The endless after-war
Veterans lost to suicide and their surviving family members are uncounted casualties of America’s 21st-century wars, a mounting toll that remains invisible to most of the country
'He went to fight a war over there, then he came back and had to fight another war.'
LAREDO — Sara Mata has followed a morning ritual since marrying Manuel Garza five years ago. She pours two mugs of coffee and sits down beside him to talk about what’s on her mind, musing out loud about their children and families, about happy memories and dreams for the future.
Until last fall, the conversations took place at the kitchen table in their modest apartment on Laredo’s south side, the couple surrounded by the clutter of family life.
Now Mata sits at the foot of her husband’s grave in a city cemetery, shadowed by the anguish of loss. She talks to the white marble headstone that identifies him as an Army veteran who served in the Iraq War. She stays long enough that his coffee turns cold.
“There are so many unanswered questions, so many things I would like to know,” she said. “I ask him when I come here.”
Garza shared little with Mata about the causes of the war within him before his death Sept. 18, when he jumped from a freeway overpass on the city’s northern edge. He clutched two yellow blankets that belonged to his young daughter as he fell to earth.
Mata knew only that he had received a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder linked to his two combat tours in Iraq. The second ended in 2005, a full decade before his suicide at age 33, and six years before they began dating.
The passage of so much time illuminates the long reach of PTSD and the enduring, largely invisible aftermath of America’s 21st-century wars on veterans and their families. Their plight deepens in the border region of South Texas, where the Veterans Affairs health care system lacks a full-service hospital and few behavioral health clinics exist in the private sector.
The VA released a report earlier this month that shows the suicide rate for veterans nationwide has surged 32 percent since 2001, compared with 23 percent for civilians. Much of the increase occurred among veterans under age 40.
The civilian suicide rate was 13 deaths per 100,000 people in 2014. Veterans age 18 to 29 were almost six times as likely to end their own lives, and the rate for those age 30 to 39 more than tripled that of civilians.
An estimated 13 percent to 20 percent of the 2.6 million veterans who deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan returned with PTSD. The vast majority recover from or learn to tame symptoms that include acute anxiety, anger, flashbacks, insomnia and hypervigilance, a nearly constant state of intense alertness.
But combat trauma traces a jagged trajectory, and symptoms can linger or resurface even decades later. A veteran’s choice to cope in silence can sow confusion among family members exposed to behavior that appears erratic and inexplicable.
Garza’s desire to shield Mata from his inner turbulence typifies the reluctance of veterans, hewing to the military ethos of self-reliance, to open up to loved ones. The blurred reasons behind his decision to kill himself contrast with the painful clarity of his absence.
“He went to go fight a war over there, then he came back and had to fight another war,” said Mata, 32, the mother of four children, the youngest two with Garza. “And now he’s gone and we’re fighting his war.”
A previous VA study showed that the veteran suicide rate runs sharply higher in less populated areas compared to urban centers. More obstacles to VA and private care, coupled with pervasive skepticism about mental health treatment, plague veterans in outlying regions.
Gabriel Lopez, founder of the South Texas Afghanistan and Iraq Veterans Association based in Laredo, established the group, in part, to aid former service members struggling with combat trauma.
Lopez describes veterans lost to suicide and their surviving family members as uncounted casualties of war. He has consoled Mata and other spouses of veterans who took their own lives, and motivated by their grief, he seeks to disabuse veterans in crisis of the corrosive belief that suicide will relieve their families of a burden.
“We veterans are very good at hiding things emotionally,” he said. “That can be useful in a lot of situations. But the problem with suicide is, you can’t come back to life and see what you’ve done.”
‘I fell to pieces’
Richard Rodriguez brooded in his backyard on a cool evening in March after another argument with his wife. The idea to end his life bloomed in his mind with cold conviction.
The former Army reservist stood up and began walking toward the freeway a few miles from his house in Harlingen. He wanted to reach a particular curve that lies beyond the glow of streetlights.
