Still at war, the Army opens a new front: against soldier suicide

Jim Haus barreled down a dusty road to Kuwait, piloting an M816 recovery truck. Sitting behind the wheel of the 5-ton machine, with rockets exploding nearby as the vehicle tore through the desert, Haus wasn't anxious. It was his first charge into combat. It was fun.

A mortar hit close to the truck and dislodged a piece of the hood. Shrapnel knifed through the windshield. Glass caught Haus' upper lip, and metal lodged in his Kevlar vest.

"My buddy looked at my vest and was like, 'Damn, you could have died,' " Haus says. "But there was nothing damaged, nothing bleeding, so I just kept going."

When he joined the Army at 18, Haus wasn't following a legacy of military service in his family. He just wanted to get out of house, get out of Des Moines, Iowa. His first assignment took him to Germany, where he darted through forests and kicked in the doors of old missile silos, practicing urban assault tactics. By the time he was 22, he was ready for the real thing: the Gulf War in 1991.

The fight was lopsided. The Americans' weaponry far outclassed the Iraqis' Russian relics. "We were just slicing through it like butter," Haus says. Even so, the conflict had an unexpected impact on the eager sergeant.

Leaning back in a beige recliner in his Belton home, Haus paws a TV remote control as he speaks. His legs are tightly crossed, but his feet bounce awkwardly. At first, he recalls his Gulf War experience in an excited voice, his eyes wide. Then his expression shifts, and a subtle shadow of nausea replaces the animated look on his face.

"There was this one particular road into Kuwait, where the Iraqi guard and army were trying to flee from the Americans," he says. "We had bombed the shit out of them, basically, and they had left all the vehicles there burning. We had to hook them up and drag them to the side of the road, but the only way to get them to move was to reach in and put them in neutral. Some of the bodies were still in there, burned, bullet-riddled, in 120-degree heat. A body doesn't deal well with that. I remember reaching up inside of one and realizing what a depleted uranium round does to a tank. It causes a nice vacuum that turns everything into Jell-O."

His hands moved through the melted human flesh.

"That was the most devastating," he says.

Haus didn't realize how deeply the war had affected him. "Drinking was my way out," he says. "At the time, I didn't think I needed counseling. To me, if command found out, I would be a marked person. And a marked person doesn't get promotions."

Haus is part of a rapidly growing population of soldiers the Army is now struggling to help: traumatized men and women returning from war and reluctant to seek mental-health care, even as their lives unravel.

In 2008, 140 active-duty soldiers committed suicide. That's 75 percent more than the number in 2003 and the highest rate since the Army started keeping track three decades ago.

Jim Haus was almost one of the casualties.

In a Fort Leavenworth classroom, Staff Group 1D sits around a horseshoe of gray tables heaped with thick textbooks and three-ring binders. These Army officers, all of them majors, have come from different bases across the country to train at Fort Leavenworth's Command and General Staff College, the Army's primary leadership institution. They began the class together in February. On this July day, they're all on a first-name basis, and they aren't shy when they have something to say. The lunch-hour topic is suicide.

Maj. Cynthia Blevins speaks first. "At Fort Stewart, there was a soldier that came to PT formation one morning and shot six soldiers," she says. "He shot the platoon leader, the first sergeant and killed himself. There were signs, but no one took the necessary actions."

Maj. George Bratcher says a soldier in his brigade committed suicide in Iraq. "We're a week away from coming back. Some people had already left, packed their bags — we're going home — and this guy goes into the latrine and puts a bullet in his head," he says.

Maj. Bill Meredith was stationed at Fort Hood, Texas, in November 2008. "The post was averaging a suicide a week," he says. "That's unfathomable."

Unfathomable but not surprising. David Rudd, a professor at Texas Tech University and an expert in suicide, says nobody in the Army anticipated a two-front war that would tax its ranks for more than six years. The combat stress of multiple deployments has created an overwhelming number of soldiers returning from conflict with post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and traumatic brain injury.

"It's arguable that, after all other factors are considered, suicide is the outcome of undiagnosed, untreated or undertreated mental illness," he says.

A 2008 Rand Corp. Study backs up Rudd's thesis. According to Rand's report, nearly 20 percent of soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan reported symptoms of PTSD or depression. Only half of them sought mental-health treatment. The study also suggests that soldiers dealing with PTSD were significantly more likely to think about and attempt suicide.