I was trying so hard to cling to my memory of the man Brian had been, the one I’d met all that time ago in the mountains of Iraq and gotten to know in that idyllic first month home. I was trying equally hard to get away from the desperate, lonely, overwhelmed Kayla I had become. What it required was an active state of denial. I knew this, but couldn’t fight it. And so I increasingly retreated from my support network of family and friends.
If anyone asked why I put up with a man who treated me so badly, why I wanted a relationship with someone with so many problems, I had no logical answer. My default reply—that you never leave a fallen comrade on the battlefield—rang hollow even to me. Whenever Brian’s friends, who loyally made sure he didn’t drive drunk and pulled him out of bar fights, told me, “You deserve to be treated better than this,” I simply didn’t listen.
After all, logic and reason didn’t figure into love. I took on faith that things would improve with time; somehow Brian would heal. I convinced myself that if I just loved him enough, he would get better. It was the type of magical thinking I had always mocked; kissing a frog won’t make him a prince in the real world, and loving an asshole even harder won’t suddenly make him a nice guy. “But this is different,” I told myself. “It’s not his fault. He’s broken, but he can get better.” I would make our relationship work through sheer force of will, loyalty, and perseverance.
Yet at the same time I was terrified that he was pulling me into the pit with him instead.
One night Brian and I had a few beers. We were outside my house, smoking, laughing, joking. Suddenly out of nowhere his face shut down, eyes turned cold, shoulders stiffened. He looked away, then looked back with clenched jaw. “You don’t understand,” he said. “You can never understand.”
My chest tightened. Not again. The suddenness with which he turned was terrifying, and I never knew how bad the fights would be. If he would turn violent. I remembered him shredding a pillow while I cowered in the bed, afraid he would turn on me next. Could I take this, again and again? I was afraid, not just that he might hurt me but that it would never get better—that I was so damaged by the war no one else would ever love me, and that the man I loved was so broken, he was gone.
Helplessness and exhaustion washed over me, and my willpower snapped. I stood up wordlessly, walked inside, crept into Matt’s bedroom, and reached under his pillow for what I knew was there—what he had kept there for comfort since we got back from Iraq. Then I slipped into my bathroom and locked the door.
The gun was heavy in my hand, cold, solid. I sat on the edge of my bathtub and stared at it. The door was shut and I was alone. I could hear my own breathing, uneven.
This I could control.
It felt like the only thing I could control. I couldn’t control my anger, which flared up unexpectedly. I couldn’t control the moments when Brian got lost in his rage and isolation. I couldn’t control whether or not the Army would stop-loss me (hold me in past the time I was supposed to get out) or let me out and then call me back to Iraq before my contract was up—back to another year with no control over where I slept, what I ate, if rockets fell on me in the porta-john, if an IED blew off my limbs.
The toilet and sink faded to nothingness in my field of vision and my focus narrowed. My hands were pale next to the black of the handgun, and the cuticles I shredded under stress stood out on my white skin, red and raw. I took a deep breath to steady myself, still my sudden trembling. My ears strained but I heard nothing—I was alone with the moment. The edge of the bathtub felt hard. Solid.
I couldn’t control the memories that suddenly, with no warning, invaded my consciousness: images of those men screaming, thrashing, bleeding on the ground. I couldn’t control when the smell of diesel on the road or at the gas station made me feel like I was in Iraq again. I couldn’t control flinching at sudden noises. Couldn’t control my dreams, still couldn’t even remember them, but knew they must be bad because I sometimes woke drenched in sweat, heart pounding.
But this, this I could control. This gun, this choice. It offered me a way out, and freedom from the fear that nothing would change. The thought of nothingness descending upon my consciousness seemed like it would be a relief—all the stress and fear and anger and confusion gone, replaced by blessed nothingness.
I couldn’t imagine going to the chain of command in my unit and confessing this to my platoon sergeant, platoon leader, company commander, and on up, couldn’t imagine being put on public, humiliating suicide watch, sleeping in the dayroom with no shoelaces or belt while people wandered in and out, staring with that mix of curiosity, pity, and disgust. I couldn’t admit these feelings of weakness in front of my leaders or—worse—my soldiers. Couldn’t own up to the shame of not knowing if I could do it anymore, keep going at all. Couldn’t talk to my friends from before—couldn’t even conceive of explaining the war to them: I was not who they used to know. I couldn’t burden my family with this; they were dealing with enough. I couldn’t let everyone down and face them afterward. Couldn’t talk to Brian, he was too immersed in his own desolation to help me find the way out of mine.
I sat and stared at the gun. This was mine, my choice, my way out, my freedom, my escape from fear and hopelessness and desperation.
But what would they go through, Brian and Matt, dealing with blood and brains and death on the bathroom floor? What about my father? I was his only surviving child, and he’d lost his sister to suicide.
Suddenly Brian tapped on the bathroom door. “Kayla? What’s going on in there?”
I startled back into the moment and hid the gun in the cupboard under the sink. “Nothing—I’ll be right out.”
I couldn’t do this. Not now, not today. But the option was there. If it got worse. If nothing got better. I could control my ending, if nothing else.1
1. A version of this chapter appeared at www.huffingtonpost.com/Kayla-williams/army-suicides-my-experien_b_172651.html.