In that dark emptiness, when the moment beckoned, he would hurl himself in front of a vehicle. He would quiet at last the chaos inside that he carried home from Iraq six years earlier.
Rodriguez rationalized that the location was far enough from the house that his wife, Vicky, and their three young children would seldom pass by the site. Nor would the date of his death coincide with their birthdays, the couple’s wedding anniversary or any other meaningful family occasion.
“I had everything figured out,” he said. “The best way to help everyone was for me to die.”
Before setting off, he sent Vicky a cryptic text to apologize and to say goodbye to her and the kids. He ignored her repeated calls as he walked until, his resolve receding by degrees, he answered and confessed his plan.
She pleaded with him to come home. Yet even after he divulged his whereabouts and promised to turn around, he continued toward the interstate.
After they hung up, Vicky called a friend of her husband’s who works for the city police force. The officer broke off his patrol route and raced across town.
The red and blue flashing lights washed over Rodriguez as he neared an on-ramp. The squad car pulled beside him. His friend stepped out and wrapped him in a tight hug.
“I fell to pieces,” said Rodriguez, 30, wiping away tears as he sat in his living room while Vicky prepared the kids for bed. In the months since then, as he has moved from resisting to accepting the diagnosis of PTSD, he has sought to disarm his “constant companion.”
“If you deny it’s there or try to run away, it’s going to find you,” he said. “You have to help yourself to remove the haze.”
The VA’s suicide study revealed that an average of 20 veterans a day died by their own hand in 2014, with two-thirds age 50 and older.
Researchers analyzed the records of 55 million veterans from every state between 1979 and 2014. The results present a clearer picture of the suicide rate than a smaller, widely cited survey from 2012 that estimated the daily toll at 22 veterans. The earlier report relied on data from only 20 states and excluded Texas and California, the two states with the largest veterans population.
In Cameron County, which includes Harlingen, four veterans died by suicide between December and May, three of whom served in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Salvador Castillo, the county’s veterans service officer, has observed at close range the fallout of the after-war. He has worked to support veterans undone by psychological trauma, their lives stripped apart as they lose marriages, friends, jobs and, in time, the vestiges of their self-worth.
“They go from having everything structured for them in the military to having no structure and no brotherhood in the civilian world,” said Castillo, who deployed twice to Afghanistan, once each with the Air Force and Army. “But a lot of them still don’t want to ask for help.”
Veterans with severe PTSD tend to perceive their condition as a personal failing. Many consider treatment an abject surrender and instead self-medicate with alcohol, drugs or both. Their approach creates a perilous illusion of control.
“They feel like they’re supposed to be able to handle anything because that’s what the military taught them,” Castillo said. “To them, suicide is a way to handle their situation.”
Rodriguez returned from Iraq in 2010 with his mind rewired by war. His platoon transported fuel, equipment and supplies between U.S. bases, hazardous work that required extreme awareness of potential enemy threats.
Back in Harlingen, he felt captive to his emotions and a stranger to his family, his mood lurching between agitation and anxiety. He argued with Vicky, snapped at the kids.
The persistent memory of two soldiers killed when a roadside bomb detonated beneath their armored vehicle shrouded his thoughts. He submerged his despair in alcohol.
“The mental tools the military gives you to keep you alive are the hardest things to let go of once you’re home,” he said. “You can’t turn your brain off.”
Vicky insisted that her husband enroll in counseling soon after his Iraq tour. Her ultimatum followed an argument in a grocery store that started over peanut butter and descended into Rodriguez raging about their relationship.
He attended a handful of sessions at a VA clinic to appease her while silently denying he needed treatment.
“There’s a stigma against mental health — in the military and in small towns — and against admitting you have a problem,” he said. “You feel like a failure.”
Rodriguez worked as an oil-field tester after his deployment, spending long stretches away from home while traveling across South Texas and to more than a dozen states. The pace and rigors of the job offered an escape from the closed loop of war memories.
