Sgt. 1st Class Daniel Wimmer's daughter Alex holds her sister Mi-Na at his grave. | MCT
Sgt. 1st Class Daniel Wimmer charmed potential Army recruits with a movie star's smile, but somehow it never quite reached his eyes, even when he was cradling his newborn twin daughters.
Whenever he closed his eyes, he dreamed of his own dead body swinging from a rope, his feet dangling just above a chair.
When those nightmares eventually blurred, the Persian Gulf veteran and former Army recruiter began trying to recreate their grisly images. He tried to kill himself with pills in the woods, and a razor blade in a hotel room, and every suicide attempt drew his wife, Jennifer, and their four daughters deeper into his dark world.
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The numbers don't tell the whole story. Long after the flag-draped coffins are lowered into the ground, families such as the Wimmers are left to measure their grief in a seemingly endless stretch of days marked by missed birthdays, anniversaries, weddings and babies' first steps.
"I think we need to realize that we have families that are under such great stress," Deborah Mullen, the wife of Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told more than 1,000 military and federal health care workers at a suicide prevention conference in January. "This stress is only going to continue. We need to be able to give tools to family members who are left behind."
Daniel's depression consumed the loving husband and father his family once knew and left behind a despondent phantom. >>>>>
Tough old soldier battles new enemy: Suicide epidemic
Despite prevention efforts, U.S. military suicides rise
Military Suicides
During the month of January, more soldiers committed suicide (24) than were killed by enemy fire in Afghanistan and Iraq combined (16). This is unusual, but--amazingly--not unique. In fact, the problem of military suicides is growing much worse, as Army Chief of Staff George Casey said yesterday in Hawaii.
Casey claimed to be mystified by the suicide rates:
"The fact of the matter is, we just don't know" why suicides have increased, Army Chief of Staff Gen. George W. Casey Jr. said Friday. "It's been very frustrating to me with the effort that we made over the last year, and we did not stem the tide."
Which I'm sure is a matter of discretion being the better part of valor.
Undoubtedly, the soldiers are suffering the effects of repeatedly being deployed and redeployed into a war zone that--in Iraq, at least--is only peripherally related to our national interests. The rationale for the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan, though certainly more plausible, is becoming less comprehensible as the years pass. >>>>>
Walter Reed and Beyond
Walter Reed and Beyond follows the care and treatment of the men and women who came home from battle in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. It examines the promises made, and the reality lived, in the aftermath of war. >>>>>
Living with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
You can find the above video's at the link directly above them as well as another that the Washington Post put together and have posted on their site along with the Walter Reed and Beyond site.
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