How to save a life

It would have been so easy.

All Staff Sgt. Tiffany Skelton had to do was take a few extra pills--she was on Zoloft, Paxil and three others--and she would drift off into a peaceful, permanent sleep. Or she could nick her wrists with one of the swords she had collected in Iraq, and let her lifeblood drain away, taking with it all of the worries and pain she had carried for so long.

Skelton had it all planned, down to who would pick up her son. He would probably be better off anyway, she reasoned. How many nights had 18-month-old Kenyen taken care of her as she lay on the couch, too depressed and overwhelmed to move? He covered her with a blanket, and brought her dinner from whatever he could reach in the refrigerator. Then his day care teacher called: Did Skelton know that he no longer smiled or wanted to play? That he was biting?

"I just couldn't take it anymore," Skelton said. "I had made my decision. I was going to die the next day."

Skelton's road to suicide started long before that June day in 2009, when she was an emotionally abused little girl in Georgia. She wanted to serve, but more than that, she wanted to escape her mother's death, and relatives who only cared if Skelton was around to cook for drunken uncles in the middle of the night. An automated logistics specialist, Skelton was excited to escape all the way to Iraq in 2003, until, that is, she realized a new nightmare awaited her.

Skelton's Reserve unit was assigned to the middle of the Sunni Triangle (between Baghdad, Ramadi and Tikrit), otherwise known as the "Triangle of Death." They were soon in the cross hairs of the fast-growing insurgency, facing multiple mortar and rocket attacks a day.


BY: Elizabeth M. Collins

http://www.army.mil/article/64291/How_to_save_a_life/