His unraveling occurred after he was laid off in March. Days later, fleeing the clamor of a young family and the echoes of Iraq, he walked toward the interstate.
As his friend drove him home in the squad car that night, Rodriguez, his emotional defenses collapsing, realized shame and misplaced pride had held him hostage for six years.
He has since committed to a counseling regimen and a program of self-care. A suicide prevention plan affixed to the refrigerator in the kitchen details warning signs, coping strategies and people to call in a crisis. The list represents a postscript of sorts to the framed citation for his war service that hangs in the bedroom hallway.
Rodriguez now steps into the backyard to settle his thoughts when his anger spikes over minor irritations. He wakes early to prepare breakfast for the kids and carves out time in the evening for Vicky. A new job at a lumberyard has provided fresh purpose.
Four months after he wanted to die, he is learning to forgive himself, to set down the weight of bearing the after-war alone.
“In the military, you fall into the trap of trying to never show any kind of weakness,” he said. “But getting help takes strength. Living takes strength.”
Lost within himself
Manuel Garza found his way into Sara Mata’s heart by courting her daughter.
Garza and Mata belonged to the same large circle of friends in Laredo but had talked only in passing. One day in 2011, after she accepted his friend request on Facebook, he called her.
“Can I talk to Maddilynn?” Garza asked.
Stunned for a moment, Mata laughed and handed the phone to her 4-year-old daughter.
Garza invited her out for ice cream, and when Mata took the phone back, he said in a playful tone, “You can come along, too, if you want.”
The lopsided double date foretold four years of family happiness for Garza and Mata. They married later that year, and their household grew as they added a daughter and son, Melanie and Manuel Jr., to Mata’s two oldest children, Maddilynn and Jeremiah.
Burly and bald, with a dark beard and shining brown eyes, Garza brought a boyish spirit to fatherhood, swaddling the family in his banter and big laugh.
He joined the kids in break-dancing, playing video games and roasting marshmallows for s’mores. When Mata arrived home after picking them up from daycare and school, he waited on the front steps of their apartment to trade hugs, high-fives and goofy faces.
The couple liked to take their brood fishing at Lake Casa Blanca, and as he helped the children cast their lines and reel in catfish and bass, Mata wondered at her good fortune.
“The way he treated my kids made me fall in love with him. He never wanted to do anything alone. He was so devoted to his family and treated me like a queen,” she said. “He was the man I thought I was never going to meet.”
Garza pushed Mata to earn her GED and attend college to pursue a degree in social work while he handled more of the parenting duties. He had quit a pair of tedious jobs to enroll in classes in computer science, and the couple planned to move this year so that he could complete his coursework at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
He supported the family largely with his monthly $1,200 disability payment from the VA. After his honorable discharge from the Army in 2007, the former sergeant had received a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder related to his two tours in Iraq.
Garza never discussed the war with Mata or the experiences that caused his condition, and he showed a similar reticence about recalling any aspect of his seven-year military career.
He allowed the children to wear his Army medals and pin them on stuffed animals. When Mata praised him as a war hero, he replied with a grimace and switched the topic.
She knew he subdued his sporadic insomnia by walking the boundary of their apartment complex, as if he were patrolling the perimeter of a military base.
Nightmares sometimes ruptured his sleep, and she hugged him close when he awoke crying or shouting. He forgot the episodes by morning, and when she told him what happened, he reassured her that nothing was wrong.
Following his cue, she held back her questions about Iraq and PTSD, soothed by his mostly untroubled manner, and unaware of the latent threat that combat trauma can pose.
In the last year of his life, Garza remained carefree around the children, whether on road trips to South Padre or barbecuing their catch of the day on the grill outside the apartment.
But Mata noticed changes. He drank and smoked more, and his insomnia and nightmares occurred with greater frequency. He suffered from panic attacks and brief periods of depression, and he developed bowel incontinence, a symptom of PTSD typically induced by anxiety.
