Military mental health crisis exposed with Camp Liberty killings

Military mental health crisis exposed with Camp Liberty killings
By ELLIOT BLAIR SMITH
Bloomberg News
Published: August 2, 2012

Sergeant John Russell lay awake, wondering what his wife would do if he killed himself.

He was so messed up that his first lieutenant removed the firing pin from his M16 assault rifle. Six weeks from the end of his fifth combat-zone tour, and five years from retiring on a 20-year Army pension, he suspected he wouldn’t see any of it.

Before dawn, shaking and stuttering, Russell walked through the still desert outside Baghdad to the quarters of Captain Peter Keough, the 54th Engineer Battalion’s chaplain. Keough listened, and hastily made the sergeant’s fourth appointment in four days at an Army mental-health clinic.

“I believe he is deteriorating,” Keough e-mailed an Army psychiatrist. “He doesn’t trust anyone.” Russell, the chaplain wrote, “believes he is better off dead.”

It was 10:07 a.m. on May 11, 2009. The battalion, military police and combat stress specialists had three hours and 34 minutes to avert tragedy. Instead, after lost opportunities and miscalculations, the blue-eyed sergeant from Texas used a stolen gun to kill three enlisted men and two officers in the deadliest case of soldier-on-soldier violence in the war zone. His victims’ bodies are buried across the U.S., from Arlington National Cemetery to the Texas panhandle.

Russell slipped through the safety net constructed to catch troubled soldiers. More and more are falling. The armed services’ mental-health epidemic has deepened since the Camp Liberty killings. In June, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta ordered a Pentagon review of every diagnosis from 2001 on. read more here

5 US soldiers shot at Camp Liberty in Iraq