground forces in Iraq during a time when fighting was nearing its worst. That was the priority, the fighting, and if there was a medical priority, it was getting injured soldiers back into the fight. Only after he came home and was promoted to vice chief of staff did he begin paying close attention to mental health issues when he was assigned to look into the rising suicide numbers. He had other assignments, too. Force modernization. Dealing with the budget. He understood that mental health was a back-burner issue. But soon he was spending half of his time on it as he realized how strained and ineffective the system had become.

Soldiers were breaking apart but were reluctant to ask for help because of the stigma, and in some cases the consequences, of doing so. For those who did ask, there was a shortage of therapists and an over-reliance on medication that led to secondary issues of addiction. As the number of military suicides for the first time rose above the rate for civilians, Chiarelli would say to anyone who would listen, “I’ve got to try to change the
culture
,” and to that end he began traveling to army posts around the country, including, one summer day, Fort Riley for the dedication of the WTB.

There, after the ribbon cutting, where the guests included Adam, who had never seen a four-star general before, Chiarelli was asked by an interviewer about the significance of the day. “I think a facility such as the one behind me shows our total commitment to our wounded warriors and our willingness to do everything we possibly can,” he said, and his earnestness made an overly rosy answer seem entirely believable, at least momentarily.

That earnestness is what always has separated Chiarelli from the other generals who have been running these wars. The pleading in his voice as he practically begs soldiers about to deploy to “please, please,
please
” ask him any questions they might have, the emotion he makes no attempt to hide as he tells their commanders, “If you do anything, help me eliminate the stigma,” the furrow lines in his forehead, the way his eyes droop a little at the edges—all of it suggests someone with wounds under his
skin. And now there is the way he is throwing himself at this impossible assignment.

His wife, Beth, says this isn’t so, that there are no wounds to speak of. Yes, she mentions to people at a dinner party one night, he weirdly leaves cabinets open all the time now, and drawers, and he never did either before going to Iraq, but that’s probably because he’s gotten used to being followed around by an aide. And yes, he’s become a more impatient driver since coming home, even irritated at times, but who doesn’t get impatient in Washington traffic?

“What you see is what you get. He’s really not that complicated,” she says. She taps her forehead. “Like a slab of meat,” she says, laughing.

And maybe he is that and that’s all there is to it. But there is also the story of his first deployment to Iraq, when he was a division commander who in the course of a year lost 169 soldiers. One by one, he wrote their names and hometowns on index cards that he carried in his pocket until there were too many to fit. He attended all of the memorial services and wrote 169 condolence letters in 365 days. But the worst part may have come later, at home, when it was time to erect a memorial, and he was approached by some of his junior officers who wanted 168 names on the memorial, not 169.

“The greatest regret of my military career was as Commanding General of the 1st Cavalry Division in Iraq in 2004–05,” he later wrote of the decision he made. “I lost 169 soldiers during that year-long deployment. However, the monument we erected at Fort Hood, Texas, in memoriam lists 168 names. I approved the request of others not to include the name of the one soldier who committed suicide. I deeply regret my decision.”

By the time he wrote that, he had become the vice chief of staff. When he had gone back to Iraq a second time, he had hoped to be put in charge of the entire war—ground, air, the overall strategy—but that wasn’t how it worked out. Now, as Vice, he had his war at last. “This is it,” Beth says. “This is his contribution.” His war would be the after-war, and one of his first acts as its commander was to convene a monthly meeting of a type never before held at the Pentagon, with roots in his regret.

“Joe, I hope you’ve had coffee,” he says now, beginning one of them,
talking one afternoon by video linkup with a general in Korea, where it is 4:00 a.m. “Okay. You’re on.”

“Sir, we have a really unfortunate one here,” the general, Joseph Fils, replies. “I’ll let Mike Tucker talk us through the details.”

“Sir, this is Mike Tucker. Can you hear me?”

“I can, Mike,” Chiarelli says.

“Okay,” Tucker says. “Sir, he was actually a married soldier, living off post with a professional girl who worked down in the ville. This is a case, sir, where the chain of command thought they knew that he was involved in this type of behavior and counseled him, but they had nothing definitive. So when they first heard of it, they counseled him on it, and yet he continued to pursue this. Another NCO at another unit actually engaged him and told him this was not the right thing to do, you have a wife and a child back in Texas, you shouldn’t be doing this type of activity, and on the first of March, when he actually committed the offense, he had, according to her, had sexually assaulted her, and he felt as though she had cheated on him because that was obviously her business, and he told her, quote, unquote, ‘You will watch me die.’ And so he strung himself up on a door hinge, standing on a table, kicked the table out from under his legs, and as much as she tried to put the table back under his legs, he kept kicking her until he died. A very unfortunate incident, sir, for this young soldier.”

