The Uncounted

One tragic number is known: 

22 veterans kill themselves every day. 

Another is not: 

How many military spouses, siblings and parents are killing themselves? 

What is war's true toll?

The Spouse

Liz Snell looked like the perfect military wife, with a resumé of volunteer jobs that ran three pages long. The truth was she wanted to die.

More than a dozen medals lined a shelf in Liz Snell's home. One was emblazoned with an eagle, another an anchor. Two bore the Red Cross insignia and were nested near a coin commemorating Operation Iraqi Freedom.

People assumed the medals belonged to her husband, Brian, a Marine staff sergeant who was barely drinking age when he deployed to Iraq for the first time in 2003.

His wife rarely spoke up to set the record straight: Those medals were hers.

Liz Snell wasn't the type to step out ahead of her Marine. A good military wife, she believed, fell in line and worked quietly in the background. That's why her volunteer resumé ran three pages long: She was a caseworker for families who needed financial advice. She coordinated job workshops for spouses who had to find new employment every time their warriors changed bases. She helped lead a volunteer program with the armed services branch of the Red Cross.

Liz's medals were tokens of gratitude, small ways of recognizing that she served her country, too -- reminders that America's longest-running wars required military spouses to be strong and brave.

A young, pretty mom with a voice so soft she often sounded like she was telling a secret, Liz weathered five deployments with her husband and knew how to calm other wives. When they were rattled by another deployment, another order to move, an argument with their Marine or some kind of broken heart, she'd say, "Stay on the positive side." Or, "God doesn't hand you something you can't handle."

In a hope chest at her home on Camp Pendleton in California, she kept a memento of her nomination as 2011's Military Spouse of the Year. It was a huge honor in her world. "The nomination itself is an award for me," she told a local news reporter at the time. "It takes qualities of strength and adaptability to thrive within the military spouse lifestyle."

Liz Snell was very convincing. There was nothing she worked harder at than hiding the truth.

Deployment after deployment, all the pressure and fear and weight of obligation had worn her down. The urge to make it stop consumed her. One afternoon, she walked into her bedroom closet with a plan.

Six years later, she remembers it like a dream: Standing outside of herself, she watched her hands as they tied a rope into a noose and slipped it over her head.

Every day, 22 veterans commit suicide.

That number is sadly familiar. It has become a symbol of the cost of war that extends beyond the battlefield.


How military suicide rates compare with suicide rates in the general population has not been analyzed comprehensively, said Bob Anderson, head statistician for mortality statistics at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "It's impossible to be exact about it based on the data we have available," he said. The CDC is working with the Defense Department and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to analyze tens of millions of mortality records in the hope of making that comparison. Anderson expects the project will take at least a year. Comparing the military population with the civilian population is complex, he stressed. One must account for age, sex and race differences in each group and that the military population is ever-changing as people enter and leave the service.

But no one is tracking war's impact on another group: military spouses, siblings and parents.*

Their suicides go uncounted.

The dozens of military family members I interviewed over the past year – many of whom have attempted suicide, contemplated it or had loved ones who killed themselves -- said the cumulative trauma of 12 years of war has left them wrung out and desperate.

Some, like Liz Snell, said the strain of multiple deployments played a role in their despondency. The financial and emotional burden of caring for injured service members wore others down. Some were pushed to the edge in their grief over a death at war.

It's an oversimplification, of course, to say deployments plus stress equals suicide. Most of the family members interviewed were quick to agree that war alone did not break them. Liz Snell said she struggled with depression long before she became a Marine wife.

"Suicide is complicated and complex," said Jacqueline Garrick, who directs the government's Defense Suicide Prevention Office. "The trajectory for suicide is as different as every human being is different.


Jacqueline Garrick's first professional experience with suicide affected her deeply. In the late 1980s, she was counseling a former Marine who had accidentally killed another Marine in Vietnam. Her client killed himself and addressed his suicide note to her. "There was a lot of turmoil in his life," she remembered. "But it got me really wondering..."

"There are associated factors in relation to suicide, but there are no causal factors. It cannot be said that one thing – service, deployment – caused someone to commit suicide."*

But tracking those deaths could help answer these questions: Why is this happening? What is the true cost of war?

Alarmed by the number of veterans and active warriors taking their own lives, the Pentagon opened the Defense Suicide Prevention Office in 2011. Garrick, a clinical social worker who has counseled suicidal troops, told me legal and logistical obstacles have prevented the military from tracking family members' suicides.

HIPAA, the congressionally mandated health privacy act, prohibits medical professionals from sharing patients' information. And death records are not consistent from state to state in reporting suicide. Also, collecting anecdotal information from xmedia reports would not paint a credible portrait because many news outlets have policies against reporting suicides.


In addition to the National Military Family Association, Blue Star Families also advocated for tracking. That organization, the largest military family advocacy group, surveyed 5,100 military family members in 2012 and found that 9% of military spouses reported that they had considered suicide. Of those, nearly a quarter said they had not sought help.

But those reasons never satisfied scores of family members who, through organizations such as the National Military Family Association, relentlessly pressed Congress to act.*

At lawmakers' request, Garrick's staff sent the House and Senate Armed Services committees a report in February outlining an idea for tracking some family member suicides: The Pentagon could buy death records from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and compare them with information the Defense Department already has on military dependents. It would take up to two years to launch the initiative at an initial cost of almost $700,000.*


The report says the cost of maintaining this system for tracking suicides of military family members would run about $500,000 a year. It would likely miss suicides by siblings and parents because to be designated as a dependent, family members would have to be reliant on the service member for more than half of their financial needs, Defense Department spokeswoman Catherine Wilkinson said.

The chairs of the Senate and House Armed Services committees, Michigan Sen. Carl Levin and California Rep. Buck McKeon, said this week that they had no comment on the contents of the report.

Levin is still reviewing it, spokeswoman Tara Andringa said. McKeon is "gratified" that the report was done, said his spokesman, Claude Chafin. Military family member suicides will "likely come up" during an annual hearing on military suicide, Chafin said. That hearing has not been scheduled but Chafin said he expects it will convene this summer.

"That is a small amount of money in military terms," said Kristina Kaufmann, a longtime military wife who has testified before Congress about the need to track these suicides. Kaufmann is the executive director of Code of Support, a national non-profit that advocates for military families. "It's a drop in the bucket compared to what they've spent to deal with the problem they know they have with service members. It's time they understood the full extent of the deaths happening."

Four years ago, the spouse of the highest-ranking military officer in the country tried to call attention to the problem. Deborah Mullen, wife of Adm. Mike Mullen, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, took the stage at a Defense Department health care summit and described what Army leaders told her when she asked how many family members had committed suicide. They knew nine relatives had killed themselves in 2009, they told her.

Mullen then asked how many family members had attempted.



There's a lot of anecdotal evidence out there. Everybody realizes that there is a problem with military family suicide.

- Deborah Mullen, wife of former Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen

Mullen recently told me that some spouses she met described being so depressed they couldn't get out of bed, prepare meals, leave the house or get their kids to school. They said they wanted mental health care but feared that seeking help would jeopardize their service member's career.

Others had sought help but felt they didn't get adequate treatment. Mullen knew two wives, each suicidal, who went to military physicians and were sent away with medications but no counseling or follow-up care.

