After
the sixth suicide in his old battalion, Manny Bojorquez sank onto his
bed. With a half-empty bottle of Jim Beam beside him and a pistol in his
hand, he began to cry.
He
had gone to Afghanistan at 19 as a machine-gunner in the Marine Corps.
In the 18 months since leaving the military, he had grown long hair and a
bushy mustache. It was 2012. He was working part time in a store
selling baseball caps and going to community college while living with
his parents in the suburbs of Phoenix. He rarely mentioned the war to
friends and family, and he never mentioned his nightmares.
He thought he was getting used to suicides in his old infantry unit, but
the latest one had hit him like a brick: Joshua Markel, a mentor from
his fire team, who had seemed unshakable. In Afghanistan, Corporal
Markel volunteered for extra patrols and joked during firefights. Back
home Mr. Markel appeared solid: a job with a sheriff’s office, a new
truck, a wife and time to hunt deer with his father. But that week,
while watching football on TV with friends, he had wordlessly gone into
his room, picked up a pistol and killed himself. He was 25.
Still
reeling from the news, Mr. Bojorquez surveyed the old baseball posters
on the walls of his childhood bedroom and the sun-bleached body armor
hanging on his bedpost. Then he took a long pull from the bottle.
“If he couldn’t make it,” he recalled thinking to himself, “what chance do I have?”
He pressed the loaded pistol to his brow and pulled the trigger.
Mr.
Bojorquez, 27, served in one of the hardest hit military units in
Afghanistan, the Second Battalion, Seventh Marine Regiment. In 2008, the
2/7 deployed to a wild swath of Helmand Province. Well beyond reliable
supply lines, the battalion regularly ran low on water and ammunition
while coming under fire almost daily. During eight months of combat, the
unit killed hundreds of enemy fighters and suffered more casualties than any other Marine battalion that year.
When
its members returned, most left the military and melted back into the
civilian landscape. They had families and played softball, taught high
school and attended Ivy League universities. But many also struggled,
unable to find solace. And for some, the agonies of war never ended.
Almost seven years after the deployment, suicide is spreading through the old unit like a virus. Of about 1,200 Marines
who deployed with the 2/7 in 2008, at least 13 have killed themselves,
two while on active duty, the rest after they left the military. The
resulting suicide rate for the group is nearly four times the rate for
young male veterans as a whole and 14 times that for all Americans.
The
deaths started a few months after the Marines returned from the war in
Afghanistan. A corporal put on his dress uniform and shot himself in his
driveway. A former sergeant shot himself in front of his girlfriend and
mother. An ex-sniper who pushed others to seek help for post-traumatic stress disorder shot himself while alone in his apartment.
The
problem has grown over time. More men from the battalion killed
themselves in 2014 — four — than in any previous year. Veterans of the
unit, tightly connected by social media, sometimes learn of the deaths
nearly as soon as they happen. In November, a 2/7 veteran of three
combat tours posted a photo of his pistol on Snapchat with a note
saying, “I miss you all.” Minutes later, he killed himself.
The
most recent suicide was in May, when Eduardo Bojorquez, no relation to
Manny, overdosed on pills in his car. Men from the battalion converged
from all over the country for his funeral in Las Vegas, filing silently
past the grave, tossing roses that thumped on the plain metal coffin
like drum beats.
“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.”
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.
Their system has made a few saves, but many in the battalion still feel stalked by suicide.
“To
this day I’m scared of it,” said Ruben Sevilla, 28, who deployed twice
with the 2/7 and now works for a warehouse management company called
Legacy SCS near Chicago. “If all these guys can do that, what’s stopping
me? That’s what freaks me out the most. I haven’t touched a gun since I
got out of the Marine Corps because I’m afraid to.”
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.”
He
was wearing a bracelet etched with the names of four Marines: one who
died on the battlefield and three who died by their own hands at home.
‘The Forgotten Battalion’
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.
The
I.E.D.s, or improvised explosive devices, plagued patrols. The first
convoy arriving in Sangin hit two. In the next two weeks, an I.E.D.
hidden in a bicycle killed a medic, an I.E.D. packed in a culvert killed
three Marines in a Humvee, and an I.E.D. discovered in a dirt lane
killed a specialist trained to defuse the explosives.
Manny Bojorquez spent the tour in a village called Musa Qala, where repeated offensives failed to drive out the Taliban.
One
evening his squad was patrolling single file across a field when the
enemy ambushed it on two sides. As the squad sprinted for cover, Mr.
Bojorquez watched a bullet hit a Marine in front of him, who crumpled to
the dirt. Mr. Bojorquez and another Marine grabbed the bleeding man and
dragged him to a ditch.
