Members of Marine Battalion "Reunions" at Graveside

Unraveling a String of Veteran Marine Suicides, One by One
New York Times
By DAVE PHILIPPS
SEPT. 19, 2015

“Look,” he said, “all I know is, in my battalion there have been 12 suicides since we came back, and it appears to be getting worse.”

Manny Bojorquez sitting in the lobby of the church in Las Vegas where Eduardo Bojorquez's funeral was held.

Justin Rogers, left, and Mark Briggs also served in the Second Battalion, Seventh Marine Regiment. Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times

In the 105-degree heat of a Las Vegas parking lot last June, a handful of infantry veterans dressed in black started gathering by the side door of a small church.

They were waiting for the start of a funeral for the latest suicide in a string of deaths since their infantry unit, the Second Battalion, Seventh Marine Regiment, had returned from Afghanistan seven years before. There had been at least one death per year. In most years there were more. The men were in their late 20s. Almost all were out of the military. Often the funerals were the only time members of the old battalion got together.

I stood waiting with them. I had been reporting their story long enough that when anything happened, my inbox filled up.

As we waited, a rental car pulled up. A Marine, now working as a police officer, got out and came over to hug the other men waiting in the sun.

One made a grim joke: “Time for our annual reunion.”

My journey with the men of the Second Battalion had started six months before with a disagreement over coffee with a sniper. I had just met the former member from the battalion and I asked him what I always ask young veterans: “What should the media be reporting about that we are not?”

He didn’t hesitate: suicide.

Those interviews showed a deep current of pain in the unit. I had started out trying to learn about the dead, but with each call I learned how wounded many of the living still were. Many were confused, alienated, depressed. Several had tried suicide. I talked to three men who had put a gun to their head and pulled the trigger. One, realizing his gun had misfired, pulled the trigger again.

I realized the story was not about the dead, but the living, and how they were working to try to save one another and themselves.
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