Mullen did say there were positive signs toward the end of her husband's time as chairman. In 2010, Mullen noticed that wives were more willing to speak up about their depression and seek help. She also told me that she is hopeful the Veterans Crisis Line has improved since its inception in 2007.

In 2009, Mullen called the line on behalf of a female veteran she met who had been unable to get treatment for post traumatic stress. Though the operator was polite and talked to Mullen for 15 minutes, she said, ultimately the operator did not provide helpful resources.

"They could provide nothing for this person," Mullen told me. "I got off the phone thinking this wasn't the right way to go.


VA spokesman Mark Ballesteros said the administration couldn't address a specific case from 2009 without more information. "The Veterans Crisis Line is staffed by dedicated, experienced and trained professionals with the primary focus of connecting veterans and service members who may be in crisis, and their families and friends, with information and services to help them through their crisis."

"It really does matter who picks up the phone," she said. "You could get someone on the line who's helpful or someone who's not."*

Mullen eventually found help for the veteran by making phone calls to contacts in the woman's state.

In 2013, the suicide hotline fielded about 29,000 calls from people identifying themselves as family members or friends – about 11,000 more calls of this kind than the hotline received in 2012.

I asked the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs for a breakdown of those numbers: how many were family members and what had they called about.

VA spokesman Mark Ballesteros explained that the hotline has that information in its database but has never aggregated it.

In other words, the VA could not provide data on how many of these callers were seeking help for their service member or how many were in trouble themselves.

"There's a lot of anecdotal evidence out there," Mullen stressed to me. "Military leaders realize that there is a problem with military family suicides and attempts."

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With her husband away at war, Liz Snell has been a single mother for much of her marriage. Her youngest daughter Briannah is 10 now, and the family is together at Camp Pendleton.

But until the military tracks those deaths, it's impossible to know why they happened.

Why did Army wife Faye Vick take her life in 2006? The 36-year-old placed her baby and 2-year-old in the backseat of her car, the Raleigh News & Observer reported, and asphyxiated them all.

Could anything have helped Cassy Walton, wife of Iraq veteran Nils Andersson? He killed himself outside his Texas home in 2007. Just days later, she shot herself wearing her husband's dog tags and fatigue jacket.

What made Monique Lingenfelter, the wife of a sergeant assigned to a special operations unit, barricade herself in her home near Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in 2009? Police tried for hours over a PA system to persuade the pregnant Army wife to come out. She killed herself, and her baby also died.

What was going through Sheena Griffin's mind in April 2010? While her husband was stationed at Fort Hood preparing to deploy to Afghanistan, Griffin told him that she wanted to kill herself and their 8-and 9-year-old sons. He called authorities. When police arrived at the family home, they found it engulfed in flames, and the mother and boys shot dead.


More than 2 million Americans have served in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. Researchers estimate that as many as 300,000 service members may meet criteria for PTSD and between 200,000 and 300,000 have suffered a traumatic brain injury from mild to severe, according to Dr. Stephen Cozza with the Center for the Study of Traumatic Stress. The nonprofit think-tank RAND Corporation estimates a third of veterans likely have TBI, PTSD or depression, which puts the overall number affected at around 600,000. A large body of research indicates PTSD is associated with increased likelihood of suicidal behavior.

The families of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have lived through America's two longest wars. They are a generation that has endured multiple deployments –- as many as five -- and the first to be bombarded by social media and 24-hour news cycles. They care for the more than 600,000 veterans with PTSD, traumatic brain injury or depression.*

"We have sort of studied everything but the family members themselves," said Melinda Moore, a University of Kentucky researcher who has worked with a Defense Department-funded group studying service member suicide.

"The service member is like a pebble dropped in a pool," she said. "The pain that person carries affects everyone around them. Trauma ripples outward."

In a photo taken just days before their wedding, Brian and Liz Snell look like little kids on a road trip. They are in the back of a car, their skinny shoulders pressed together, grinning wide, cheesing for the camera.

It was September 14, 2001, and Brian had graduated from Marine Corps boot camp in California that day. With planes still grounded because of the 9/11 terror attack, Brian's mother was driving the teenagers home to Michigan. They had to make it back in time to say their vows in the backyard of Liz's grandmother.

The couple's life together had barely started, and war already was calling the shots.

Liz remembers her cream empire-waist dress, made by her mother, and how she swept up her red hair, tendrils framing her face. She was such a happy bride. She was marrying the boy who made her feel anchored.

Liz's youth had been spent moving -- whenever her mother remarried or changed jobs or when Liz went to live with her dad for awhile. As the new kid at Northwest High School in Rives Junction, Michigan, she noticed Brian right away: He was the star football player with a swagger and a soft spot for the underdog. He was always sticking up for kids who got picked on. It took Liz weeks to work up the nerve to approach him.


"Uh, do you have a dollar?" she asked.

He answered without hesitation. Sure, he did. And he'd give it to her – in exchange for a kiss.

They weren't together long when Liz started to get a bad feeling. She called Brian, crying, telling him to come over. They needed to talk.

"I'm pregnant."

The first time she said it, he fell off the couch and put his head in his hands.

She repeated herself. A couple minutes passed. Brian looked up at her.

"OK," he told her, "I guess we're gonna have a baby."

They were scared and broke, but Brian promised they would make it.

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Before he left on his fifth deployment, Brian Snell wanted to have a special photo taken of him and Liz.

He managed to finish football season and his senior year in high school while working part-time at an automotive plant. He found an apartment for them in a public housing complex. When he kept going out with his friends at night, she told herself it was understandable. He was still growing up.

One night he came home and said he wanted to take her to dinner at Chi-Chi's. Halfway through, he pulled out a ring fashioned from a straw wrapper.

"I was just wondering if you wanted to get married?"

"Yeah, OK," she said.

Major life decisions followed a similar script. Liz doesn't remember Brian telling her he wanted to enlist. He just did it.

She imagined military life as a grand adventure. They would move around, see different places. Maybe he'd get stationed in Italy.

But soon the baby arrived. And then boot camp. Kaila Snell, born April 6, 2001, was barely 3 months old when her daddy left for basic training.

War came quickly to the Snells' home. Brian spent much of 2002 away from his new wife and baby daughter, training for deployment. In 2003, he left for Iraq.

Liz's first time at war felt like the cold tile of the bathroom floor in her parents' house.

She would wait until Kaila was asleep, then get into the shower, turn on the water, slump down and cry.

One morning, Liz's stepfather tried to comfort her.

"I can hear you crying in there," he said. "You don't have to hide."

Be strong. Don't complain. Never worry or distract your warrior when he's on deployment. Defend the home.

Liz doesn't remember anyone telling her how a good military spouse behaves. It was just understood.

The early days of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were hard on military families. Many organizations set up to help them cope weren't in place back then. Young spouses like Liz didn't realize they needed to plan for how their children might react when one parent disappeared. No one asked Liz how she would handle finances or juggle the demands of being a single parent. Questions of the heart were not broached.

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How would she stay close to Brian when he was going through an experience to which she could never relate? How would he reconnect with her or their baby after being gone for a year?

Liz recalls that her only contact with the military came during a predeployment meeting that family members were encouraged to attend. She stood in a crowd of people she did not know and who did not talk to each other.

It was strictly procedural. "They gave us a phone tree, I think, but I wasn't really going to call someone I didn't know and tell them that I was scared."