“Okay, Mike,” Chiarelli says when Mike has finished, and after a brief discussion about what lessons can be learned from such a soldier, with twenty-eight more suicides to get through in two hours, he moves on to a general in Iraq who will tell him about suicide number two.

“Ladies and gentlemen, the Vice.”

Another meeting, another month, another twenty-four suicides to review. Chiarelli walks into a conference room where those invited to the meeting rise to their feet as he looks embarrassed and tells them to sit. He takes his own seat at the head of a long conference table with a nice military shine. The curtains are drawn. The
SECRET
sign is lit. The video screens are linked to army posts around the world, where other
officers, surrounded by their own staffs, sit at their own tables, waiting to be called on to talk about a particular suicide that happened under their watch.

The setting for this meeting is the Gardner Room, a Pentagon conference room that was named in honor of a Vietnam War soldier named James Gardner, who died on his twenty-third birthday and was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. According to the award citation:

Left out of the citation, but cited elsewhere, were Gardner’s final words. “It’s the best I can do,” he is supposed to have said after being shot in the chest four times, and the question for the ages, or at least those gathered in the Gardner Room forty-five years later, is why some soldiers become James Gardner and some become the soldier whose final words are “You will watch me die.”

They are, by military measures, an impressive group: a few colonels here and there but mostly generals, and not just one-stars, either. Every high-backed leather seat is filled with an army success story. They are the achievers, the ones who got in and rose up and kept rising until they were one day invited by the vice chief of staff of the army to learn about some of the others who didn’t rise, who if they were in this room would look at the rows of medals and see their own failures, and the rows of water glasses and see shards of opportunity to slide across their wrists. No one would prefer to be here, not when you get down to it. It is a brutal, depressing meeting. At the end, people always walk out looking stunned. But here they are anyway, ready to go, as Chiarelli starts to talk to them about what they might do.

“I think if you go back, I think you’ll see that in the last fourteen or fifteen days, we’ve had about fifteen suicides,” he says. “Now one of the things I think you can do to help your soldiers is not necessarily focus on suicide as much as you need to focus on the high-risk behavior. High-risk behavior is found once an individual enters the phase and starts to go deeper into that phase because that, in most of these cases, is the precursor for a suicide or a suicide attempt. If we were to focus our efforts there, not just when an individual says he or she is going to hurt themselves, but when they notice that they are relying on alcohol too much, that they have a prescription drug dependency, involved in risky behavior of any type, that we take the action necessary. And I’d ask you all to redouble your efforts to do that.

“And with that I’ll stop, and let’s head into today’s cases.”

“He was a nineteen-year-old male who hung himself” is the way the first case is described.

“Age twenty-five, he was a previously deployed combat veteran. The soldier just recently moved back in with his mother and subsequently jumped off a three-hundred-foot bridge.”

“Age eighteen, suicide by hanging.”

“He was twenty years old and committed suicide by automotive exhaust.”

“He was twenty-three years old, self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. This incident occurred in a Dumpster behind a store.”

“Twenty-three, non-deployed, generally called happy, upbeat, positive, had just reenlisted on a Thursday, was on a four-day reenlistment pass and killed himself Saturday by gunshot.”

“This happened sometime I think between two and four in the morning. Nobody in the house hears anything and his mother actually finds him but not until late morning.”

“She committed suicide by hanging herself.”

“He committed suicide by hanging himself. It was clear by the documentation he left behind it was a very deliberate effort. He documented in a personal diary and a series of letters exactly what he was doing, to include binding his legs in such a way that if he chickened out at the last minute or had second thoughts he couldn’t help himself.”

Again and again, Chiarelli reminds people: “We are more interested in the lessons learned from the cases and what you are doing about it than necessarily the details, although they are helpful. Okay?”

But the details keep coming, and vary so widely that it is difficult to learn much at all. Some of the soldiers had been in combat, some had never deployed. Some had been diagnosed with PTSD, some hadn’t. Some had never gotten mental health treatment, but just as disturbingly, half of them had. A few things
were
clear. Soldiers with repeated deployments were more likely to commit suicide. Married soldiers were less likely. Guns and liquor were a bad combination. More time at home between deployments helped. A soldier in an explosion who talked about what he experienced before going to sleep did better than a soldier who didn’t. But explanations for these things remained as elusive as patterns, and patterns remained as elusive as remedies. What
was
the cause for the high rates—not just of suicide but also of PTSD? Were the rates measurably higher than in previous wars? If so, could the cause have something to do with the military now being an all-volunteer force, and a disproportionate percentage of those volunteering coming from backgrounds that made them predisposed to trauma? Could it have nothing to do with the soldier and everything to do with the type of war now being fought?