‘A WAR WITHIN MYSELF’
ONE VETERAN’S STRUGGLE FOR LIFE AFTER COMBAT
“The rest of the morning was spent picking up body parts, still warm, in perfect condition, like they had just fallen off the owner. My Marines were crying and I yelled at them, calling them demeaning names and to man up. This day caused so many feelings & emotions in me that I wrote my dad about the event and how much it was tearing me apart. We never talked about it, but one year later, he died and I found it in a safe under his bed. Nothing else was in the safe. He took it to the grave. I felt so guilty and ashamed that I told him. I thought that I caused the stress that led to his fatal heart attack.”
Brandon Ketchum was on a rescue mission on a rainy morning in July when he pulled into the parking lot of the VA hospital here. Strolling into the towering building, Ketchum cut the same trim figure, with perhaps a few extra pounds, that he carried in the Marine Corps when he twice deployed to Iraq during the height of the insurgency, then served in Afghanistan with the Iowa National Guard.
Except now, at age 33, the blue-eyed veteran wore a full red beard that his 4-year-old daughter loved to cut with an electric razor, and he had needle tracks on his left arm from the heroin he’d been shooting up for a month.
“I have run my life out of control to the point where I can’t live it anymore,” Ketchum had jotted on a notepad back at his home in
Davenport, Iowa.
But a part of him wanted to live, and that’s why he was seeing his VA psychiatrist.
This is the story of one combat veteran’s desperate fight against the self-destructive urges pulsing through a generation of men and women who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Through a series of interviews, an examination of a thousand pages of medical files and a review of Ketchum’s extensive journals, USA TODAY gained rare insight into what he called “a war within myself.”
On July 7, the day he saw psychiatrist Anthony Miller, agency officials in Washington released early findings from a sweeping analysis of suicides among veterans. There were 7,403 in 2014 alone. On average, 20 veterans commit suicide each day.
The Iraq and Afghanistan wars were unique in physical and emotional demands. Because the wars lasted so long, large numbers of troops were required to serve multiple deployments that added up to years of cumulative combat duty. Ketchum did three tours. Others have done more. The result was veterans with a complex roster of ailments. Ketchum, who was a combat engineer, suffered from service-related injuries to his knees and back, as well as traumatic brain injury, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, substance abuse, headaches and ringing in the ears. He had a team of people supporting him at the VA in Iowa, a coordinated effort that is a hallmark of the agency.
One of the team members was Miller, Ketchum’s psychiatrist. But on that Thursday morning last July, after 10 minutes, Ketchum stood up, thanked the doctor for his time and walked out.
Miller pursued him into the parking lot and rapped on the hood of his Hyundai to get the veteran to stop. Ketchum raised his arms in a shrug, as if to say, “What’s the point?” and drove off.
It was hard to understand Ketchum’s despair. He adored his daughter, Layla, and had a threeyear relationship with Kristine Nichols, a social worker who cared deeply about him. He had come out of the military respected and loved by his combat brethren. “He had a lot of genuine goodness in his heart,” said Ethan Driscoll, Ketchum’s platoon commander in 2006.
But strife didn’t end when Ketchum put the uniform away. “I came home from war only to become lost in the fog of another war,” he wrote.
Brandon Michael Ketchum was born in Killeen, Texas, the son of Sgt. 1st Class William Ketchum, who was assigned to nearby Fort Hood. Brandon’s parents split up when he was 5, and he only occasionally saw his father. He spent nearly all of his childhood growing up in Baraboo, Wis.
His mother, Beverly Kittoe, a hairstylist, struggled raising Brandon and his younger brother, Brad. When her older son grew rebellious, chafing at school and study, and she discovered marijuana one day, she’d had enough. Brandon, then 14, was sent to live near Des Moines with the father he hardly knew.
Brandon followed him into the military, enlisting in the Marine Corps in 2004 at age 21. “He just felt this was his calling,” Kittoe said.
The insurgency was gaining ground in Iraq, and by February 2006, Ketchum was in combat. He was part of Charlie Company, tasked with locating roadside bombs, a weapon causing the greatest number of U.S. casualties. Charlie Company operated along roadways between the violent cities of Ramadi and Fallujah.
The Marines cleared 92 bombs in seven months. Ketchum earned a Combat Action Ribbon. They worked out of armored ve- hicles, but there were detonations that left them stunned.
At the time, military medicine barely understood what exposure to a bomb blast could do to the brain and how rest is required to allow recovery. There were insufficient field resources to deal with increasing cases of post-traumatic stress disorder — or PTSD, the chronic anxiety and memoryflashback illness that service members suffer after terrible events.
In addition, the challenges of fighting an insurgency sometimes left Charlie Company in emotionally troubling circumstances that no training could contemplate.
Every member of the company remembers Oct. 14, 2007, during Ketchum’s second tour to Iraq.
Insurgents detonated a vehicle bomb near the home of a police chief who was inside with his extended family. It was a slaughter. The Marines witnessed the attack and rushed to cordon off the area.
This was the attack Ketchum wrote about to his father.
“My vehicle was positioned closest to the blast, front row seats to the carnage,” Ketchum wrote in his journal during therapy. A car drove toward the Marines, and Ketchum’s men were ready to fire, but something told him it wasn’t part of the attack, and he had his men stand down. In fact, it was a family trying to rush a young boy with mangled legs to medical care. The boy died before he could receive treatment.
“I let the father use my shovel to bury him, and the mother carried what was left of him across the road and buried him atop a hill,” Ketchum wrote.
Driscoll remembered finding a dead young girl, maybe 4 years old, lying on the ground with her eyes open. “She had blue eyes,” he said.
By
his third combat tour, Ketchum was 28 and showing signs of physical and emotional wear-and-tear, much like others of his generation subjected to multiple deployments. He had left the Marine Corps in 2008 after a standard four-year term, and within a few weeks, he joined the Iowa National Guard as a combat engineer. His unit was unexpectedly called up for duty in Afghanistan in 2010. Ketchum would be back doing route clearance.
He had fallen hard down a steep slope while training in California’s Sierra Nevada. Pain medication became an on-again, off-again part of his life. Six months into the Afghanistan deployment, Ketchum had a seizure and collapsed in his barracks at the U.S. military base in Bagram.
He was evacuated to the U.S., bitter and ashamed to leave his squad. Within a month of coming home, he married a young woman who was pregnant with his child. Layla was born in October 2011. It was a tumultuous period. He began abusing drugs for his chronic pain, his marriage was quickly disintegrating, and his wife found him one night with a gun barrel in his mouth.
Before the year was out, the Army sent Ketchum to a civilian detoxification center in Kentucky, where he was under care when divorce papers arrived from his wife.
“I didn’t decide to leave the military. The military told me I had to leave. I was medically and mentally unfit.” Brandon Ketchum, giving a talk to a classroom of students