A Unit Stalked by Suicide, Trying to Save Itself

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: Cpl. Joshua Markel, a mentor from his fire team, who had seemed unshakable. In Afghanistan, Markel volunteered for extra patrols and joked during firefights.

Back home 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, Bojorquez surveyed 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.

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.

"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.

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 Markel's funeral in Lincoln, Nebraska. The crack of rifles echoed off the headstones as a uniformed honor guard fired a salute.

Lacking Data on Suicides

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 first few suicides struck the men of 2/7 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.

The Marines tended to chalk up these first suicides to a 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, Hunt was fighting to get adequate care at the VA, encountering long delays and inconsistent treatment, according to his mother, Susan Selke of Houston. Hunt shot himself in his apartment in Texas in March 2011. He was 28.

Fighting the Label

Increasingly, members of the battalion felt that at home, as in Afghanistan, they were still forgotten. So they looked for help from the people they counted on in Afghanistan: their fellow Marines.

In November, Keith Branch of Austin, Texas, who was a 20-year-old rifleman in the 2/7, 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," 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.

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.

Kamp 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."

Within minutes, the battalion's response system kicked in. Havniear, the former lance corporal, in Oregon spotted the Facebook post and called a Marine in Utah who had been Gerard's roommate. They called Gerard immediately but got no answer. 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 Kamp, 90 minutes away. Within 10 minutes, he was in his truck, speeding north. Kamp had never met Gerard.
At the lake, Gerard propped his rifle against his head, closed his eyes and pulled the trigger. There was a click, then nothing. 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, 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," Kamp told him.