Combat Stress Takes Toll

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.

"Truthfully I don't think Brian had a grip on why things were happening the way they were," said his mother, Janice Minnella.

For a while, Sgt. Brian Rand enjoyed being assigned to Fort Campbell and working as a helicopter mechanic.

But that was before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the war on terror.

Before Iraq.

As the war dragged on and Rand was sent first to Kuwait, then Iraq, he told family members that he felt torn about the things he saw.

Once while waiting for a helicopter to land in the Green Zone in central Baghdad, Rand waved at a man he knew. The man turned and Brian saw that half of the man's face was ripped off.

Brian later told his sister he was shocked by how white the bones looked under the flesh.

Then one day, while standing guard near the Green Zone, Rand killed an Iraqi man.

"The spirit of the man that he killed didn't leave him, it kept harassing him," Somdahl said of her brother. "He said 'This guy is following me around in the mess hall. He's trying to kill me. I told him to leave me alone but he says he wants to take me with him.'"

To help ease his nightly terrors, April would log onto her computer and talk to her brother over the Internet until he fell asleep.

She ended every conversation the same way:

"Sleep well baby boy. Tomorrow is a new day."

Rehearsing suicide

But when he returned from Iraq in 2005, Brian Rand was a different man, his sister said.

His voice was distant. His jokes were morbid. He moved as if trapped in a nightmare.

At his family's behest, he finally sought counseling at a hospital near Fort Campbell. He later told his sister the waiting room was full of soldiers who went in for 10-minute visits with a psychiatrist and came out with prescriptions for pills.

The psychiatrist spent nearly two hours with him and wrote an evaluation that suggested he not return to battle, Somdahl said. But that paperwork never made it to his commanding officer. That Sunday, Rand was told his unit was deploying back to Iraq.

His widow, Dena, said the military told her it has no record of the psychiatrist's recommendation that he not redeploy to a combat zone.

Months after he returned to Iraq in November 2005, Rand picked up a fork, stabbed a fellow soldier in the neck in the mess hall, then crawled into the fetal position and sobbed. The soldiers in Rand's unit picked him up and carried him over to a phone, dialed his sister and placed the phone to his ear.

"I asked why did you do that?" Somdahl said. "He said 'I thought I was a vampire.' I said, 'You're going to get a punishment, but maybe they'll let you come home.'"

They didn't, at least not right away.

When he did return in August 2006, he answered "yes" to questions on a post-deployment health assessment form that asked if he was having nightmares, mood swings and felt hopeless, according to his wife, who has copies of his medical paperwork. However, military officials told her that they have no record of requests for a mental evaluation.

Rand's demons followed him home.

"He wanted to hibernate with me, he started to be more clingy," Dena Rand said. "One day he got upset and he started punching himself and gave himself a black eye. He went to formation with that black eye."

Eventually Rand's thoughts turned to death.

"He had a rifle that his wife bought for him," his mother said. "He had been rehearsing (the suicide) by putting it to his mouth and threatening his wife that he would do it. I asked him if he was serious, he said no."

He also became increasingly violent toward his wife, who was two months pregnant when her husband committed suicide.

"He became a lot more emotional. Two weeks before the incident, he became violent to me," said Dena Rand. "He was very remorseful about that."

Weeks later, his body was found steps from the place where he and his wife had married.

'A double funeral'

Strained by grief and grasping for reasons, his family blamed one another for his death.

Dena was accused of being unsupportive, April of meddling. His family and his wife barely speak now and most of his family members, including his mother, have never met his infant son, Brian, now 9 months old.

"I felt it was a double funeral. I lost my son and I lost my grandson," Minnella said. "I would love to hold that baby more than I could ever express."

Somdahl has become a vocal critic of the military's treatment of Iraq war veterans and has taken her brother's tale to dozens of media outlets.

Dena Rand is now focused on seeking justice for her husband. She'd begged the military to investigate his death and has called her congressional representatives for help.

"I want someone to tell me why this happened," she said.

So far, there's been no word.

But above all, Sgt. Brian Rand's family blames the military.