Houston Army Recruiter Suicides

The U.S. Army has appointed a general to investigate a rash of suicides among recruiters of the Houston, TX recruiting battalion, five since 2001. Nationwide, since 9-11 seventeen Army recruiters have taken their own lives.

NPR’s story recounts recurring symptoms of PTSD, including violent nightmares and sleep disturbances, among suicides.

Back in March of 2007, Aron Andersson locked himself in the cab of his Ford 150 pickup, called home to say he was going to kill himself, shot up the dashboard radio, and then put a bullet in his head. He had threatened suicide five months earlier, and back then his father, Bob Andersson, reported him to the military.

“I don’t know if that was the right thing to do, but I called a major and told him his girlfriend had said he threatened to commit suicide, and she told me he was going through night terrors and a bunch of other things. And he’d get up to go to work in the morning and tell his girlfriend he was exhausted, and she’d say, ‘Yeah you’ve been jumpin’ over the couch, hidin’ behind the chairs and stuff, like you’re in battle,’ and he wouldn’t even realize it in the morning,” Andersson says.

Long before I was diagnosed, I had nightmares of being trapped in a room without doors or windows and being unable to get out, and often wake up cowering next to a wall with my hands up on it looking for a way out. In college my night terrors were so severe my roommate was often afraid for my life, and several times I jumped out of bed and ran from my dorm room screaming. I now take medication and talk to my therapist, often. Aron Andersson was diagnosed with PTSD, given medication, and then put right back into the most stressful job in the entire military.

As a recruiter stationed in River Oaks and Rosenberg, Andersson often worked six days a week, routinely got home after 11 p.m., and would sometimes weep from despair and exhaustion…

After his diagnosis, Andersson never received any follow-up treatment from the Army, and fell into a relationship with a manic-depressive who also had a history of suicide attempts. She was the one who found Andersson in his truck, where he shot himself with his Army-issued revolver. The next day she bought a handgun and shot herself in the head.

Although Texas Senator John Cornyn has asked for an independent investigation, the Army is going through with an internal investigation despite public accusations of a possible cover-up of the psychiatric problems going on in Army recruiting.