Fort Campbell Battle within fort may decide war on suicide

Battle within fort may decide war on suicide
Article by: MARK BRUNSWICK , Star Tribune Updated: July 29, 2011 - 11:37 PM
Fort Campbell, home to the most often deployed combat force in the Army, is using new approaches to combat an alarming rate of suicide.

CLARKSVILLE, TENN.

Sgt. Patrick Cummings suffered his second traumatic brain injury when a 155mm shell exploded midbarrel as he and other soldiers fired a howitzer against the Taliban. The blast should have killed everyone within a 100-yard radius, but here was Cummings, sitting on a table at the All American Tattoo Company outside Fort Campbell, spending his Valentine's Day night alongside two fellow soldiers who also survived the blast.

The tattoo the men will share memorializes the searing experience they shared, a time-honored military tradition for commemorating brushes with death. But a new deadly danger has been waiting inside Fort Campbell for those preparing for or returning from war, an epidemic of suicides that has shown how ill-prepared the military is to deal with the psychological and emotional injuries of nearly a decade of conflict.

"The problem is you are drilled on these tests from boot camp, 'Suck it up. Be a soldier,'" said Kat Cummings, who accompanied her husband to the tattoo parlor. "They come home, they went through their surgery, the very last thing they thought about was counseling for what they went through," she said. "I understand why these guys are knocking themselves off."

Home to the 101st Airborne, the Army's most often deployed contingency force, Fort Campbell sprawls across 106,000 acres of western Kentucky and Tennessee. The base and its inhabitants bear the scars of nine years of constant warfare, the air thick with equal measures of adrenaline and trauma, soldiers preparing for war, soldiers trying to recoup.
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Battle within fort may decide war on suicide