From Queens to Kuwait, Where a Life Was Ended

Sgt. Denise A. Lannaman fatally shot herself in Kuwait last year.
From Queens to Kuwait, Where a Life Was Ended

In the space of three months last year, three members of the U.S. Army who had been part of a logistics group in Kuwait committed suicide. Two of them — a colonel and a major — had power over contract awards and had been accused of taking bribes just before they killed themselves.

The third was Sgt. Denise A. Lannaman of Queens. In a war that has cost the lives of more than 3,700 Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis, the death of one woman by her own hand has attracted little attention beyond the circle of shattered family and friends.

Yet those who know her say that questions about Sergeant Lannaman’s death remain unsettled, and go well beyond psychic agonies that she struggled with her entire life. “From the day she was born, she was different,” Barbara Lannaman, her mother, said. “Life was just not satisfactory to her.”

Gifted as a mechanic, fastidious as an administrator, brave in a combat zone, Sergeant Lannaman at the end of her life had landed in a spot where, investigators say, officers were able to scoop up millions of dollars in bribes from merchants who wanted the contracts the Army awarded for everything from water to laundry.

Far as it was from the bombs that she drove past in Iraq, the logistics operation in Kuwait would lead to its own peculiar casualties.

That Sergeant Lannaman was in the Army at all — whether in Iraq or behind a desk — could be seen as a testament to her own shrewdness, or to the Army’s hunger for recruits in a grindingly long war.

Born in Kingston, Jamaica, she spent nine years in the Navy, then bounced from job to job. By the time she was 42, in the spring of 2003, Denise Lannaman had been a firefighter, a sailor, a filmmaker, a scuba diver, a paramedic and an auto mechanic.

She also had been a frequent psychiatric patient, her family says, an iron-willed perfectionist who had dealt with life’s ragged edges by making four suicide attempts.
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