Casualty of a hidden war

No bugle blew taps for Fort Carson Sgt. Chad Barrett at his service in February in Mosul, Iraq. Days earlier, the auditorium at Forward Operating Base Marez had been packed with hundreds of mourners, including the highest-ranking generals in Iraq, who came to honor five men killed by a bomb.

Combat heroes get memorial services in Iraq with full military honors. Barrett, with the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, got a "remembrance." Just the first few rows of seats in the auditorium were filled. There were no generals.

His widow, Shelby Barrett of Fountain, said Sgt. Barrett deserved honors. He fought to be allowed to return to combat for a third time, before being overcome by his demons from past tours in Iraq.

She worries he'll be forgotten this Memorial Day because he took his life.

"I want people to remember Chad," she said. "He was a hero."

The mentally ill Iraq veteran who had pulled bodies from the Pentagon rubble after Sept. 11 died in Mosul after taking an overdose of painkillers and sleeping pills.

Just a few days before he died, the Army had pledged to redouble efforts to prevent suicide in its ranks. In 2006, 102 soldiers took their own lives - the most suicides since 1990 when the Army was 300,000 soldiers larger.

In 2007, the Army had 89 confirmed suicides with 32 more under investigation.

On the day he died, Barrett had written his wife an e-mail earlier in the day saying he felt useless and lonely as a .50-caliber gunner shunted to a desk job. He complained that he wasn't allowed to carry ammunition because commanders who knew his history of mental problems feared he'd hurt himself or others.

"They isolated him plain and simple," his widow said this month.

Barrett has a stack of papers indicating how troubled her husband was when commanders gave in to his pleading and sent him to Iraq with the brigade in January.

Barrett had suffered traumatic brain injuries from bombings during his 2003 and 2005 tours in Iraq.

He served in the 2003 invasion with a unit based in Germany. He returned in 2005 with Fort Carson's 3rd Brigade.

Barrett said her husband performed his duties valiantly, showing his expertise with firearms on neardaily combat missions. But he came home from his second tour a changed man.

"He was different," she said. "He was angry."

Doctors found that portions of his brain controlling anxiety and anger had been permanently damaged in the roadside blasts.

Barrett has a copy of a letter from her husband's commander, Capt. Karen Baker, urging the Army to medically discharge Barrett because his mental illness - he attempted suicide in June - left him unfit for duty.

The Army, though, says Barrett was given the goahead for war duty.

"Chad Barrett was cleared by SRP to deploy prior to his deployment, that is about as much as we can tell you," brigade spokesman Maj. Mike Humphreys wrote in an e-mail from Iraq. SRP refers to the soldier readiness processing system at Fort Carson that determines whether troops are ready for war.

The Army said it can't discuss details of Barrett's death because of privacy laws and an ongoing investigation.

Doctors at Fort Carson say they struggle with sending soldiers with mental health issues back to war. There's a sizable group of troops in Iraq from the post who require medication for symptoms ranging from depression to sleeplessness, they said.

A main factor in whether soldiers return to war is whether they're eager to go.

"You rely 90 percent on what a patient tells you," said Col. Jim Terrio, who oversees clinical services at Evans Army Community Hospital.

Barrett wanted desperately to stay in the Army and wanted to go to Iraq. His widow said it was a mix of emotions that drove him, ranging from patriotism and loyalty to friends to a deep-seated fear of what would happen if he was discharged.

"This was the only world for him," she said. "He loved fighting for his country."

In a meeting with commanders, Barrett said he was ready to go and downplayed the things that haunted him. He forbade his wife from talking about the problems she was seeing at home.

"This is what he wanted," she said.

‘Couldn't wait to go'

When the couple met over the Internet, 10 years earlier, Barrett was a different man.

"He was loving, compassionate and very, very understanding," Shelby Barrett said. "He was everything I thought he was."

The couple married in 2001 and moved to Fort Lee, Va., where Barrett was assigned when terrorists attacked New York and Washington, D.C., on Sept. 11, 2001.

Barrett was sent to the Pentagon, where he was attached to a mortuary affairs team digging through the remains of the building where 125 died.

That's when cracks in Barrett's psyche started showing from stress.

"He couldn't stand to be around a barbecue after that," Shelby Barrett said.

He put that aside as he eagerly headed to war in 2003.

"He was gung-ho," she said. "He couldn't wait to go."

His e-mails home during the first Iraq tour were basically love letters and reflected that he was glad to be part of the effort in Iraq.

The couple had a few fights after he came home, but her husband calmed down after a few months, Barrett said.

The tone of the e-mails changed during his second tour in Iraq.

"He would tell me, ‘I wonder if this will be the last time I can tell you I love you,'" Barrett said.

She later learned his vehicle had taken three direct hits from roadside bombs.

"He witnessed people dying," she said. "He witnessed his soldiers dying."

Changed personality

When Chad Barrett came home in 2006, "his personality had changed 180 degrees," his wife said.

The couple fought bitterly. At night "he would wake up in a cold sweat or would curl up into a ball," Barrett said.

The rage Shelby Barrett witnessed so frequently in 2007 erupted at a bar where he threw a stool at hecklers who didn't like his singing. What scared her is that her husband often didn't recall his outbursts.

In June, after an argument, Barrett called his wife and told her he was going to kill himself.

She called police. When they arrived, Barrett was unconscious from an overdose of pills. Police officers took him to the hospital where he underwent a mental health assessment.

Commanders didn't ostracize Barrett and seemed eager to help, Shelby Barrett said.

"It didn't get him in trouble, they were very protective of him," she said.

The Army found in September, though, that Barrett's troubles were enough to recommend a medical discharge for post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury.

"All of a sudden, he was going to be nothing," Shelby Barrett said of her husband's reaction.

Instead, he fought the pending discharge and talked his way back to Iraq.

"He was ecstatic," Shelby Barrett said. "He couldn't wait."

But the return to Iraq exacerbated what was going on in Barrett's mind, his wife said. E-mails show anger, loneliness and paranoia.

In the early morning hours of Feb. 2, friends found Barrett near death in his room. He died at a hospital.

As the "remembrance" ended in Mosul, the mourners didn't march up to salute Barrett's picture, something that's common at other services for war dead.

They just stood there, staring at the portrait of a troubled man - an Army sergeant who, his widow said, wanted desperately to be remembered as the hero he was.

CONTACT THE WRITER: 636-0240 or tom.roeder@gazette.com