Then the young couple found out Liz was pregnant again. This time, Brian wouldn't be able to feel her belly as it grew. He wouldn't be there for the birth.

Days before her husband left, Liz grappled with bad news from her doctors. She needed to have her cervix stitched closed because she had "cervical insufficiency," a condition in which the weight of the pregnancy causes the cervix to open too early. She'd gone through the same surgery before Kaila was born and had hoped it wouldn't be necessary again.

Not wanting to ruin her husband's send-off, Liz didn't tell Brian.

She kept her mouth shut about most things. He didn't know she spent many nights awake, staring into the dark. She didn't have a name for what she was feeling, but she'd experienced it before -- when she was a teenager and had trouble shaking sadness.

Her husband gone, Liz drew inward as her pregnancy progressed, spending whole days watching television or sleeping. When her mother and grandmother called from Michigan, she told them she was fine.

When Briannah was born, Liz wanted to show her husband the thick dark hair she had, so different from her older sister's auburn shade. But Brian didn't have access to e-mail; Liz had to mail him a photo that he wouldn't get for days.

She didn't tell her husband that Briannah had a heart condition. Alone, the Marine wife made her way through more than a dozen doctor's visits and a stack of confusing medical bills.

Each time Brian came home from a deployment, they danced the same choreography: a week or so of renewed romance, followed by awkward moments, little annoyances, stupid stuff that morphed into fights. The toys went over there. That's the way she'd been doing it for months. The kids' bedtime was 7. That's the routine. He couldn't just come back and mess everything up.

In the span of nine years, from 2002 to 2011, the family moved four times when Brian got orders to change bases. Even with a bachelor's degree earned online and a few credits shy of an MBA, Liz struggled to find a job in each new city.

The nose-diving national economy didn't help. When prospective employers called her for an interview, some said they couldn't afford to hire someone tied to the military who might not be around for long. So Liz took part-time work as a house cleaner and baby sitter.


Brian knew it was hard; he told her he understood. When he was home, he put his arms around her and kissed her forehead. He had missed their first two wedding anniversaries because he was deployed. For their third, he surprised her by arranging day care and taking her to a cabin for the weekend. It was sweet. She loved him for doing that, and she did her best to show it. But truthfully, it only made her feel more obligated. On top of everything, now she had to be sexy, too.

She weighed telling Brian that she felt depressed, but guilt stopped her. What right did she have to complain? He was the one fighting a war. He never talked about what he saw, which made her scared to ask. If he opened up, she was sure she couldn't help him navigate that pain. And then she would have really failed.

So for years, Liz kept doing what she'd always done -- act the opposite of how she felt. She crammed her schedule with more volunteer jobs. She worked with a Marine family readiness group designed to help families cope with the emotional tumult of deployments, a job that required her to give lectures to other spouses. She told them it was perfectly OK to be unhappy. She wrote blogs about how much she enjoyed being a military wife.

Inside, a voice continually goaded her: You're worthless. You're not doing a very good job.

It was on an August morning in 2007, with Brian away at his job on a new base at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, when Liz left her daughters to play in the living room and walked to the bedroom closet.

She stood on a stool, looped a rope over a rod and around her neck. She tugged, testing its strength. Then she heard her daughters wail.

Startled, she pulled the rope loose, stepped down and went to the living room. After drying tears and wiping noses, she curled up on the couch.

She closed her eyes, hard, and told no one what she'd done.

Liz Snell didn't know Jessica Harp. But she'd heard the Army wife's name – and her story. In 2011, Harp's suicide note, posted on her blog, went viral among military spouses.

The note shocked Liz, but not for its content. She was stunned that a wife would have the bravery to be so public about her problems.

While Liz struggled to keep her secret, Harp's became known to the world.

"If you are reading this, you should know that I am dead," the 27-year-old wrote. "At least I hope I'm dead. It would be awful to fail at your own suicide."

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In nearly 4,000 words, Harp unpacked in aching detail the way her marriage disintegrated after her husband returned from a tour in Afghanistan. Her story of loneliness and depression mirrored Snell's. Harp wrote that she repeatedly asked for help but never got what she needed. That was the experience of other military family members I interviewed.

In fact, they all have a name for their common enemy: The Deployment Monster.

This is the bastard, they say, who pulls up a seat at the kitchen table and mocks them before, during and after a deployment. It brings isolation, fear, chaos and uncertainty. It steals sleep and security.

The monster is a baby who never cried a lot before a deployment but now cries all the time, or a toddler who, months into a deployment, is found sleeping by the front door.

The monster is the warrior who returns changed, drinking all the time, blowing through money, suffering an unseen injury that causes him or her to feel constantly unsettled, distant, balled up angry and ready to fight.

A spouse, parent, sibling or a child tries to hang on as the monster spins a post-deployment ride faster. They don't know how to make it stop, and they second-guess themselves about whether they can do anything at all.

Some confess to thinking, as Harp did: "If he had died, I would have been surrounded with so much support."

Harp did not kill herself.

When I contacted her, she explained that she had preprogramed the note at a time when she was suicidal. When her note published, she was in a hospital. National media covered her story.

Her marriage ended, she said, and she found someone new. Therapy and medication helped her recover. She had started fresh. She is happy.

She declined to say anything more because she was concerned that doing so would disrupt her new life.

But she also sized up whether it would be worth it to again enter a media spotlight.

So many military family members need help, she said; they're killing themselves, and they go unheard. She said she would talk again if she believed it would make a difference. She didn't think it would.

What difference would it make to talk about the pain? To tell someone, anyone, that you were drowning? Better to pretend. Better to use work as a life raft.

Liz kept herself afloat by volunteering. The Marines had given Brian a new job as a recruiter and transferred him to Southgate, Michigan, near Dearborn, in 2009. He was away from home a lot, either on training missions or simply working.

But Liz was back in her home state. At least there, she had connections.


The difficulty in finding employment with each move military spouses make with their service members was mentioned by almost every military spouse interviewed for this story. As of June 2011, the unemployment rate for military spouses was 26%, three times the unemployment rate for the general labor force, according to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics. Two pieces of military spouse employment legislation, including the one Snell worked on, did not pass, according to Jocelyn Benson, president of Military Spouses of Michigan and dean of Wayne State University Law School in Detroit. But at least four other states -- Florida, Colorado, Texas and Arizona -- have enacted laws to help military spouses get jobs, Benson said. First lady Michelle Obama and Dr. Jill Biden's Joining Forces initiative is intended to expand employment and career development opportunities for military spouses, veterans and service members.

She threw herself into a major project with the armed forces branch of the Red Cross: the development of a database of national and local resources for military families. She had finally landed a paid position with the organization, managing some staff and a large group of volunteers. She joined the board of the Military Spouses of Michigan and helped write legislation aimed at aiding spouses in finding employment when their service members were reassigned to the state.*

As the family neared the two-year mark of living in Michigan, Liz began to get comfortable. Brian had done four tours – more than his share, she assumed. She had made friends. Briannah was taking Taekwondo and playing softball. Kaila, a voracious reader, began writing her own short stories.

Brian and Liz felt connected again. Sometimes they sneaked away to a cabin in the woods where their cell phones wouldn't work.

Depression occasionally climbed on her back, but she wrestled it off. She thought work helped, that it strengthened her with purpose.

