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.

Reprinted from The Invisible Front Copyright © 2014 by Yochi

Dreazen. Published by Broadway Books, an imprint of the Crown
Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC.