Prologue

The Lost Boys

Seoul, South Korea, June 2003

The call came just after midnight, waking Colonel Mark Graham and his
wife, Carol, instantly. Mark worked for the four-star American general
charged with protecting South Korea from a sudden attack by its mercurial
neighbor to the north, and his job required that he be notified of any
emergency, regardless of the hour. He reached for the phone expecting to
hear one of his subordinates. Instead, Mark heard the muffled voice of his
older son, Jeff, an army lieutenant stationed in Kentucky who was getting
ready to deploy to the battlefields of Iraq.
“No, Jeff, no,” Mark said, shaking. “Tell me it’s something else.”
Carol, who had put her own life on hold to follow Mark to postings
around the world, sat up in bed, her mind spinning. She knew that her
three children partied hard and had a weakness for alcohol. Had one of
them gotten into an accident or been arrested for drunk driving? Melanie,
the youngest member of the family, had once downed so much alcohol
during a frat party her freshman year that she passed out and had to be
carried back to the off-campus apartment she shared with her two
brothers. Had she done so again? Carol realized it was something much
worse when Mark put his arms around her and dropped his voice to such a
quiet whisper that she initially had a hard time hearing him.
“Kevin hung himself,” Mark told her. “He’s gone.”
Carol tried to stand and then crumpled to the floor. She loved all of her
kids, but Kevin, the middle child, had always been particularly special to
her. Tall and burly, with a shy smile and a dry sense of humor, he was the
perfect son—brilliant, kind, and always willing to put others before
himself. When the children were young, Jeff sometimes locked Melanie
into a closet as a joke. Kevin would wait for his older brother to leave and
then open the door and let her out. As a senior in high school Kevin
notched a 1310 on his SAT and graduated with a 4.07 GPA. He won a full
academic scholarship to the University of Kentucky and was a top cadet in
the same Reserve Officers’ Training Corps program that Jeff had
completed just one year earlier. Kevin’s ROTC instructors regularly told
him that his future in the military was boundless, that his career might
one day outshine his father’s.
But Kevin had another side, one that his parents didn’t discover until
after his death. He had been diagnosed with depression during his
junior year at Kentucky, and prescribed Prozac. Kevin hadn’t told many
people that he had begun taking an antidepressant. Depression was seen as
a sign of weakness in the military world that Kevin was preparing to
enter, and psychiatric medications such as Prozac were thought to make
soldiers unreliable and unstable. Kevin wasn’t in the army yet, and his
military career wouldn’t begin until he finished ROTC the following
year. But he began to worry that he wasn’t going to make it. He was set to
spend his entire summer in army-run training courses, and he felt
increasingly certain that his ROTC instructors would discover that he was
taking the medication and boot him out of the entire program. The risks of
staying on Prozac, he concluded, far outweighed the benefits, so Kevin
abruptly stopped taking the medication. Alone with his disease, Kevin
Graham began spiraling downward. His grades plummeted, and he cut
ties with most of his friends. On June 21, Jeff stood in the parking lot of a
nearby golf course and scanned the road for his brother’s aging green
Honda. They’d made plans to play a round of golf that Saturday morning,
but Kevin hadn’t shown up. Jeff called his brother’s cell phone again and
again, but the calls went straight to voice mail. Suddenly alarmed, Jeff
called Melanie and asked her to check in on Kevin. Phone in hand, she
opened the door to Kevin’s bedroom and suddenly went completely
silent. Her brother was hanging from the ceiling fan, his feet almost
touching the floor.
Mark and Carol made it onto the first plane back to the United States
and landed in Louisville on June 22, less than a day after Kevin’s death.
Numb with shock and grief, they struggled to keep their composure as
Kevin was buried on a grassy bluff overlooking the slow-moving Kentucky
River.
Less than a year after Kevin’s suicide, Second Lieutenant Jeffrey Graham
was on a foot patrol near the insurgent stronghold of Khaldiyah when he
spotted a buried IED. It exploded just as he turned to warn his men to
stay back, killing him and one of his soldiers but saving the lives of the
rest of the platoon. Jeff was buried next to his brother, which struck Mark
and Carol as appropriate. Their sons had been inseparable in life. They
would be inseparable in death as well.
In the years ahead, Mark and Carol would struggle to come to terms
with their twin losses. They would draw purpose from their sons’ deaths
by working to change the military that defined both their lives and those of
Jeff and Kevin. They would fight to erase the stigma surrounding mental
health in the army and battle its growing suicide problem. Kevin
hadn’t served a day in the military when he killed himself, but Mark
and Carol would come to understand that the factors that kept him from
seeking help—stigma and the legitimate fear that he’d be drummed out of
the military if his commanders discovered that he was on prescription
medication—were the exact same ones that would lead hundreds of
soldiers to take their own lives in the years ahead. They would become
experts in post-traumatic stress disorder, the signature wound of the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and one of the biggest causes of the suicide
epidemic just beginning to spread through the military. They would learn
that the Pentagon hadn’t had remotely enough psychologists and
psychiatrists to handle the flood of troops returning home from the wars
with PTSD or depression, forcing some soldiers to wait so long for an
appointment that they killed themselves before ever seeing a counselor.
Mark and Carol would also watch, horrified, as the numbers of
soldiers taking their own lives grew larger and larger. The military’s
suicide rate jumped more than 80 percent between 2002 and 2009, the
first year that the percentage of troops who took their own lives was
higher than the percentage of civilians who did so. In 2012 more
soldiers died by their own hand than in combat. In 2013 the total
number of military suicides since the start of the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan passed the 1,000 mark. In 2014 the Pentagon disclosed
that the suicide rate for male veterans age thirty and younger had
jumped 44 percent between 2009 and 2011, a startling figure that
suggested that the number of younger soldiers choosing to take their
own lives would continue to increase well into the future.
Mark and Carol Graham have devoted their lives to preventing that
problem from getting worse. Mark rose through the ranks of the army
and was eventually promoted to general, a post that gave him the
power to develop innovative suicide prevention tactics that
dramatically reduced the suicide rate at the base he commanded
and would later be replicated throughout the military. Carol told the
story of her lost sons to audiences of strangers all over the country,
publicly reliving the most painful moments of her life in the hope of
persuading troubled young people to seek help before making the
darkest of choices. Suicide has become the military’s newest war, and
Mark and Carol are squarely on the front lines. Ten years after their
sons’ deaths, they’re still fighting.