It did win her attention: In January 2011, she was nominated for Military Spouse of the Year, a title decided by the vote of military families across the world. She was so happy about the recognition that when she lost, it felt alright.

It felt like a mean trick when Brian told her he'd gotten his fifth deployment order, this time to Afghanistan. The family would have to go back to Camp Pendleton in California.

Liz went numb.

Kaila, 10, screamed at her parents that she hated military life. "I'm never going to marry a military man!" she shouted.

Eight-year-old Briannah slammed the door to her room, threw things and cried. Brian tried to console them, explaining that what Daddy did was important, that he believed in it.

Liz would have to quit her jobs in Michigan and resign from the state's board of Marine spouses. She would leave her family and friends and return to a place where the people she knew before were probably gone -- reassigned somewhere else.

She felt like she'd been locked in a dark room and couldn't find the door.

When Staff Sgt. Snell came home from Afghanistan in January 2013, his wife was more than depressed. She was gripped by violent fantasies.

When she closed her eyes, she envisioned walking to the closet where her husband kept his gun.

Terrified that she could not control herself, she went to see a doctor on Friday, March 1. The physician asked whether she was suicidal. She lied. How would it look to other military spouses if she went to a psychiatric ward? She'd never get a job then. People would talk. What would her husband think, her kids?

The physician referred her to a behavioral therapist who she could see Monday, March 4.

Liz spent the weekend in a ball on the couch, afraid to shut her eyes. When she did, that awful movie started in her head: Opening the closet, unlocking the gun cabinet, curling her finger over the trigger.

Need help?

For immediate help

Veterans Crisis Line – A 24/7 hotline open to family members and all armed forces, including veterans, active, Reserve and National Guard.

1-800-273-8255, press 1

For nonemergency help

TAPS – Not-for-profit Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors offers help to anyone who has lost a military loved one regardless of the relationship to the deceased. It provides in-person and online peer-to-peer counseling and specializes in connecting family members – siblings with siblings, parents with parents, for example – who have lost loved ones under similar circumstances.

1-800-959-TAPS (8277)

Give an Hour – Psychologist Dr. Barbara Van Dahlen founded the nonprofit in 2005 after recognizing a demand for mental health professionals to help Iraq and Afghanistan troops and their families. Give an Hour's network of nearly 7,000 psychologists, social workers, psychiatrists, marriage and family therapists, drug and alcohol counselors and pastoral counselors offer help to individuals, couples, families, children and adolescents.

Military OneSource – Nonemergency 24/7 help for service members and their families to tackle all aspects of military life. OneSource provides counseling referrals and other assistance with mental health needs.


Military and Family Life Counselors – These certified counselors with master's or doctorate degrees in mental health are embedded at installations and offer short-term, nonmedical counseling.

Courage Beyond – Courage Beyond provides confidential, no-cost or low-cost programs and services to military Americans and families facing post-traumatic stress disorder and other invisible wounds of military service. The group hosts several retreats a year for spouses and weekly anonymous online counseling sessions open to any family member.


By Sunday the compulsion to kill herself was all consuming. In church, she tried to pray the thoughts away. If God was good, she kept thinking, why was she so bad? On the family's drive home, Liz started crying hysterically. Brian pulled over.

She got out of the car, away from the kids' earshot, and he followed.

"You have to promise me you won't ..." she choked, "Promise ... just go home, go home and hide the keys to the gun closet.

"I don't feel safe in the house. Keep me out of the house."

Then, she told him about wanting to die.

They got back into the car and drove home, both silent. Liz had convinced Brian she could make it one more day, to her doctor's appointment. He was quiet that night. He asked no questions, and she offered nothing more. He waited until she fell asleep to go to bed.

The next morning, Brian and Liz went to the hospital on Camp Pendleton.

For about eight hours, Brian sat with his wife in a room while several doctors came in to question Liz. She asked Brian to step out because she was afraid she wouldn't be able to tell the full truth in front of him.

By dark, the Snells say, they were told that the facility had no designated spaces to treat psychiatrically troubled military family members. She was transferred to the Naval Medical Center San Diego, about 50 minutes away.

Liz laid back on a gurney and straps were fastened over her. As she was wheeled out to an ambulance, she craned her neck back and caught sight of her husband.

He was leaning against their car in the parking lot, his head buried in his hands.

At the Naval Medical Center San Diego, Liz was checked into a psychiatric department reserved for patients who are at high risk of hurting themselves or others.

She was given a hospital gown and pants and was asked to remove her bra so that she couldn't use it to hurt herself.

That first night, she called Brian.

"I want to go home," she told him, crying. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm weak."

As Brian listened to his wife, he could only think to tell her something he'd never told her before.

"You are the strongest person I know."

Liz had voluntarily checked herself in, and at that point, no doctor had examined her. She could have left, but her husband's words made her want to try. Typical to her way of thinking, she believed she owed it not so much to herself as to her family.

Her roommates were both military spouses. One was married to a Vietnam vet. The other woman looked to be her age. She was surprised by how many military wives she saw come into the hospital. It made her feel less crazy and alone.

Every day, she met one-on-one with a Navy lieutenant and psychologist, Michael Epstein. She granted him permission to speak with me.

"Once she'd been taken out of her home life, she was very motivated to live," he said. "With Elizabeth, there were a lot of stressors in her home – Brian being deployed, she was a single mother pulling a lot of weight and not having an independent life outside of being a mother."

He made an analogy to the safety instructions given before an airline flight: "You put your mask on yourself before you put it on your kids. Elizabeth had been putting the oxygen on her kids and husband for years, and never on herself."

Several times a day, Liz attended group therapy. Everyone had to name something they wanted to work on. By the end, the clinician had demonstrated that each person could offer something unique and valuable to someone else in the group. Liz thought about the jobs she'd had helping other military wives and felt her strength grow.

But she fell sometimes, too.

During shift changes, nurses asked patients if they felt they wanted to harm themselves or someone else. Once, Liz replied by staring at the phone and confessing she had an urge to wrap the cord around her neck.

But Liz made remarkable progress. On her third day in the hospital, her status was upgraded. She was allowed to wear her own clothes. She put on Brian's USMC sweatshirt.

He visited her every day. He brought her food and met with Epstein.

"Here was this staff sergeant deployed five times, in charge of probably hundreds of 17-year-old and 19-year-olds in theater, and he was standing in a room with me feeling powerless about how to take care of his wife," Epstein recalled. "He wanted to do anything that he could to help her. I saw absolute genuine concern for her, and he listened to everything I said."

Brian encouraged his wife to keep a journal if that helped. She could blog it all if she wanted, he told her. People in the military could think whatever they wanted. It didn't matter.

"Brian is clearly a person who puts family first, the Marines second," Epstein said.

After 12 days, the psychologist and other doctors deemed Liz stable enough to go home. With a diagnosis of chronic depression and anxiety and a two-week supply of Zoloft and sleeping medication, Liz checked out on March 15.

The hospital, following procedures set by national standards for mental health care, arranged an appointment for Liz to come back within a week for a follow-up visit, Epstein said.

When service members are treated for mental health care and released from hospitalization, Epstein said, their commanding officer is notified.

Military spouses and other family members are largely on their own. After their initial follow-up appointment, the hospital provides them with a reference to a therapist. It is up to them to go.

