Veteran Loses Battle With Depression After Helping Others With Their Own
By JAMES DAO
April 15, 2011, 10:14 am
--NYtimes.com--

It was mid-January, 2010, just days after a powerful earthquake had reduced much of Haiti to rubble. Jake Wood, a former Marine and now the head of an international aid organization called Team Rubicon, arrived in Port-au-Prince with a group of volunteers to provide emergency medical care.

Out of the blue, an old friend, Clay Hunt, showed up. Mr. Hunt and Mr. Wood had served together in Iraq and Afghanistan with the Marine Corps and were almost brothers. Mr. Hunt had found them using a day-old GPS coordinate posted on Team Rubicon’s Web site. Minutes after arriving, he was helping to splint a patient’s leg.



“He couldn’t stand that we were down there and he wasn’t,” Mr. Wood said. “That was Clay.”

Mr. Hunt had battled depression and post-traumatic stress disorder in the year since he left the Marines, but volunteering with Team Rubicon and veterans organizations like Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America seemed to have given him a new sense of purpose.

And yet it was not enough. On March 31, Mr. Hunt committed suicide in his apartment in Sugar Land, Tex. He was 28.

News of Mr. Hunt’s death has ricocheted through the veterans’ world as a grim reminder of the emotional and psychological strains of war — and of the government’s inability to stem military and veteran suicides, which have climbed steadily in the decade since the 9/11 attacks.

“The message I’ve been trying to convey to people is that if this can happen to Clay Hunt, it can happen to anyone,” said Paul Rieckhoff, the president and founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. “He was involved. He had a supportive family. He was going to the V.A. He was doing the right things. And it still happened.”

According to a profile in the Houston Chronicle, Mr. Hunt grew up in Houston and attended Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles before joining the Marine Corps in 2005. He deployed to Iraq’s Anbar Province in January 2007 as part of the Second Battalion, Seventh Marine Regiment.

Within weeks, several friends of his were killed, and then Mr. Hunt himself was shot through the wrist by a sniper, Mr. Wood said in an interview. He had to be medically evacuated, ending his deployment early. Back home, he felt anguish at not being in Iraq with his unit, Mr. Wood said.

When the battalion returned in late 2007, Mr. Hunt and Mr. Wood joined the sniper platoon and were deployed to Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan the next year. During that deployment, at least two more friends of theirs from their former platoon were killed.

After returning home from that second deployment, Mr. Hunt got married. But he was already struggling with depression and what doctors diagnosed as P.T.S.D., Mr. Wood said.

“There were a lot of reasons,” Mr. Wood said. “Survivor’s guilt. Struggling with not knowing why guys had been lost for, what we were trying to accomplish, what we had accomplished. He carried that burden.”

He returned to Loyola Marymount, but felt adrift and unappreciated, Mr. Wood said. Then he began throwing himself into volunteer work.

He built bikes for Ride 2 Recovery, a rehabilitation program for injured veterans, went to Haiti and Chile with Team Rubicon and helped organize events for I.A.V.A. He even appeared in this well-received public service announcement by I.A.V.A. and the Ad Council encouraging veterans to seek help for mental health problems.


“Whenever we were doing an event on the West Coast, he put his hand up and said, ‘I want to help,’” Mr. Rieckhoff said.

But then came a series of troubles. His marriage began to crumble in the summer of 2010, Mr. Wood said. He quit college, and a full-time position at a refugee camp in Haiti fell through. He stopped taking his medications. By December, he showed up at Mr. Wood’s door looking for help.

“He had hit rock bottom,” Mr. Wood said.

Mr. Wood convinced him to seek help, and he did. He started going to a veterans’ clinic, returned to Houston, found work and started dating. He even discussed re-enlisting in the Marine Corps.

“I told him the structure would be good, and the pride would be good for him,” Mr. Wood said. It was the last time the two men spoke, just weeks before Mr. Hunt killed himself.

No one, of course, could say exactly what went wrong. Perhaps it was his failed marriage. Perhaps it was frustration with the government for rejecting his petition to increase his disability rating. Perhaps he still felt guilt that his friends had died while he had not.

“He had a big heart, with a high opinion of what the world should be,” Mr. Wood said. “But he was always disappointed about how petty and selfish the world was. For everything he did to try to make the world better, he didn’t see improvements.

“He couldn’t handle the disappointment of not being able to effect change.” More than 1,100 people showed up for Mr. Hunt’s funeral in Texas.

His family requested that memorial contributions in his name be directed to:

Team Rubicon, Inc.
P.O. Box 7476
Santa Monica, CA 90406

or

Ride 2 Recovery
23679 Calabasas Rd., #420
Calabasas, CA 91302