4 recruiter suicides at one unit lead to probe

Pressure from above alleged
She said her husband also found himself under crushing pressure from above. He and other recruiters in the battalion were required to account for every minute of every day in planners and logs, his widow said.

When Henderson took some time to recover from knee surgery, his bosses acted as if he was lazy and threatened to have him thrown out of recruiting and reassigned far from his wife, Amanda Henderson said.

He lived in constant fear of failing to sign up enough people, something that can result in an all-day audit by a recruiter's superiors and thwart a soldier's chances of a promotion, Amanda Henderson said.

As much as Henderson hated recruiting, he did the job well, his widow said. But Flores, who killed himself a few weeks before Henderson, "was getting chewed up one side and down the other" at work in the days before he died, Amanda Henderson said. Flores was her boss.

Smith, the Army spokesman, would not comment on Henderson's job performance. Asked about the demands put on recruiters by their superiors, he said recruiting duty "often does entail long hours during the week and on weekends." But he added: "There are other duty assignments in the Army that entail long hours, such as being deployed."

Most recruiters are assigned
Some recruiters volunteer for the job, but most are assigned. They must have a recent evaluation showing no record of mental instability. But Amanda Henderson said her husband, like other combat veterans, rushed through his assessment, insisting he was fine.

Patrick Henderson had been out of Iraq a little less than a year when he began recruiting, and after several months on the job, his sleeplessness and flashbacks became evident, according to his wife. She said she stayed up one night watching him apparently flash between nightmares of combat and of illegally signing up a recruit.

He suffered a breakdown in the weeks before his suicide, his wife said. Because he was hundreds of miles from the nearest Army post, he went to a local counselor recommended by the military after an initial visit with an Army doctor. But the counselor had never worked with a combat veteran and couldn't decipher the military jargon in his medical records, Amanda Henderson said.

One morning in September, she woke up alone, panicked and went out to look for her husband. The chain was on the door to the shed, but she could see him inside. She pried the window open, and screamed. "He was gone," she said, her voice breaking.

"I don't want anybody to feel this pain that I have," she said, her eyes welling with tears. "It's too much for one person. They need help."

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