After Liz got out of the hospital last March, the couple made an effort to spend evenings together with their daughters. When I visited them in September, Brian had just returned from training Marines on how to work amphibious assault vehicles. Briannah and Kaila were doing their homework on the couch.

Briannah is 10 now, an athlete. She has earned belts in Taekwondo and wants to play soccer. She's shy and smart and after warming up to me, she demonstrated how to unlock cell phones.

Liz and Brian said they'd had to limit Kaila's Kindle downloads to three books a month. The 12-year-old engaged me in a miniseminar on young adult literature and discussed character development like one of my editors might.

[+] Click to enlarge

Liz Snell and her daughters, Briannah and Kaila, shop on base at Camp Pendleton. The family also lives on base.

Over dinner, sitting at the kitchen table next to her parents, Kaila talked more about her favorite books, which all seemed to feature a strong girl fighting battles. Her parents became tickled at her passion. Kaila laughed with them. She said they like it when she talks.

"We talk about things now," she said, looking at them before continuing. "We didn't really do that before. It's OK because we talk now."

Liz went to a handful of sessions with a therapist after she got home. But those ended, she said, when the counselor shut down the practice, citing personal reasons. Liz did not ask the therapist to connect her with another mental health professional, and the therapist didn't offer to do that, Liz said.

To refill her medications, Liz goes to a psychiatrist who asks how she's feeling. At most, she said, their exchanges last 10 minutes.

Liz has not talked much to anyone about the most shattering event in her life since her hospitalization. In late September, after my visit, Brian was in a motorcycle crash. His injuries were severe. Liz and her mother both told me that Liz said aloud in the desperate hours after the crash that she didn't want to live if Brian died.

In the short conversations I had with Brian before the accident – he didn't want to be formally interviewed but was polite and eventually open with me – it became clear that he was the only person available to catch Liz if she fell. She has no family or friends she deeply trusts near her in California. Brian is her world.

He kept alarms in his phone to remind him when it was time for Liz to take her medication. When she shared details about her depression with me, a stranger, or he told me something about Iraq, their eyes locked. They looked out for each other. They were a team.

After months of therapy, Brian is now getting around in a wheelchair. He has suffered a brain injury, too, and often speaks in tangents because he struggles to stay focused on a single thought.

"It takes a lot of patience, and it makes me feel sad," Liz told me. "I wanted him to come home, and he is home. But he's not Brian, and I'm alone."

Kaila and her sister struggle, too. Briannah won't go on sleepovers because she doesn't want to be away from her dad. Kaila acts angry. When she recently punched Briannah in the face a couple times, Liz asked her psychiatrist – a private provider covered by the military's insurance-style program TRICARE – to recommend a counselor for her daughter. So far, Kaila has had one session; her mom sat in for the first half-hour.

Liz saw how much the session helped, so she set up appointments for herself.

She said she'd like to have someone to talk to. Brian is no longer available like before.

When Liz is not driving Brian to his therapy appointments, she is keeping busy with new responsibilities. She's got a paid position as a volunteer coordinator with Blue Star Families. She created a website dedicated to encouraging depressed and suicidal military family members to get help. She blogs about her hospitalization, anonymously.

A military spouse assisting with the website nominated Liz for 2014 Military Spouse of the Year. Liz campaigned hard for it on social media. She told military relatives eligible to vote that she wanted to use the title to call attention to the problem of depression and suicide among military spouses.

She was disappointed when she didn't make it through the first round of votes. But it was a step, she said. Stay on the positive side. Eventually, she believes, the people with power who can do something will.

They'll pay attention, she just knows it, and people like her will finally be counted.

The Parents

Bill and Christine Koch lost one child at war, another at home. Now they, too, struggle to go on.

The Teenager

With a father changed by his time in Iraq and a mother trying to hold him together, Kristi Anne Raspperry felt ignored – and worse. Now 19, she describes a child's view of life after war.

Kristi Anne Raspperry, 19, lives with her mother and father, Heather and John Moates, outside Savannah, Georgia. Heather cares full time for her husband, John, an Army veteran who developed post-traumatic stress disorder after serving in Iraq. The strain of that, coupled with fights with her husband, prompted the Army wife to try overdosing on pills in 2010. Heather didn't tell her daughter about her suicide attempt. She told Kristi Anne that she had to go to the hospital because she was sick. Kristi Anne kept her suicide fantasies a secret, too. Mother and daughter only recently began sharing these painful experiences because Kristi Anne is seeing a counselor. The following is an edited transcript of Kristi Anne's interviews with CNN's Ashley Fantz. John Moates did not want to talk at length with CNN but responded to his daughter's interview with a statement, which also appears below.

I was around 11 or 12 when my dad deployed. I was very sad because my dad was going, possibly, to die and it was just, I didn't know what was going to happen to him.

I always kind of grew up in the military brat life, so I knew that sometimes when your parents deploy, sometimes they don't come back.

I'd given him a small little necklace that my grandma gave to me. That way I'd make sure he came back safe.

I talked to a few of my friends whose parents had also deployed at the time so they were always there for me. You know, 'Yeah I think my dad's doing OK. Is your dad doing OK? Yeah, I'm not really sure about that.'

When he came home the first time, I did notice there was something kind of off about him. He was a lot more aggressive, and he didn't laugh as much as he usually did. He didn't really trust people as much.

Going outside, going into public, I noticed that he was a bit more cautious around people. Any loud noises, he would immediately find where it was coming from.

At the time, I had no idea what PTSD was. I just thought this is what he's really like, but I really didn't know who this man was now.

I was pretty much afraid of my dad after he came back from Iraq. I really didn't talk to him that much. He wasn't my dad; he was some monster that took his place.

'I felt like I was suffocating'

It was always very heavy-feeling in the air -- like there's a giant cloud of fog everywhere. I really didn't want to talk to anyone about it. I just thought maybe it's a normal thing that happens in the military because I hear a lot of kids saying, 'My parents beat me. That's why I live with my grandparents,' or this or that. And some kids just don't even talk to their parents anymore.

Sometimes you would hear about a kid that had gotten beaten by his parents severely, how his or her parents are getting a divorce now because their dad is too aggressive towards them. A lot of kids would actually run away from their parents.

Friends would be using drugs like marijuana and Ecstasy, that kind of stuff, LSD, because they didn't want to live with the fact that their lives have pretty much gone to chaos because their parents came home from the war in Iraq. I didn't really turn to drugs because it's always been kind of ingrained into my mind that drugs are bad.

It was during middle school when I just kind of started de-attaching myself, like emotionally, from everything. I just kind of stopped caring about what was happening. I was numb to everything.

My mom and my dad had gotten into a serious fight. There was a lot more crashing. It really freaked me out. I saw my dad cornering my mom on the wall. So I said, 'Should I call 911?' and she's like, 'Yes, you should call 911!' So I quickly shut my door and I pushed my dresser in front of it and I took out my phone and I went to my closet and that's when I dialed 911. I told them that my dad is, he's a soldier and he's really freaking out. I kept on the line with the woman just trying to make sure that I was OK, nothing bad was going to happen to me, until the police arrived.

I'm not really sure what happened after that because I kind of blanked it out from my memories because it was a bit too much. All I remember is the police took him away. I was just crying pretty much because I didn't know what happened to my life.

I felt like after this time that my mom, because he almost physically assaulted her, it's not going to last, she's not going to stay with him. But I guess she did.