Since leaving the military, Garza had attended occasional counseling sessions with VA therapists in Laredo, Harlingen and Corpus Christi.
Last September, a week before his suicide, he received a referral from a Laredo provider to see a VA psychiatrist in San Antonio. He alluded to concerns about his self-control to Mata without elaborating.
The number of former service members seeking behavioral health care through the VA soared from 925,000 in 2006 to 1.6 million last year. The rising demand prevents clinicians from counseling most veterans more than once every few months.
Gabriel Lopez, founder of the South Texas Afghanistan and Iraq Veterans Association, regards the growing need as the unseen legacy of America’s distant conflicts.
“This is war coming home,” said Lopez, 48, a Navy veteran who has been diagnosed with PTSD linked to his tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. “This is the price we’re going to have to pay for the fact that we’re always at war. It’s not going to end.”
In some cases, VA providers in the South Texas border region send patients to larger networks in San Antonio and Houston to reduce the wait for an appointment. The referrals require veterans to travel long distances to meet with unfamiliar clinicians.
Mata supported Garza’s decision to make the trip to the VA hospital in San Antonio. She joined him for the drive and they brought Melanie, their 2-year-old daughter, who slept in the back seat nestled in a pair of yellow blankets.
The VA visit marked the beginning of her husband’s final 48 hours. In Mata’s version of events, after meeting with the clinician, he became lost within himself.
Garza withheld details about the session from her beyond claiming that the psychiatrist appeared indifferent to his condition and told him, “It’s all in your head.”
Federal policy prohibits VA officials from commenting on the care of individual veterans. For Mata, proof of the session’s effect emerged in the ensuing hours as Garza, his mood darkening, spiraled out of reach.
The couple stayed with her brother in San Antonio overnight. Garza retreated into his mind and slept little, if at all. The next morning, during the trip back to Laredo, he alternated between stretches of silence and talking in a voice flat and faraway.
In the late afternoon, after returning from a short visit with neighbors, Garza left the apartment, telling Mata he wanted to buy beer. An hour or more had passed when he called her.
Caught between anger and unease, she demanded to know where he had gone.
He asked to talk to the children. She repeated her demand. They went around several more times before he relented.
“Just tell the kids I love them,” he said.
He sounded weary, broken. Her thoughts fogging with dread, she shouted at him in desperation.
“Come back and tell me and tell our kids!”
“I love you. I love them.”
Mata heard nothing more from him. She waited on the front steps through the night, walking inside at 7 a.m.
An hour later, she answered a knock at the door. Two police officers stood before her.
War’s hidden debris
Alex Almanza sat alone in a camping trailer near a highway outside Edinburg. He laid his 9mm Glock on the dining table and gave the gun a hard spin.
In his version of Russian roulette, if the gun stopped with the muzzle pointing at him, the retired Army staff sergeant would end his life.
The clockwise rotations slowed. He heard neither the hiss of traffic nor the scuffing of the Glock. He heard the sound of friends dying in war.
Nine years earlier, weeks before Almanza’s first tour in Iraq ended in 2004, his platoon responded to the scene of a roadside bombing in a town north of Baghdad.
The blast flipped over a Bradley fighting vehicle, trapping three U.S. soldiers. Flames swallowed the carrier as hundreds of rounds of ammunition “cooked off,” in military lingo. A rescue was impossible.
Almanza stood back with the members of his unit. The screams from the vehicle faded amid the acrid scent of burning flesh. He considered two of the dead men his younger brothers.
His mind quelled his heart’s urge to mourn. He needed to brace for the next day, the next mission. His platoon had patrols to conduct, raids to execute, checkpoints to set up. Sorrow succumbed to war’s relentless exigencies.
“You just have to eat it and move on,” he said. “That’s how you survive.”
The deaths trailed Almanza back to America. He carried a small bottle of cologne that he opened when the smell from that night in Iraq invaded his memories. He turned to alcohol to defuse his guilt over returning alive, to decelerate from the extremes of combat, to outlast the day.
