Suicide never a thought, before 9/11
Guardsman couldn’t deal with profound anguish
Cliff Bauman wants to show you his life. He almost lost it.
He wants to show you the fire pit in his backyard, where he and his family roast s’mores in the winter, and the patio where they eat dinners on warm Virginia nights. He pulls up photos on his phone.
Bauman wants to show you his family. His older son, Cliff Jr., 14, a wrestler. He swipes right. A picture of them working out in his basement gym. They run together, too. But not the long run – Bauman does that one alone. His younger son, Lloyd, 4, is always on the move. His wife, Krystal, is his rock. He doesn’t avoid cliches – it was love at first sight, he says, when he spotted her in the chow hall in Kuwait more than a decade ago.
This is the life that nearly eluded him. “If you would have told me in August of 2001 that by December of 2002, I would try to commit suicide, I would call you a damn liar,” he says.
But on Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists turned the iconic towers along Manhattan’s skyline into rubble and flew a Boeing 757 into the west side of the Pentagon in Washington. Chief Warrant Officer Bauman, then 31, was scheduled to be in the Pentagon that morning, but his boss was late, postponing their departure from the National Guard Bureau in the Crystal City area of Arlington, Virginia. The fortuitous delay put Bauman about a block from the Pentagon when the jet hit.
He headed toward the tragedy and spent two days without sleep in search of the living, wading through water, fuel, bodies and debris. All he found were the dead.
“I went home early morning on (Sept.) 13th, took my hat, boots and gloves off, put them in a box, washed my uniform and just kind of went on with my life,” he says.
Except he couldn’t. On the first anniversary of 9/11, Bauman read a story pro- filing victims at the Pentagon. He recognized one.
“I had crawled over half her body,” he says quietly.
Bauman had struggled all year, but that moment, he says, marked the beginning of a rapid unraveling. The hap- py-go-lucky guy who was always the first to say hello at work, the first to ask about your day, your family, that speech you gave last week, the guy who never knew a stranger – one year later, he was unrecognizable. He was withdrawn. He began to drink heavily. He had nightmares full of terrors too brutal to describe.
Bauman had never thought about ending his life before 9/11. But he had never learned how to deal with anguish that profound. He grew up on a farm in Aurora, Missouri, where he was taught, like so many men, that pain was meant to be endured. He never saw his father cry. The resolve to conceal what he saw and felt was firmly rooted.
Bauman was ordered to attend counseling and diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but he says he lied to the counselor about how he felt. He was worried about his job and about losing his security clearance. He accepted a prescription for a sleep aid to help with the nightmares, but he couldn’t escape them.
In the winter of 2002, tormented by what he saw and the guilt of not saving anyone, Bauman felt he deserved to die. While he was home with his family for the holidays that December, he made an attempt on his life.
Suicide in the military
Bauman’s experience reflects a broader trend in the military after 9/11. Suicide rates in the military rose with the onset of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and remain higher today than before 2003.
Since 2011, according to the Department of Defense, the military’s suicide rate for the active component has been mainly on par with the general U.S. population after adjusting for age and sex, now roughly 17 deaths per 100,000. Veterans die by suicide at more than 1.5 times the rate of non-veterans, according to data from the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Laura Neely, a research personnel psychologist at the Department of Defense Suicide Prevention Office, says the department is working to address the unique stresses service members face: trauma from combat, instability from multiple deployments and the loss of purpose many feel when re-entering civilian life.
Neely says one of the most intractable problems is the military culture of tough resilience that makes it difficult to seek help.
The Department of Defense says approximately 60 percent of service members say they would not seek mental health care because they worry it will negatively impact their careers.
Bauman says he doesn’t know precisely what triggered his suicide attempt. He felt an intense pressure to perform at work, but the constant flashbacks were a distraction. He was stressed that he couldn’t explain to his worried family what was happening to him, because he didn’t know himself.
After his attempt, Bauman decided he had to find a way to cope.
“I made the conscious decision to go back into counseling and focus on me and not so much worry about what’s going on with my career,” he says. “(I) was opening up about why I did what I did and how it got to that point, and I felt suddenly ... the sunlight seems bright, the darkness doesn’t seem so dark.”