16 ARMY RECRUITERS HAVE COMMITTED SUICIDE SINCE 2000 *PIC*

Posted By: Sandollar <Send E-Mail>
Date: Friday, 10 October 2008, 2:50 p.m.

Something is happening to our young men once they are recruited in the armed forces. I shudder to think of what the root cause is, but so many are coming back from Iraq with PTSD and other horrible problems.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/5788103.html

Nils Aron Andersson married Cassy Walton on March 5, 2007. Walton killed herself the day after her husband's suicide.

Army recruiter Nils Aron Andersson sat behind the wheel of his brand-new Ford F-150, firing round after round into the truck's CD player and radio with a .22-caliber semiautomatic pistol. Spent cartridges littered the seats and floorboards, along with a paper pharmacy bag holding a prescription for the antidepressant Lexapro.

Andersson's wife, Cassy Walton, had been trying to reach the 25-year-old sergeant on his cell phone for hours. He finally picked up about 2 a.m. and told her he wanted to kill himself.

Walton begged him to keep talking to her. Andersson told her he was on the top floor of a downtown Houston parking garage and ended the call. Then he put the pistol to his head, just above his right ear.

Minutes later, Walton raced up the stairs of the garage to find her husband of less than 24 hours slumped on the driver's side of his truck, bleeding from a single bullet wound to his right temple.

Sobbing, she unlocked the truck with her own key, climbed onto his lap, and started CPR.

"Why did you do this?" she screamed.

When Andersson killed himself on March 6, 2007, he became one of at least 16 Army recruiters to commit suicide nationwide since 2000. Five of those suicides occurred in Texas, including three at the Houston Recruiting Battalion, where Andersson worked after serving two tours of duty in Iraq.

Roughly one in five U.S. troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan reports symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression, but only slightly more than half have sought treatment, according to a recently published Rand Corp. study. Of those who did seek care, only about half received minimally adequate treatment, the study found.

Amid increasing concerns about failure to screen, diagnose and treat soldiers with mental health problems adequately, Andersson's story raises questions about the pressures faced by the growing number of veterans who return from multiple combat deployments to high-stress recruiting assignments back home.

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