“You’re numb,” his wife said before leaving him. “You’re cold.”
Over the next decade, including his second tour in Iraq in 2008, war scattered its hidden debris across Almanza’s life.
He lost two more marriages and drifted from his four daughters. He was arrested twice within six months for drunk driving and public intoxication as he approached the end of a military career spanning a quarter-century.
Before the Army medically discharged him in 2013, Almanza received counseling for post-traumatic stress disorder and alcohol abuse. His willpower splintered as soon as he moved to his hometown of Edinburg later that year.
He added pot, cocaine and Ecstasy to his beer diet. He wound up homeless, living with a series of relatives.
One allowed him to stay in the camper parked north of town close to Interstate 69, and there, his hope depleted, he conceived his variation of Russian roulette.
He watched the Glock finish its final turn. The muzzle pointed toward the wall. He stared at the gun and heard his voice ask a question from the brink.
“How did I get here?”
He felt alone and bereft, as unknown to himself as to others, clenched by a desolation that has afflicted a sizable segment of those who deployed in the country’s most recent wars.
Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, a national advocacy group, found in a survey of 3,000 of its members last year that 40 percent had considered suicide after enlisting.
The figure, a 10 percent increase from 2013, represents more than 1 million men and women if applied across the entire generation of new war veterans.
Nearly 60 percent of the poll’s respondents reported a mental health condition related to their military service, and almost half knew a veteran from the two wars who died by suicide. The results suggest the alienation that can thwart former service members as they attempt to navigate the civilian landscape.
“Your ego takes a giant hit when you come out of the military,” said Mike Allen, the coordinator of the Crossroads Area Veterans Center in Victoria. “You’re no longer part of a group when you go civilian. That’s the biggest disconnect.”
Allen, 43, works with veterans to obtain medical care, employment, VA benefits and other support services. He arranges fishing trips, paintball battles and group barbecues while exhorting them to reengage with the world around them.
His urgency arises from the pain of losing six Army comrades to suicide and the struggle he endured to avoid their fate.
Allen returned to his native South Texas in 2011 after a 20-year Army career. The retired first sergeant arrived with PTSD and a mild traumatic brain injury wrought by two roadside bomb explosions during his first tour in Iraq in 2005.
The conditions provoked volatile behavior that had ruined his marriage in 2008, the same year the Army sent him back to Iraq. His temper redlined at unexpected moments and anxiety seized him in crowded spaces. His days were scarred by migraines and memory loss, his nights by insomnia and violent dreams.
He marinated his mind in alcohol as suicide claimed one former member of his unit from his 2008 tour, then another, then a third.
The deaths gave human shape to Allen’s abstract fear of the same dark impulse. He entered therapy, attending dozens of sessions with a VA counselor in San Antonio, and by last year, when the veterans center opened, he had again found purpose.
In his office, where a couple of large artillery shells evoke his past trade as a tank gunner, he keeps a photo of another Army brother who died by suicide two years ago. He was the sixth casualty of the after-war with whom Allen served, and memories of friends gone animate his mission.
“I see too many guys stop when they hit an obstacle,” he said. “If you sit around and dwell on bad stuff all day, more bad stuff is probably going to happen. You can’t stop.”
Almanza’s journey forward began three years ago, after his decade-long freefall reached bottom inside a musty, 1970s-era camping trailer.
He set the Glock aside and admitted his despair. He collected the fragments of his resolve and went to the VA.
Recent medical studies and news reports have documented a widespread pattern of VA clinicians overprescribing drugs. Almanza received a dozen medications for anxiety, depression, insomnia and other conditions.
The medley of pills left him feeling underwater. His counseling sessions offered little reason to surface.
Most VA mental health providers lack military experience, and combat veterans in particular remain loath to bare their trauma to those who have never worn the uniform. Almanza started to thaw only when he found a private therapist who had served in the Army.