Pressed
against the ground, readying his machine gun, Mr. Bojorquez looked over
and saw his teammate Corporal Markel laying down fire — with a steady
grin on his face. Together they showered the surrounding fields and
houses with bullets, providing cover for a medic. But the enemy pressed
harder, another Marine was hit and the outnumbered squad had to pick up
and run.
“It’s funny. I was never scared. You just act. But it stuck with me,” Mr. Bojorquez said.
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.
One Mission’s Toll
Beginning in 2005, suicide rates among Iraq and Afghanistan veterans started to climb sharply, and the military and Veterans Affairs created a number of programs to fight the problem. Despite spending hundreds of millions
on research, the department and the military still know little about
how combat experience affects suicide risk, according to suicide
researchers focused on the military.
Many recent studies have focused on whether deployment was a risk factor for suicide, and found that it was not.
The
results appeared to show something paradoxical: Those deployed to war
were actually less likely to commit suicide. But critics of the studies
say most people deployed in war zones do not face enemy fire. The risk
for true combat veterans is hidden in the larger results, and has never
been properly examined, they assert.
“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.
The
men of the 2/7 overwhelmingly see a tie between combat and their
suicide problem. Not only were all of the men who committed suicide
young infantrymen who struggled with experiences of killing and loss,
they say, but it is possible to trace one traumatic moment forward and
see how those involved are now struggling.
Noel
Guerrero and Manny Bojorquez were best friends in the battalion. As two
Mexican-Americans from the Southwest, they bonded in infantry school
over a love of Mexican hot sauce. In Afghanistan, they would share
bottles sent from home.
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?’
”
Lacking Data on Suicides
The
first few suicides struck the men of the battalion as random. It was
only over time that they came to see the deaths as a part of their war
story — combat deaths that happened after the fact.
Cpl. Richard McShan
died first. He had survived a truck bomb in Iraq before deploying to
Afghanistan. Four months after they returned, in the spring of 2009, he
put on his dress uniform after an argument with his girlfriend and shot
himself in his driveway.
In December 2009, Pfc. Christopher G. Stewart hanged himself from a door in his barracks.
In
April 2010, Shawn Jensen, a sergeant who had just gotten out of the
Marines and moved home to rural Washington State to work in
construction, shot himself during an argument with his girlfriend and
mother.
The Marines tended to chalk up these first suicides to foolish impulses
or prewar problems. Then came the death that shook the battalion, and
prompted many to ask whether something was wrong not just with the men
who killed themselves, but with them all.
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.
But Dr. Harold Kudler, chief mental health
consultant to the department, said the military and V.A. did not share
information that could allow the monitoring of combat units over time.
“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.”
A Pact to Help
In
December 2012, Marines from the 2/7 converged on a small town in the
Central Valley of California for another funeral. A former radioman
named Ufrano Rios Jimenez had killed himself with a shot to the heart.
Mr.
Rios had lost a leg in Afghanistan. Once home, he struggled with PTSD.
But he gave up on treatment at the V.A. and turned to alcohol,
painkillers and eventually heroin, according to his former girlfriend,
Allison Keefer. After the suicide of a friend from the battalion,
Jeremie Ross, in July 2012, he quit work and slipped into a deep
depression.
At
the funeral, Mr. Bojorquez stood with the others from the 2/7 as they
shook their heads and discussed what to do. A battle-hardened former
corporal named Travis Wilkerson spoke up.
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.
“He was very religious, a Catholic,” his sister, Margarita Reyes, said. “To do what he did, he must have been in so much pain.”
News of his death was one more in a mounting pile of problems for Tyler Wilkerson.
After
the Marines, Tyler Wilkerson, also a Californian, became part of a
commandolike team of Greenpeace protesters. The job combined his love of
tactical missions and his vow of nonviolence.
But in March 2013, he was arrested
after he and others trespassed to unfurl giant banners that accused
Procter & Gamble, the household products company, of destroying rain
forests.
In
the months that followed, his girlfriend broke up with him and
Greenpeace fired him, leaving him alone with wartime memories that he
had tried to escape.
He fatally shot himself in October 2014, a few weeks before he was to stand trial for the Greenpeace action.
“He
felt like he had lost everything,” Travis Wilkerson said. “He said his
life looked like this endless mountain he couldn’t see the top of.”
Other deaths soon followed.
A month later, a mortar man who had served three tours at war, Joseph Gellings, killed himself at his home in Kansas.
He
had tried mental health treatment at the V.A., but gave up after delays
and other frustrations, according to his longtime girlfriend, Jenna
Passio. Instead, she said, he drank and became reclusive. She eventually
left him, taking their daughter.
