In their stories, however, may lie a clue into a newly reported federal analysis that shows that National Guard and Army Reserve troops who have fought in Iraq and Afghanistan are more likely to commit suicide than their active-duty counterparts.
"The trend we've seen, and it's a little bit sad, is that these suicides are often relationship-based," said Utah Guard chaplain Gerald White. "What we've seen here in Utah . . . is the majority of soldiers who have committed or attempted suicide have done so when a failure of a relationship occurs."
A Department of Veterans Affairs analysis of ongoing research of deaths among veterans of the nation's continuing wars found that Guard or Reserve members made up 53 percent of the veteran suicides from 2001 to 2005, even though they made up only about 28 percent of all U.S. military forces deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Reserve soldiers tend to be older and are more likely to be married than their active-duty counterparts, White noted. "It used to be that the Army would say, if we wanted you to have a spouse, we would have issued you one," White said. "Now the Army is having to deal with the fact that things have changed."
Among those changes are the effects of deployments on relationships - and the effects of relationships on the well-being of soldiers.
"When you take people who may already be on the edge of crisis - maybe they have family relationship issues, divorce, health problems - and then you add a deployment on top of that, taking them away from their family for six months to a year and a half, you see people who may have been teetering before are now pushed into more of a crisis," he said.
The Utah Guard counted three suicides in 2005, four in 2006, one in 2007 and one so far this year. Officials said statistics from prior years were unavailable because the Guard's personnel officers didn't track suicides separately from other deaths until 2005.
Not all of the suicides were among combat veterans, and Guard spokeswoman Karen Nuccitelli, a civilian marriage and family counselor before she transferred to a full-time Guard position, stressed that the pressures of life as a citizen soldier can mount upon even those who have not yet been to war.
"Guard members have to juggle so many things," she said. "You throw in their children and their spouses, you add the additional pressure of having a full-time job and a part-time guard career and on top of that you have to make time for training, schools, promotions - you sit down with any Guard members and everyone has a story like that . . . there are days when you just sit down and say, 'Wow, this is all too much for one person to handle.' "
Paul Rieckhoff, executive director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, has long argued for better tracking of suicide rates among veterans, and particularly among reservists. He said the study's findings reinforce the argument that Guard and Reserve troops need more help as they transition back into the civilian world.
"National Guardsman and reservists are literally in Baghdad in one week and in Brooklyn the next," Rieckhoff said, "and that transition is incredibly tough."
White agrees. And that's one of the reasons he's sold on a program the Guard is working on, in collaboration with the Veterans Administration, in which soldiers will be routinely evaluated "for peak performance."
"We train constantly to ensure and maintain their quality," he said, noting that a large factor in the quality of soldiers is their mental health. "We want them operating properly and effectively. These are the most important resources we have."
mlaplante@sltrib.com
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* THE ASSOCIATED PRESS contributed to this report.