Their discussions guided him toward self-absolution, a process that evolved further when, around the same time, he rediscovered his faith while attending church with his sister.
He soon stopped taking his medications, and in the last two years, as his mind and spirit have healed, he has released his survivor’s remorse over the deaths of his friends in Iraq.
“They will always have a place in my heart and prayers. But they don’t consume me anymore,” said Almanza, 47, sitting in the living room of the home he shares with his wife of a year and her two children. The small brick house stands less than a mile from Interstate 69 and a world removed from where he last lived near the highway.
“I’m able to look back now and have answers to the question, ‘Why am I still alive?’” he said. “I know that there’s a direction to my life.”
Almanza has enrolled in college to study criminal justice and serves as an intern with the Hidalgo County public defender and the McAllen parole office. Last fall he formed Game Changers, a Christian nonprofit group that enlists veterans to provide community services.
The work at once lends order to their days and aids them in crossing the divide between the military and the outside.
“I’ve been a soldier longer than I’ve been a civilian, so I’m still learning,” Almanza said. “But what I’ve realized is you have to find something larger than yourself, like when you were part of the military.”
‘Daddy’s house’
Sara Mata sat in the Chevrolet Yukon guessing at her husband’s last thoughts. A few days earlier, in the predawn hours of Sept. 18, Manuel Garza had parked the aging SUV on the shoulder of a highway overpass in Laredo.
He stepped from the truck carrying two yellow blankets that had been wrapped around his young daughter during a trip to San Antonio less than 48 hours earlier. He and Mata had traveled to the city for his meeting with a VA psychiatrist, and not long after they returned home the next day, he went out and never came back.
The sun had yet to rise. He moved closer to the concrete wall of the overpass. His feet left the ground.
Mata retrieved the truck from a police impound lot. She climbed behind the steering wheel, and when she could breathe again, she asked him question after question, trying to make sense of what he had done, searching for answers that still elude her almost a year later.
“For someone like him to suddenly take his own life — I think that’s what you can’t understand,” she said.
His suicide has given Mata an unwanted education in post-traumatic stress disorder. She has read books and watched documentaries on the subject, and enlightened by the stories of other combat veterans, she has formed theories about his behavior.
She thinks it’s possible that he started drinking more to stifle memories from Iraq. He may have preferred shopping for groceries late at night to stay away from crowds that could trigger his anxiety. Perhaps he imagined himself a threat to or a weight on his family and believed his death would spare them suffering.
Mata heard from a friend of Garza’s, another Iraq War veteran, after his suicide. He told her that Garza avoided talking about the war to shield her from his trauma. She laments that she has come to recognize the contours of PTSD only in the wake of his death.
“If I had known more, I would have tried to get him help,” she said. “If he had opened up to me a little more, maybe he wouldn’t have felt the way he did.”
His absence is a constant presence as she strains to raise four young children on her own.
Maddilynn sleeps in his Tennessee Titans jersey. Jeremiah wears his watch, Melanie keeps his wallet. When the family nears home while riding in the Yukon, Manuel Jr., too young to realize the truth, raises his arms and shrieks, “Yay, daddy!”
Mata hides her panic attacks and tears from them. She withdraws to the bedroom and shuts the door. She steps into the closet and presses her face against his shirts to breathe him in, or draws a bath and pours a few drops of his shampoo to feel him around her.
His spirit embraces them. They talk about him, repeat his jokes, invoke him in their prayers. She brings the kids to the cemetery once or twice a week to spend time at what they call “daddy’s house.”
Most days she visits the grave alone. She brings two mugs of coffee and sits down. Her long, dark hair grazes the earth, her brown eyes cloud with tears.
She talks about the kids and her parents and anything else on her mind. She tells him that she loves him and misses him and needs him.
She knows he will never return from war. She will never stop waiting.
mkuz@express-news.net
Twitter: @MartinKuz