Usually when I came home and my dad's in a bad mood, I would just go straight to my room. I really couldn't go out of my room because I felt like I was suffocating under, just, everything.

Just put on my headphones and kind of tune everything out. In my room, I was in different Internet forums. You know, places where no one knows who you are. I would be in my own fantasy world.

I would go on websites where you can kind of role play with other people, websites where you could have, like, your own little virtual pets, you could meet with other people in the community. Just kind of get a sense of like, you know, a family setting. It was pretty much I had a new family.

I would talk about, like, all these thoughts I was having in my head. I always had thoughts in my head saying, 'You're never going to make anything of yourself. You're worthless. You have no reason to live. There's no one that would really stop you.'

I was around the age of 13 to 14 when I started having these really powerful emotions and feelings.

I sometimes feel like a parent to my parents. ... I really do feel deep down in my heart that it's my job to make sure he's OK.

During that time, I was very depressed and I had thought about, like, committing suicide, just like end everything. Just, like, if life's this bad, maybe, you know, death, that would make everything better for me.

You know, I could take a couple of my mom's pills, sort of fall asleep, never wake up. I always thought about – because Fort Riley has a train system that goes through it – I could stand on the tracks, get hit by the train. Just a quick, instant death.

They were just fantasies that I would have.

I never hurt myself physically.

I never really bothered telling anyone about my problems. My mom didn't know anything about my suicidal thoughts.


I kept all of my emotions pent up inside to the point where I would explode on anyone. That anger, it just felt, it was just so much feeling that my heart was swelling. I actually kicked a door once, and it created a giant hole.


I would scream a lot -- and just not outwardly. It was more an inward scream, just for something different, for a better life.

A lot of times, a lot of this anger would go onto my mom, and I would make her cry sometimes. I would tell her, 'I hate you. This is all your fault. You don't deserve me.'

I really do regret saying those kinds of things.

I just felt she was dealing with my dad at the time, like I should not burden her with my problems because she had enough problems. My mom would try to spend more time with my dad, would try to make sure that he's doing alright, make sure that he's taking his medication. A lot of times I felt ignored.

'I don't think I protected my children'

I really started to feel my anxiety problems coming on around freshman year of high school, because, you know, all your friends in middle school, they're not your friends anymore. They don't talk to you anymore. They have other friends they can talk to. A lot of my old friends started going into things like drugs and alcohol, and I just felt like that's not me.

There's always so much pressure to be pretty, to be popular, to wear the right clothes. When I was in high school, I never wore makeup. I never really did anything with my hair. I always felt that I was very ugly, that there was nothing special about me. I felt really self-conscious to the point where sometimes I wouldn't eat anything for the day. All I'd eat was just a bowl of rice. A lot of my depression problems and anxiety started getting very high up there.

It just got to the point where my mom said, 'Kristi, you need to stop this.' That's when I started going to therapy. My therapist, she really helped me with my emotions and feelings -- especially with my mom. And I also started taking Lexapro for my anxiety and my depression. It really does help. I really feel like this is the happiest I've been since I was 10.

Art was the best release for me because I always had a big problem conveying my emotions. If I'm angry, I would draw gruesome things, add reds here and here, thick and thin lines.

I think I was 14 when I started to see my dad's artwork. My mom and I were unpacking boxes in the living room – just stuff we'd never gotten around to organizing. I saw these drawings of men with giant muscles, skulls, a lot of tough, cool stuff. I was like, 'Mom whose are these? Are these Dad's?' He came out and was like, 'My old drawings!'

I said, 'These are the most amazing drawings of all time!'

That kind of inspired me to do more drawing. He's always been very supportive. Every year at the high school, they would have a little art gallery. He would look at all the drawings, and he would look at mine, saying, 'Oh, yours is better than the rest of these.'

Knowing that he did art, it really helped connect us more.

I could take in a deep breath and just breathe out, and I was also starting to talk more with my dad.

There was one time me and my mom got into a really big argument. I was crying real hard. I started hyperventilating because I don't like arguing. My dad just sat down and started to rub my back. He was like, 'It's going to be OK, Kristi, it's not your fault.' At that moment that's when I started feeling that father-daughter bond. He's not at all a touchy-feely guy. He was rubbing my back trying to get me to calm down. I was around 17.

Me and my mom can really pick up when he's happy. It's really hard to see the happiness because he has a permanent scowl on his face, but you can feel it in the air when he's happy. You look at the way he's sitting, if he has his head up or not. I like being around him when he's in a happy mood.

What about the children of war?

Even a toy can help comfort a child whose parent is away at war. But the full impact of America's longest wars on children in military families is still emerging. What is being done?

See full story and video »

I do feel that it is my responsibility as a person who's very able bodied, that I need to help protect my dad from all these outside sources. Like, if I'm at a movie theater and there's people talking and I know my dad's getting agitated, I will pretty much tell them point blank to be quiet. If we're out in public and there's a screaming kid and people talking really loud, I'll try to usher my dad away. I feel like it's my responsibility now because I know that I never tried to bond with my dad all that much in the early years.

I sometimes feel like a parent to my parents. I felt that what my dad has become is, he's kind of become like a toddler where they're always full of rage sometimes, and they have hissy fits and meltdowns and tantrums.

A lot of times I blamed my dad for things that happened even though it was the PTSD that was making him do it. I always felt bad because I would blame him for everything. I would blame him and my mom. Everything my mom's gone through, everything my dad's gone through, I owe it to them to make sure that he's OK, that he's safe, in a safe, comfortable zone.


I am still scared of him. I'm scared that the next day he's going to blow up. I'm still scared of him, but I still do trust him.

Some nights, I don't get that much sleep, especially after a really big fight. I usually just lock my door, stay on the back part of my bed, just stay close to the wall, just thinking, 'Is he going to come in here tonight? Should I keep my windows unlocked?' Just in case something happens, I can jump out the window. I have my phone on me. There's definitely been nights where I didn't get any sleep at all because I was just scared of what's going to happen.

In the Army, you don't get the feeling that these people really care about the families. They just need soldiers and bodies to send out. They really need to start having family therapy and group therapy to help these kids and parents try to connect more. Tell these kids, you don't have to be afraid because even if there's something wrong with your parent, he or she has PTSD. If they're yelling at you, it's not them; it's the PTSD that's yelling at you.

I really do wish that the military and the VA would give -- not just the wives or husbands of injured veterans but the kids -- a training course in, if your parents are having a really bad day, this is what you should do.

When they say the whole family's going to war, they don't mean in the way that we're all in it together. Because we're not. When they say a family's going to war, it means they're going to war with each other.

A statement from Kristi Anne's father, John Moates

I understand these things, and it is OK for her to feel the way she does. I am constantly trying to improve my conditions, which I believe have gotten much better since those years. I am trying to work better with other people. Yes, me and my wife had an altercation like she said, but at that time, I was completely lost, and I also had been drinking alcohol, which I did often to medicate myself. She has a right to say what she observed about what she experienced. I realize that it has not been just me who has been affected by my conditions. And I understand sometimes she may be afraid that the man that once was may come back again. But I assure you that man is dead and buried. I love my wife and all my children. They have stuck with me when other people would not have. And for that I am truly thankful and blessed.

