Memories of Iraq haunted soldier until suicide

The soldier’s sister says the military let her brother down.

McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — Until the day he died, Sgt. Brian Rand believed he was being haunted by the ghost of the Iraqi man he killed.

The ghost choked Rand while he slept in his bunk, forcing him to wake up gasping for air and clawing at his throat.

He whispered that Rand was a vampire and looked on as the soldier stabbed another member of Fort Campbell’s 96th Aviation Support Battalion in the neck with a fork in the mess hall.

Eventually, the ghost told Rand he needed to kill himself.

According to family members and police reports, on Feb. 20, 2007, just a few months after being discharged from his second tour of duty in Iraq, Rand smoked half of a cigarette as he wrote a suicide note, grabbed a gun and went to the Cumberland River Center Pavilion in Clarksville, Tenn. As the predawn dark pressed in, he breathed in the wintry air and stared out at the park where he and his wife, Dena, had married.

Then he placed the gun to his head and silenced his inner ghosts.

“My brother was afraid to ask for help,” said April Somdahl. “And when he finally did ask for help, the military let him down.”

Since the start of the Iraq war, Fort Campbell, a sprawling installation on the Kentucky-Tennessee border, has seen a spike in the number of suicides and soldiers suffering from severe post traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.

In 2007, nine soldiers from Fort Campbell committed suicide — three during the first few weeks of October, according to a letter sent to base personnel by the 101st Airborne Division’s commander, Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Schloesser.

“As our soldiers fight terrorism, the sacrifices asked of them and their families have increased significantly,” Schloesser said in the letter. “... Regrettably, under such circumstances, it is natural for our people to feel the stress of these demands and to be overwhelmed at times. Tragically, these pressures too often end in suicide.”

Fort Campbell spokeswoman Cathy Gramling said post officials were unable to track the suicides referred to in the letter and declined to give additional suicide figures. The Pentagon said it does not track suicides by military installation.

Fort Campbell’s suicide record tracks with a national upsurge — 99 active-duty troops committed suicide in 2006, the highest rate in nearly three decades, according to the Pentagon.

According to the Army, more than 2,000 active-duty soldiers attempted suicide or suffered serious self-inflicted injuries in 2007, compared to fewer than 500 such cases in 2002, the year before the United States invaded Iraq.

A recent study by the nonprofit Rand Corp. found that 300,000 of the nearly 1.7 million soldiers who’ve served in Iraq or Afghanistan suffer from PTSD or a major mental illness, conditions that are worsened by lengthy deployments and, if left untreated, can lead to suicide.

Soldiers deployed from Fort Campbell have served up to 15-month stints and have fought in such heavy combat zones as Basra, Mosul and Al Anbar province. Some soldiers, like Brian Rand, have been deployed multiple times since the war began.

The Pentagon and the Department of Veteran Affairs have added mental health workers and staff to help families and troops cope with the effects of prolonged combat and to encourage deployed troops to support each other through a buddy system.

But sometimes soldiers fall through the cracks.

Rand’s family says a culture that often attaches a stigma to troops who seek help and a stop-loss policy designed to keep soldiers on the battlefield ultimately led to his death.

“Truthfully I don’t think Brian had a grip on why things were happening the way they were,” said his mother, Janice Minnella.

For a while Sgt. Brian Rand enjoyed being assigned to Fort Campbell and working as a helicopter mechanic.

But that was before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the War on Terror.

Before Iraq.

As the war dragged on and Rand was sent first to Kuwait, then Iraq, he told family members that he felt torn about the things he saw.

Then one day, while standing guard near the Green Zone, Rand killed an Iraqi man.

“The spirit of the man that he killed didn’t leave him, it kept harassing him,” Somdahl said of her brother. “He said this guy is following me around in the mess hall, he’s trying to kill me. I told him to leave me alone but he says he wants to take me with him.”’