Returning soldiers find themselves in fragile state

Returning soldiers find themselves in fragile state
By Christopher Curry
Staff writer
Published: Saturday, March 3, 2012

U.S. Marine Marco Grosso. Grosso, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, committed suicide in Gainesville last November. (Submitted Photo)

From childhood, Marco Grosso dreamed of serving in the military. His family recalls him dressed in camouflage and playing army in the woods behind his family's home near Syracuse, N.Y.

In 2007, he graduated from high school and enrolled in the Marines, a fresh-faced 17-year-old aiming to fight for his country and become a military lifer.

Grosso served two tours in Afghanistan's brutal Helmand Province. There, in March 2010, as he rode in an armored vehicle, a land mine explosion knocked him unconscious and wrecked his life.

He returned to the battlefield three weeks later and was awarded a Purple Heart. It was only after he returned home and was diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder that he learned the blast had cut short his military career.

He and three battle buddies, friends from his Camp LeJeune days, moved to Gainesville when they left the Marines. They were drawn here for school and work but mainly because they had experienced the college town's nightlife on several unauthorized jaunts from the North Carolina base and wanted another taste.

On Nov. 6, 2011, after a Sunday night out at a bar with his friends, Grosso returned to his Gainesville townhouse. Sometime after 11:30 p.m., he put on his Marine Corps dress blue uniform, put a rifle to his head and pulled the trigger.

He was 22 years old.

PTSD rates are as high as 35 percent in returning veterans, and those veterans are four times as likely to have suicidal thoughts, according to three studies the Journal of Traumatic Stress published in 2009 and 2010.

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