In Sgt. John M. Russell’s chaotic Army world the morning of May 11, the enemy was closing in. For the previous several days at sprawling Camp Liberty outside Baghdad, the big Texan had talked of conspiracies, woken up from constant nightmares, and broken down in tears, wishing someone would put a bullet in his head.
“The three of us sat on my front stoop and talked. He was visibly upset and very shaken,” an Army chaplain recalls of the conversation he and a commander had that morning with the frustrated Sgt. Russell, 44, whose Germany-based 54th Engineering Battalion operated in Iraq under Fort Lewis command. “He explained that his appointments at mental-health [clinics] went very bad,” the chaplain added, according to a newly released 325-page Army report on Russell’s case, from which names are redacted. “He just did not want to live anymore.”
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