The War On Suicide?


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Peter van Agtmael/Magnum for TIME


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The commander encouraged McCaddon to get help but wouldn't order him to do it. He left the room, livid, and Leslie burst into tears. "Honey, don't worry," Leslie remembers the commander saying. "My first marriage was a wreck too."

Can't you make him get some help? Leslie pleaded again, but the colonel pushed back. McCaddon was doing fine at work, with no signs of a problem. "'Leslie, I know this is going to be hard to hear, but this just doesn't sound like an Army issue to me,'" McCaddon's wife recalls the colonel saying. "'It sounds like a family issue to me.'" Leslie felt her blood run cold. "No one was going to believe me so long as things were going fine at work."

McCaddon did try to see an Army psychiatrist, but a month or more could pass without his finding the time. "I'd say, 'He's in the Army,'" Leslie recalls telling the doctor, "'and you make him do everything else, so you should be able to make him go to mental-health counseling.'" But McCaddon was not about to detour from rounds to lie on the couch. He barely ate while on his shift. "Everybody here is under stress," he stormed at Leslie. "I can't just walk out for an hour a week--I'm not going to leave them when we're already short-staffed."

The marriage was cracking. Back in Massachusetts, Leslie's mother was not well. Leslie and the kids moved home so she could take care of her. She and Michael talked about divorce.

The Waiting Room

Early on Monday, March 19, Ian Morrison showed up at a Fort Hood health clinic, where he sat waiting in his uniform, with his aviation badge, for three hours. Finally someone saw him. "'I'm sorry you had to wait all this time,'" Rebecca says he was told. "'But we can't see you. We can't prescribe you anything.'" He had to see the doctor assigned to his unit. When Morrison arrived at the flight surgeon's office, he told Rebecca, the doctor was upset that Morrison hadn't shown up at the regular daily sick call a couple of hours earlier.

"He told me this guy was so dismissive and rude to him. 'You need to follow procedure. You should have been here hours ago,'" Rebecca says. "Ian wanted to tell the doctor he was anxious, depressed and couldn't sleep, but this guy shut him down." Morrison acknowledged only his sleeplessness, leading the doctor to give him 10 sleeping pills with orders to return the next week. He'd be grounded for the time being.

But that didn't seem to affect his mood. Morrison toasted his wife's success on a big exam that day--she was close to earning her master's in psychology--by cooking a steak dinner and drawing a bubble bath for her that night. "He was dancing around and playing music and celebrating for me," she remembers. "He seemed really hopeful." He took a pill before bed but told Rebecca in the morning that he hadn't slept.

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