Alexis Soto-Ramirez (43-year old 544th Military Police Company specialist), who’d been evacuated a month earlier from Iraq due to back pain, hanged himself with his bathrobe sash at Walter Reed Army Medical Center on January 12, 2004/ss/. Five days later, on January 17, 2004/ss/, Jeremy Seeley (28-year old 101st Airborne specialist) walked off Fort Campbell, Ky., checked into a hotel, and overdosed on household poison.
Boyd Wicks, Jr. (Marine infantry sergeant) returned from Iraq in June 2003 and was discharged in October; he committed suicide on February 1, 2004/ss/, his father saying of PTSD. On March 7, 2004/oif/, Matthew Milczark (18-year old Marine) shot himself in a Kuwaiti military chapel. One week later, on March 14, 2004/ss/, William Howell
(36-year old Ft. Carson, Colo., Special Forces chief warrant officer
with 17 years of military service as a Green Beret) threatened his wife
with a gun, and then shot himself as police officers moved in on him; he’d returned from Iraq a mere three weeks earlier.
Four days later, on March 18, 2004/ss/, Brandon Ratliff (6-times decorated Army Reserve’s 909th Forward Surgical Team executive officer), shot himself
after writing The Columbus Dispatch, “I didn’t think I’d have to fight
over there and have to fight these guys, too.” He’d lost a promised
promotion and raise following his tour in Afghanistan saving injured
soldiers on the frontline.
On March 21, 2004/ss/, Ken Dennis (22-year old Marine corporal and combat rifleman who’d served in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Djibouti and Iraq) hanged himself with
his belt in his Renton, Wash., apartment eight months after returning
from Iraq. He’d confessed to his father, “You know, Dad, it’s really
hard – very, very hard – to see a man’s face and kill him.”
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