After their breakup, he posted to Facebook, “I’m done with life.” Other Marines texted and called to check on him.
“Disregard guys, everything is fine,” he replied.
A
short time later he shot himself in the head as Ms. Passio looked on in
horror. Realizing he was only wounded, he went into a bathroom in his
home and shot himself again.
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?’ ”
It was the friend who had helped Mr. Cleveland pull body parts from a smoldering Humvee in Afghanistan, Jastin Pak. Three days after Mr. Gellings’s death, Mr. Pak, 27, hanged himself from a pine tree in the mountains west of his home.
On
his desk, Mr. Pak left a completed “stressful incident form” that the
veterans hospital in San Diego gave him on his initial visit a few days
before. It asked him to list events from combat that were causing him
anguish. He filled two pages, starting with the killing of an older man
in Iraq who had been unarmed and finishing with placing the remains of
the dead sergeant into a sleeping bag.
Failed Therapy
After
the eighth suicide in the battalion, in 2013, Mr. Bojorquez decided he
needed professional help and made an appointment at the veterans
hospital in Phoenix.
He
sat down with a therapist, a young woman. After listening for a few
minutes, she told him that she knew he was hurting, but that he would
just have to get over the deaths of his friends. He should treat it, he
recalled her saying, “like a bad breakup with a girl.”
The
comment caught him like a hook. Guys he knew had been blown to pieces
and burned to death. One came home with shrapnel in his face from a
friend’s skull. Now they were killing themselves at an alarming rate.
And the therapist wanted him to get over it like a breakup?
Mr.
Bojorquez shot out of his seat and began yelling. “What are you talking
about?” he said. “This isn’t something you just get over.”
He
had tried getting help at the V.A. once before, right after Mr.
Markel’s funeral, and had walked out when he realized the counselor had
not read his file. Now he was angry that he had returned. With each
visit, it appeared to him that the professionals trained to make sense
of what he was feeling understood it less than he did.
He threw a chair across the room and stomped out, vowing again never to go back to the V.A.
In
recent years, suicide prevention efforts by the Department of Veterans
Affairs have focused on encouraging veterans to go to its hospitals for
help, but a bigger problem could be keeping them there.
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.
A 2014 study
of 204,000 veterans, in The Journal of the American Psychological
Association, found nearly two-thirds of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans
stopped Veterans Affairs therapy for PTSD within a year, before
completing the treatment. A smaller study from the same year found about 90 percent dropped out of therapy.
The
therapies, considered by the department to be the gold standard of
evidence-based treatments, rely on having patients repeatedly revisit
traumatic memories — remembrances that seem to cause many to quit.
Evaluations of the effectiveness of the programs often do not account
for the large number of patients who find the process disturbing and
drop out.
Dr.
Kudler of the Department of Veterans Affairs said data showed that 28
percent of patients drop out of PTSD therapy, but that most veterans
stay in treatment and report improvements.
He
added that dropout is an issue in all mental health care, not just
among veterans, and that the department was constantly trying to provide
alternative types of therapy, like meditation.
Craig
J. Bryan, a psychologist and an Iraq war veteran, said that “the V.A.
has done more to try to prevent suicide than anyone has done in the
history of the human race.” Mr. Bryan, who runs the National Center for Veterans Studies
at the University of Utah, added: “But most veterans who kill
themselves do not go to treatment or give up. They are not interested.
That is the challenge.”
Mr.
Bojorquez tried the system one more time out of desperation. After the
spate of suicides in 2014, he called and said he needed help. The V.A.
had him see a psychologist and psychiatrist.
He
told them that he wanted therapy but no drugs. Too many friends had
stories of bad reactions. One, Luis Rocha, had taken a photograph of all
his pill bottles right before shooting himself.
“We
get it, no drugs,” he recalled them saying. But on his way out, after
scheduling a return appointment in two months, he was handed a bag
filled with bottles of pills. He calmly walked to his car, then screamed
and pounded the steering wheel.
He
wanted to get better, so he started taking the medications — an
antidepressant, an anti-anxiety drug and a drug to help him sleep — but
they made him feel worse, he said. His nightmares grew more vivid, his
urge to kill himself more urgent.
After a few weeks, he flushed the pills down the toilet, determined to deal with his problems on his own.
Fighting the Label
Increasingly,
members of the battalion felt that at home, as in Afghanistan, they
were still the Forgotten Battalion. So they looked for help from the
people they counted on in Afghanistan: their fellow Marines.
In
November, Mr. Branch, who was completing a degree in social work in
Texas, posted a request on Facebook asking the others to enter their
addresses in a Google spreadsheet. That way, if a Marine in Montana was
worried about a friend in Georgia, he could look on the spreadsheet and
find someone nearby to help.
