As mourners trickled out of Lubbock's Resthaven Memorial Park in the gray chill, Andrew Velez stayed behind. He stood among the gravestones and watched his brother's coffin laid low in the winter ground.
Cutting a sharp figure in his Army uniform, his dark eyes and soft-featured baby face set hard and unreadable, he asked his sister to remove some ribbons from his lapels. Then he knelt above his brother's grave, bowed his head, extended his arm and dropped the tokens into the hole.
For as long as Andrew could remember, he and his brother and sister had been inseparable; now they were only two. Army Specialist Jose Alfredo "Freddy" Velez, 23, had died a war hero in Iraq during the November 2004 occupation of Fallujah, felled by a bullet to the back of the neck while supporting his buddies with machine gun fire as they scrambled for cover in an insurgent stronghold.
Andrew gazed into the grave for a long moment and then turned to his sister. "Stop crying," he told her, resolute. "I'm going to make everything better."
Though the youngest, Andrew had always been scrappy and defiant, quick to confront anyone who threatened his family. Once he made up his mind, he couldn't be swayed. After the funeral, he refused to skip the rest of his combat tour, an option the Army offers sole surviving sons to shield them from danger. He would return to the Middle East with his unit, even if it meant re-enlisting—even if it meant hiding the storms of fear and paranoia that sent him flying into a rage one moment and quivering on the floor the next.
His sister didn't know about that at the cemetery. She hadn't heard him describe the violent nightmares and flashbacks, the memories that blasted into his thoughts and held him hostage from peace, sleep and those he loved. There were bright, blossoming balls of flame and falling bodies, thunderous shelling and the metallic taste of terror. Yet the worst image was deadly calm: Freddy's lifeless face as it came into view in the body bag. It was the mental snapshot he couldn't shake and probably the one that sent him back into battle.
His sister couldn't understand why he was so determined to return to the war that had claimed their brother, but she didn't try to stop him. His impulse to go back was visceral; it existed in a universe of honor and valor, redemption and penance, bravado and glory.
Eighteen months after his older brother was killed, four months after he arrived in Afghanistan still tormented by grief and just hours after mounting marital discord drove his wife to request a divorce, Andrew Velez placed the barrel of his brother's M-249 in his mouth and squeezed the trigger.
Every suicide committed by a soldier returning from Iraq is another addition to the unfathomable toll in human misery produced by the war. The story of the Valez family is only more poignant and heartbreaking, as one brother could not survive the death of another.
For more on soldiers and suicide, and the suffering caused by PTSD, see our earlier stories here.
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