GI's suicide shows failure by all of us

By Jim Spencer
Denver Post Columnist
Thursday, March 18, 2004 -

The United States military began washing its hands of William Howell's death long before he died.

In February, Howell, a Green Beret from Fort Carson, returned to Colorado from 10 months of fighting in Iraq. Like every returning soldier, he was screened for post-traumatic stress. Like every returning soldier, he had the obligatory counseling.

On Sunday, three weeks after coming home, Howell hit his wife, put a gun to his head when police answered a domestic abuse call, then blew his brains out.

Howell's name will never appear in any official body count for Iraq. Make no mistake: He is a casualty of war.

Politicians and patriots pay a lot of lip service to honoring U.S. servicemen and women. To make those words more than rhetoric, Americans must do everything it takes to care for the military and their families after combat.

This has never happened for the veterans of any war, including Iraq. It obviously can't happen for Howell. Now, it looks like no one will try to learn enough from Howell's tragedy to protect anyone else.

Civilian cops are doing a routine check of a policeman who shot at Howell as Howell shot himself, said El Paso County sheriff's spokesman Clif Northam.

Deputies will not try to figure out what caused Howell to snap and assault a woman he presumably loved, Northam said.

There's no need. Howell's dead.

And to a large degree, forgotten.

Special Forces, the Army branch that runs the Green Berets, doesn't count post-combat suicides on official casualty lists. Neither does the rest of the Army. Neither do the other services.

If they did, they'd probably dig deeper into the demise of guys like Howell. He was a 36-year-old warrant officer in one of the military's most elite commands.

Dummies and thugs don't get to be noncommissioned officers in the Green Berets.

"We need to deconstruct what made this person of character do what he did," said Steve Robinson, executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center.

Robinson doesn't expect that to happen.

"The military," he said, "doesn't equate combat experience to suicide, crime, domestic abuse or drug and alcohol abuse."

Robinson thinks the Army will write Howell off to marital problems. "They'll call it a civilian matter," he predicted, "case closed."

The 10th Special Forces Group, where Howell served, called Howell's death "sad and tragic."

"The incident is currently under investigation by the local authorities and the military," a public affairs officer said.

What authorities want to know and what they do with the knowledge will say plenty. It will test how much this country cares for those who defend it. Howell can't be dismissed simply because he's gone. His life must be looked at in detail with an eye toward saving other servicemen and women.

Howell's suicide was the seventh among returning Iraqi vets. None may be worth changes in the way the military and the country helps folks in uniform deal with the ravages of war. But no one can draw that conclusion without turning each case inside out.

Someone needs "to do a post-mortem on this type of situation," said Dr. Gene Bolles, who saw plenty of broken minds and bodies as chief of neurosurgery at the military's regional medical center in Landstuhl, Germany, from November 2001 to January 2004.

Howell "probably filled out his forms," Bolles continued. "I don't think our soldiers feel they should be honest with other soldiers (about psychological stress). They're not trained to show weakness. They're trained to be tough and indestructible."

Especially elite units like the Green Berets.

In the end, though, the fault doesn't rest with Special Forces. It doesn't rest with the Army. It doesn't rest any of the services. The fault rests with every citizen in this country.

As a society, we demand that our warriors learn to kill in order to protect us. Then, we sidestep responsibility for the fallout.

Today, Howell is a tragic figure. Had he suffered another decade or two, he'd be considered a basket case by his neighbors and probably by his former command.

"Compare the way we treat our soldiers with the way we treat an NFL quarterback," Robinson challenged. "The quarterback twists his pinky, and he gets an MRI that day. We have veterans waiting months to get services at hospitals."

That "skewed sense of priorities" extends to men and women coming home from war, Robinson said. "We don't do everything we can to make our soldiers whole."

That's because Americans prefer to live in a dream world.

"We have this (George) Patton image of soldiers," Bolles said. "We don't want to hear that our soldiers can cry, that our soldiers are weak."

We don't want to hear that our soldiers are human.

They won't be until we admit it.

Jim Spencer's column appears Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays in The Denver Post. Contact him at 303-820-1771.

http://denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36%257E27772%257E2024918,00.html