“All
of us are going through the same struggle,” Mr. Branch, now 28, said in
an interview. “If we can get someone there that a guy can relate to, we
hope it will make all the difference.”
The
spreadsheet is part of a wider realization among young veterans that
connecting with other veterans — whether through volunteering, sports,
art or other shared experiences — can be potent medicine.
One
battalion member started an organic farm intended to help veterans heal
by growing food. Another leads trips to bring together veterans with
PTSD. Mr. Wood, 32, the former sniper, founded a national network of
veterans, called Team Rubicon, that provides volunteer relief work after natural disasters.
“We did it because we really wanted to help others,” said Mr. Wood, of Los Angeles. “We soon realized it would help us, too.”
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.”
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.
A Lifesaving Call
After
swearing off the V.A., Manny Bojorquez turned increasingly to friends
for support. Late-night calls and texts with guys from the battalion
seemed to help more than therapy ever did.
He
reconnected with Mr. Guerrero, who still shared his love of Mexican hot
sauce. The machine-gunner was living in California, in his last year of
college, and he had a baby boy.
“The guys we served with, they are the only ones we can really talk to,” Mr. Bojorquez said in an interview.
But
in November, Mr. Bojorquez got a text from Mr. Guerrero that upended
everything. “I don’t think I can do this life anymore,” it said.
Mr.
Guerrero had never mentioned it to others, but he still believed his
sergeant’s death was his fault. If only he had yelled a warning. Or
spotted the I.E.D. He was getting therapy and medication for his
depression, but still often woke up with a deep dread, as if he were
sitting at the principal’s office, waiting to be punished. Every day, he
wore a bracelet etched with the sergeant’s name.
That
night, Mr. Guerrero had been watching television with his wife after
church when something snapped. He crumpled to the floor and backed into a
corner, crying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
He
had not smoked since the Marines, but pleaded with his wife to go out
and buy cigarettes. The panic and guilt were so excruciating that he
decided the only relief was to kill himself. He went onto his porch with
shaking hands to text Mr. Bojorquez to say goodbye.
Mr. Bojorquez called immediately. Mr. Guerrero picked up, sobbing, but after a few words hung up.
A
fear had crept over Mr. Bojorquez over the last year that he was doomed
to watch his friends die one after another until he was the only one
left. At times, he saw it as another reason to kill himself. But it was
also motivation to break the pattern.
He
knew he had to call 911, but hesitated. The call might land Mr.
Guerrero in a psychiatric ward or ruin his marriage, already strained.
Worse, if the police barged in, his friend might go berserk. Someone
could get hurt. But what choice was there?
The
police pounded on the door just as Mr. Guerrero put a handful of pills
into his mouth. He spent the next few weeks in a private inpatient
treatment program for PTSD.
It
was far from a cure. He said he was still deeply depressed and ashamed.
He still slept on the couch instead of in his wife’s bed, and he was
not speaking to his parents. But he was alive.
Six
weeks later, Mr. Bojorquez drove out to visit him in San Diego. The 911
call had not broken their friendship, but it had broken the long
silence in which neither mentioned what he had brought home from war.
They
greeted each other in a hug. During a lunch at a nearby taqueria, Mr.
Bojorquez talked about the night he had put a gun to his head. Mr.
Guerrero talked about watching his sergeant’s Humvee explode and being
so rattled afterward that he did not care that his cigarette was flecked
with blood. They stayed long after the lunch crowd cleared out.
“This is good — us here like this,” Mr. Guerrero told his friend. “It’s the times when I’m alone that I fear.”
They
had found small ways to rebuild their lives. Mr. Guerrero had become a
rabid marathoner and was leading the youth band at his church. Mr.
Bojorquez was studying to join the United States Border Patrol and
playing on a softball team with his brother.
At
dawn the next morning, Mr. Guerrero took Mr. Bojorquez on his favorite
run to the top of a mountain behind his house. He had placed an old
metal ammunition box at the top, where Marines could leave letters and
sign their names. He dedicated it to the men of the Forgotten Battalion.
As they clambered up the trail, they talked about how hard it was to find balance.
“The
death of my brothers consumes me,” Mr. Guerrero said between breaths.
“It gives me this dark energy. I don’t know what to do, so I run. I run
all the time. I pray I never run out of trails to run.”
It
was five winding miles to the summit. When they reached it, the two
stood side by side catching their breath and looking out at the dawn
spreading over the ocean. Mr. Bojorquez hung his arm over his friend’s
shoulder. Hummingbirds zipped through the pink light.
Mr. Guerrero broke the silence.
“I’m glad I got to share this with you,” he told his friend. “I wish I could bring the whole battalion up here.”
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