The Sibling

Monica Velez was her brothers' keeper – the mother they didn't have. When Freddy died in combat and Andrew killed himself, she felt like life had lost its purpose.

Monica Velez, 36, lives near Austin, Texas. Her story highlights the often-overlooked family member touched by war: the sibling. The following is Velez's story as told to CNN's Ashley Fantz.

The first thing you have to know is how close Freddy, Andrew and I were. Because if you don't understand that, then you won't understand why I wanted to die when I lost them.

Freddy was killed in Iraq, and then Andrew took his own life in Afghanistan. I was their sister. I was supposed to protect them.

When we were little – I was about 7 – my mom took us to a gas station in Texas. My dad was in the driver's seat, and we were crammed in the back. My mom said she didn't want to have anything to do with us and got out. I watched her walk away. I can see us all in that car. My youngest brother Andrew was sleeping. Freddy, who is the middle kid, was crying. Something inside me decided right then and there that I would take care of them.

My dad was a police officer in a rural town and worked all the time. We lived on the outskirts of Lubbock near a cotton field. Our nearest neighbor was a mile away. My brothers and I, we didn't really have anyone else but each other. We played Army, cowboys and Indians, ship pirates. We shared a bedroom.

I would help the boys get dressed for school, help them with their homework, teach them new things like riding bikes and swimming. I learned how to sew because they were always popping off their buttons.

On the bus, kids would pick on us about our clothes, shoes and haircuts. I'd get defensive. If somebody made one of my brothers cry, we were probably getting kicked off the bus that day!

When we got older, I wanted them to dress preppy and spent money from my part-time job to buy them polo shirts and khaki pants. I taught them how to press their pants. I got them to do this thing with the brush where they'd spray their hair while the blow dryer was on it. Every day I wrote them notes about how important they were to me, how much I loved them.

Freddy was the boy who did everything well. He ran fast. He was awesome on the football field. He'd play dominoes and win. Oh my gosh, his dimples. Teachers loved him. He was the real confident one. It was always an unspoken vow between Freddy and me that we'd never let anyone hurt Andrew. They were a year apart, and Andrew always watched to see what Freddy did. They had a language between them.

'Like someone drowning you in a tub full of memories'

When it was time for Freddy to go to college, we went door-to-door trying to raise money. That seemed like a good idea to us, just go and ask for it and show that he really wanted it. Some businesses actually donated to him. Looking back, I think this was when Freddy got worried about how we'd keep paying. He didn't want my dad to do anything outside his means, and he didn't want me to help out.

One day, I got a phone call. Come over, he said. When I showed up, he was acting weird. He said, 'I'm going to be leaving in a couple weeks for basic. I enlisted in the Army.'

I was livid. And this was just before 9/11, so I cannot imagine how scared I would be if he'd told me this after 9/11. But I was so, so angry. I called an Army recruiter and said Freddy had a bum ankle from high school wrestling, and he couldn't participate. The recruiter was like, 'Don't worry. We give all the guys a thorough examination, and he's fine.'

Freddy was always trying to calm me down. He told me that he wouldn't be in the middle of anything, and he was going to try to use the Army to get a degree that he would use after he got out. I believed him. We threw a party before he left for boot camp. Everyone was happy for him.

I remember Andrew telling me that he thought Freddy was leaving him.

He said, 'What am I gonna do, be here all by myself?'

About midway through Freddy's basic, he called to say he'd changed his mind and that he wanted to go infantry. 'They get to blow up stuff over there and shoot really cool guns,' he said.

I didn't know what war looked like. No one did back then. I grew up when Desert Storm happened. I remember Geraldo Rivera doing his shenanigans out there, and it just kind of seemed like it was not real. It was like, 'Yeah! We're America, we're pretty cool. You can't mess with us.' I actually thought it was going to be like that.

I couldn't do my job anymore as a sister. I didn't want to be here. … The darkness eventually walked away from me.

But one time, I remember, I was at work and saw the front of the Austin American-Statesman. It was a picture of a woman with her arms clinging to a casket that was draped in the American flag. I thought, 'That can't happen, it wouldn't happen to us.' I had to go home that day.

There wasn't anyone from the military who told us what to expect, how we might feel or how to deal with any of those feelings. They had meetings, but those were for the wives. There wasn't anything for siblings. I did call the military sometimes, like at Fort Hood. Most of the time, the operator would assume I was the wife. They'd be like, 'Oh, you're the sister? We can't talk to you.' I really don't know if my dad ever got much information. I guess I was just doing what I'd always done, taking care of things.

When Freddy got deployed to Iraq in 2003, he was 22. When we would talk to him, he would make it seem like he was on a beach somewhere drinking martinis and piña coladas and getting a tan. We sent him care packages. He kept requesting that I send him loud music – Linkin Park, Metallica. I found out that he would put his headset on so he could drown out the sounds of the bombs and guns and the tanks at night when they were driving through a town.

When Freddy first left, Andrew hung out for a while. But then his girlfriend got pregnant. Of course, I was scared, but I got more excited as time went by. I threw my energy into helping him with the baby. He was so concerned about his daughter, very responsible. I was proud of him. I realized that he had learned what it meant to love somebody unconditionally.

The last time we were all together was Thanksgiving in 2002. I took a snapshot in my mind. I admired how they'd grown up, and I was looking forward to more Christmases and Thanksgivings. I imagined us getting old together, how they'd make fun of my gray hair and I'd get to make fun of them for going bald or getting fat. Freddy got married that year to his high school sweetheart, Nickie.

That Thanksgiving, the buildup to Iraq was happening.

Andrew never really gave me a reason why he enlisted the next year. When Andrew made a decision, you didn't question it. But he was struggling with his young family, working two jobs. Two kids by this time. They were living with his wife's mother. The military offered them housing, a set paycheck, benefits. It seemed like a good deal to him.

Freddy was in Iraq and then Andrew was sent to a base in Kuwait. You know when moms say how it feels when the last kid leaves the house? I felt alone. How am I going to protect them now? How am I going to make this work? I couldn't turn on the TV without something from Iraq coming up. I just stopped looking at the news.

Andrew came home for R&R. We wined and dined him. We were expecting Freddy to come home, but then we found out he wasn't. He told me that he needed to pull his weight there. He told me he joined a new unit and the guys were pretty tough and he was learning so much.

Around Freddy's birthday, he called us. It was October 31, 2004. Andrew was still at home, on one of his last days of R&R. Freddy wanted to tell us they were going into Falluja. It was strange but for some reason, he was able to spend his day talking to us – to Nickie his wife, to me and my dad. I remember Andrew taking the phone from me and walking away in our home to have a private conversation with Freddy. I don't know what they said.

I couldn't stop thinking how odd it was, Freddy spending the time to talk to each of us. I had a terrible thought. I thought he was saying goodbye. My dad said to stop that negative thinking.

The next day or so, Andrew's R&R was up, and he had to go back to Iraq. So I now had two brothers over there.

I watched the news every day. November 1, November 2, November 3, November 4, every day. I can list to you every soldier that died during that time. I woke up November 12 and turned on the TV. They were reporting that there had been a casualty in Iraq connected to Fort Hood. Maybe I didn't allow my brain to go there because I kept working. I didn't think it was us. I went home and sent Freddy an e-mail. At 2 or 3 in the morning, Nickie called me. The casualty was in Freddy's unit. She heard it from a friend in casualty assistance.

