Another soldier ends the nightmares, why?

PTSD blamed in former soldier’s suicide

The Associated Press
Posted : Sunday Dec 2, 2007 15:17:40 EST

LIVERMORE FALLS, Maine — When serving in Iraq, Tyler Curtis survived bullets and bombs. But once he got home, he couldn’t escape the emotional wounds he suffered.

Curtis, 25, took his own life on Thanksgiving morning, three months after returning to Maine following his 2006 discharge from the Army.

Curtis was unable to go on after Iraq, his sister, Gretchen Errington, said in a letter that was read to mourners who filled a funeral home last week to say goodbye.

“He served his country and ended up paying the ultimate price,” Errington wrote in the letter, which was read by a friend because she was too distraught to speak.

In the months after his return from two tours of duty, Curtis had grown inward and sad. He talked about his desire to return to Iraq and his grief for the families of those he may have killed.

Two weeks before his death, he told his former wife, Randi Sencabaugh, that it wasn’t the fact that he had to shoot people that bothered him most, the Sun Journal of Lewiston reported.

“It’s the fact they had a brother or a sister,” she remembered him saying. “I can’t imagine somebody — my sibling or my parents — dying.”

The Pentagon has not released numbers of how many war veterans have killed themselves after returning from the Middle East.

The Associated Press reported in October that at least 147 soldiers had committed suicide while serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. The AP said at least 283 combat veterans who left the military between the start of the war and the end of 2005 had taken their own lives, according to preliminary Veterans Affairs Department research.

Details of Curtis’ death are sketchy. Police said they found him after receiving a call from a family member early on Thanksgiving with a plea to check on him.

An investigation is continuing, but it’s clear his death was a suicide, said Capt. Ray Lafrance of the Androscoggin County Sheriff’s Department.

At his funeral, Curtis was remembered as a mischievous kid who always wanted to be in the Army, which he joined in 2001 after high school.

He was honorably discharged in 2006 and trained as a diesel mechanic upon his return to the U.S., according to this obituary. Most recently, he worked as a mechanic at a company in Auburn.

His obituary said he took his own life as a result of “post-traumatic stress syndrome.”

“He knew he had it,” Sencabaugh said. “I know he did.”

Curtis was hardly alone among soldiers who have difficulties returning home.

The VA’s Center of Excellence in Canandaigua, N.Y., created a phone bank for veterans last summer that branches out of a nationwide suicide hot line. Anyone who calls the number is asked to press “1” if they’re a veteran or calling on behalf of a veteran, with those calls then diverted to workers in Canandaigua.

Kerry Knox, a psychologist who runs the VA’s Center of Excellence, said attempts to define a particularly at-risk segment of returning soldiers — young, old, male, female, married, single — have been fruitless.

“I think it’s such a wide range,” said Knox. “We are right at the beginning of understanding what we’re seeing.”
Army Times

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