I got to her apartment. I started to feel like there was no way it was us because in the movies, the casualty people only show up during the morning. But it was 1 p.m., and there was a knock at the door. I opened the door. There were two guys dressed in uniform. They asked for Nickie. I said, 'I am his sister. Is he hurt? I am his blood type! I can give him my kidney! I can give him my lung!' I think they thought I had gone crazy.

They just said, 'We need to speak to Mrs. Velez. We can't speak to you.'

I screamed, 'I'm his sister!'

Nickie was standing next to me. She was paralyzed. She couldn't speak. Then they started in, 'Mrs. Velez, we regretfully tell you that your husband has been killed in action.'

All I could see was my little brother's face asking me for milk or asking me what time the bus was coming. It was like someone drowning you in a tub full of memories.

There wasn't anyone from the military who told us what to expect. … They had meetings, but those were for the wives. There wasn't anything for siblings.

Then, all of a sudden, there were all these people. Military people, people from the base, wives, women everywhere. Some of them told me to stop crying because I had to be there for Nickie. Ladies from a family readiness group – they had these groups – they came over and brought food and toilet paper and they kept telling me that I had to pull it together for Nickie. They asked me to run errands. Go get ice. Can you call people?

I felt irrelevant. I felt like I didn't matter. Nobody really talked to me. I just sat with Nickie, and we cried. She knew that I was hurting, too. She and I were in the same place.

I wanted to be the one who told Andrew. I was patched through to him in Iraq. He said, 'Tell me it's not true, tell me it's not true.' He just screamed and screamed. I told him, 'They should be sending you home soon.' I found out later that Andrew did some damage to the building he was in after I told him.

He told me, 'Yeah, they're sending me to go meet up with Freddy. I'm coming home with him. Don't worry. I'm going to bring him home.'

They do that. If there's a family member, they see if that relative can come back with the body. When they landed in Germany, Andrew called me. He was hysterical. He was crying. He couldn't breathe.

In Lubbock, the media was there. Chaos. I ran to the park to be alone. I got on my knees and put my head down. I didn't know how to help Andrew. Because it was really bad for him.

As the days dragged on, we were both just lost. It felt like we'd been left on the side of the road in the dark without a flashlight. 

I tried to look for counseling through my insurance because Andrew didn't want to see anyone in the military. He didn't want anyone to think he wasn't OK. He had anger. He was struggling at home. He just didn't feel like anyone understood him. His commander made him see a chaplain.

I was so worried about him staying in the Army. I called Fort Hood. I called casualty assistance. I called veterans affairs. I started doing research into post-traumatic stress disorder. I called anyone who would listen to me for five minutes. I did what I'd always done – I was my brother's keeper.

I confessed this to Andrew. I told him that I didn't feel important any more. I couldn't do my job anymore as a sister. I didn't want to be here. I didn't want to feel the pain any more.

'I'm not going to get hurt. Nothing's going to happen,' he told me. He asked me to write down that I was important, that he loved me and his kids needed me.  He made me promise that I would not hurt myself.

He said, 'This is your promise to me. This is your word.'

The Army gave Andrew the option to step out as the sole survivor, but he didn't want to. He wanted to go back. He wanted Freddy's sacrifice to have stood for something. He got deployed to Afghanistan.

We e-mailed each other a lot. Over time, his stories became more graphic. He would explain to me what it was like to kill somebody. I kept asking him to come home or get reassigned somewhere else. He could get what's called compassionate reassignment. I learned that from some wives who let me join their group at Fort Hood. They met and comforted each other. They saved me. I thought I could find something like that for him.

I tried to tell him every time that everything here was good. The wives told me that no matter what's happening at home, make it sound like you're baking cupcakes. Deal with whatever when your soldier comes home.

He told me, 'When I get home, I'll go to counseling.'


Andrew was 22. The day I found out he ended his life was seven months after Freddy died. I was in Killeen signing a lease on an apartment, and I'd turned my phone off. I came home, and my boyfriend was in the kitchen crying.

He said, 'Have you talked to your dad?' That stopped me in my tracks. I said, 'Why? What's wrong?' And he said, 'You need to call your dad,' and he started crying more.

The phone rang. It was Nickie. She was crying. I said, 'Tell me what's going on!' She said, 'I can't tell you. I can't do it.'

I don't think I've ever felt that angry in my entire life.

About that time, I see these cars pull up to the front of my house. You never forget those cars. My boyfriend put the phone to my ear. It was my dad. He tells me, 'Andrew's gone.' I said, 'He went AWOL?'

He said, 'Andrew committed suicide. He put a gun in his mouth, and he killed himself.'

I didn't believe him and hung up. Then all the people came again. A rush of people. A chaplain was there. One of the wives from my Fort Hood group, my boss.

I stepped out of myself. Whoever Monica Velez was, she died the day that Andrew did. I just couldn't understand. Did he not remember that I loved him? I kept thinking, now no one is going to remember our memories.

From then on, whenever I stood, I fell. Then I stopped getting up. I was not, in my life, doing what was good. I was working at the time, finding excuses to be at work when I didn't need to be. I found myself not wanting to get out of bed. I didn't want to talk to anybody. Friends and co-workers always asked, 'Are you OK?' Some days I stayed in my apartment all day with the lights off.

I quit my job. I broke up with my boyfriend. I cashed out my 401(k). I was getting into bad things. The company I was keeping was kind of risky. One night we were speeding down the road, and I tried to jump out of the car but those people grabbed me.


The Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors has amassed a database of more than 44,000 family members grieving a service member's or veteran's death. Several times each month, TAPS receives a call or responds to an online message from family members who indicate they may be considering harming themselves, said spokeswoman Ami Neiberger-Miller. The nonprofit has safety protocols that ensure people get connected with mental health professionals.

One day I got a call from the wife from the Fort Hood group. I told her that I didn't want to be here. She said, 'OK, I'll come pick you up. I said, 'No, I mean, I don't want to live.' She made some calls to this group called Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors. Then I got a call from a woman with TAPS who told me that her brother died in the war. She asked me if I wanted to talk and if I needed help.*

I said, 'Yes, I want somebody to help me.' I asked her if it ever goes away. Would I feel better? She told me no, it's a long road, but there are people who will be there.

It's not like you feel better in a few days or a week. I still had very low moments. I was in my apartment once just pitying myself looking at photos, wanting to die. I was drunk and passed out. When I woke up, there was a song on the radio that me and Freddy and Andrew used to pretend we were playing. Freddy and Andrew playing the guitar, me on drums. That made me call a counselor at the Veterans Affairs department in Austin, and I made my first appointment.

I met with her three times a week. It was awkward. I didn't know what to say to her, and she didn't seem to know what to say to me. I thought it was a waste of time so I called TAPS again. That worked. They got it. I just kept with it.

I got on Facebook and met other families who had lost in the way I had. I learned there was a whole world of families out there in tremendous pain, some of them who thought about suicide, who needed to talk to people like me.

The darkness eventually walked away from me. Actually, I can tell you it was a moment: I crossed the finish line at the Marine Corps Marathon in 2009. Marines ran alongside me, chanting my brothers' names. I had their pictures on my shirt. For those few seconds, I felt like the three of us were finally seen.

Copy editing: Forrest Brown Design: Bryan Perry

Illustrations and development: Kenneth Uzquiano

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