A Disaster of the U.S. Military’s Own Making

Austin Valley had just arrived at his Army base in Poland, last March, when he knocked on his buddy Adrian Sly’s door to borrow a knife. The base plate of his helmet was loose and needed fixing, he told Sly. The soldiers had spent most of their day on a bus, traveling from their former base to this new outpost in Nowa Deba, near the border with Ukraine. It had been a monotonous 12-hour journey with no stops and nothing to eat but military rations. Sly thought his friend looked exhausted, but then so did everyone else. He handed Valley an old hunting knife, and Valley offered an earnest smile. “Really appreciate it, man,” he said. Then he disappeared.

A boyish-looking 21-year-old, Valley grew up in a military family in rural Wisconsin and declared his intention to join the Army at age 7. He enlisted on his 18th birthday, so intent on a military career that he tried to sign a six-year contract until his father, a Gulf War veteran, persuaded him to take it more slowly and commit to three. Stationed at Fort Riley, in Kansas, he made an immediate impression on his superiors. “He was one of the best workers that I’ve seen in the military,” a squadmate says, recalling how Valley, who drove an armored troop carrier, thought nothing of crawling into its guts to check for broken parts, emerging covered in grease, a flash of mischief in his deep brown eyes.

Valley left Sly’s door and walked into the forest. A fresh snow had fallen, and the larch trees towered above him, their branches bare and ghostly. Valley carried the borrowed knife and some nylon cord he’d probably procured from another fellow soldier. He texted his parents: Hey mom and dad I love you it was never your fault.

Thirty minutes passed before Erik Valley, Austin’s father, saw the text. He called Austin’s cellphone several times but got only his voice mail. He contacted Austin’s unit at Fort Riley and eventually reached a sergeant; Erik explained the situation and forwarded Austin’s note. “Could someone please check on him and let me know what’s going on, please,” he said.

Word of a soldier’s disappearance spread quickly across the Polish base. Sly recalled sergeants pounding on doors and shining their flashlights. “Where’s Valley?” one asked him. Sly and several others from Valley’s unit took off into the woods. Seeing fresh tracks in the snow, one soldier followed them until he heard a faint gurgling sound. Drawing closer, he saw Valley, hanging from a tree. He was alive, but barely conscious. The soldier cut Valley down, while another called for the medics, who sped off with him into the night. His friends would never see him again. The following morning, Valley was taken to the U.S. Army hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, and then returned to Fort Riley. Four weeks later, he was dead.

Valley was one of at least 158 active-duty Army soldiers to die by suicide in 2023. According to the investigative-journalism nonprofit Voice of San Diego, young men in the military are more likely to die by suicide than their civilian peers, reflecting a suicide rate that has risen steadily since the Army began tracking it 20 years ago. That these deaths are occurring within a peacetime military contradicts a common misperception that soldier suicide is closely linked to PTSD from combat. In fact, those at the highest risk for suicide are active-duty personnel who have never deployed. During the first half of 2023, 102 soldiers from Valley’s 4,000-person brigade were hospitalized for suicidal ideation. “Unfortunately, I think suicide has just become a normal part of Army culture,” one former officer at Fort Riley says. “It doesn’t even surprise anyone anymore when it happens.”

Since the end of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army has maintained its global footprint, even as the force has shrunk. (Last year, the Army had to lower its recruiting goal after it fell short by 10,000 recruits in 2022.) But the Army’s “operational tempo” — the amount of time soldiers spend on deployments or training missions — is as high or higher in some units than it was at the peak of the war on terror. American soldiers are currently training foreign troops in Eastern Europe as part of a NATO mission to support Ukraine; conducting military exercises across the Far East and South Pacific as a counterweight to China; and also monitoring Africa and the Middle East for terrorism threats.

“Senior leadership, in my view, became habituated to the go-go tempo of the past 20 years — it’s all they ever knew, and now it’s seen as normal,” says Dr. Stephen Xenakis, a psychiatrist and retired Army brigadier general who has served as an adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on mental health. “It’s not normal. It’s a climate rooted in constant pressure, constant movement and constant trauma. And the legacy of that trauma and combat cascades down on the soldiers.”

The Army’s motto is “People First.” But a yearlong investigation into Austin Valley’s death — including more than three dozen interviews with family, friends, fellow soldiers, senior Army leaders and mental-health specialists, as well as a review of Valley’s medical records, social media posts and text messages — shows that the Army failed to live by it. The Army’s mental-health system, experts say, is focused more on ensuring that units meet their personnel goals than on the welfare of soldiers. A result is some of the highest suicide numbers the Army has ever seen — despite the millions of dollars in suicide-prevention research the Defense Department has invested over the past two decades.

In February 2023, the most recent of the department’s independent suicide-prevention committees published its findings in a 115-page report, one of several released since 2008 that have often repeated the same basic findings and recommendations. “My expectation is that this study will sit on a shelf just like all the others, unimplemented,” says M. David Rudd, a clinical psychologist and the director of an institute that studies military suicides at the University of Memphis. The committee cited high operational tempo, ineffective leadership and poor quality of life on many bases as areas of particular concern. “I would argue that the well-being of your troop force is central to having a ready military,” Rudd told me. “Unfortunately, the Department of Defense doesn’t see it that way.”

After Military.com published a story about Valley and I began reporting on his death, the soldiers in his unit were instructed by their leadership not to talk to me. Nearly 20 of those soldiers, as well as some officers and senior enlisted personnel, did so anyway. Many of them spoke on the condition of anonymity, as they are still on active duty and fear reprisal, but Adrian Sly, who left the Army late last year, disillusioned by its handling of Valley’s and other suicides, is one of several people who were eager to use their names. “We’ve had countless suicides and suicide attempts,” he says, “almost all of them swept under the rug. The Army failed Valley, time and time again, just like they’ve failed all of us.”

A senior officer in Valley’s brigade I spoke to says the military has created a mental-health crisis so acute that he regards it as the Army’s new war. “Every generation of soldiers is defined by the conflicts that killed them,” he says. “For the greatest generation, it was World War II; for baby boomers it was Vietnam; for Gen X it was Iraq and Afghanistan. This new generation, what’s killing them is suicide.”

If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources. Go here for resources outside the United States.

Valley joined the First Infantry Division at Fort Riley in March 2021 as a gawky teenager. He had dreamed of becoming an elite Army Ranger, but after failing to make the cut for Ranger school, he quickly recalibrated and decided to follow in his father’s footsteps: Erik Valley was an infantryman who had commanded a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, a hulking troop carrier that looks like a modified tank. Austin idealized the life of a soldier, says his mother, Diane, who is divorced from Erik. He was drawn to the infantry’s ethos of brotherhood and teamwork, which he absorbed over countless hours playing military-themed video games as well as in conversations with his recruiter.

Valley was assigned to the 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Battalion 70th Armored Regiment; he joined C Company, known as Carnage, a unit with a fleet of Bradleys. According to The Army Times, some armored units have been shown to have some of the highest operational tempos in the Army, with deployments roughly every 18 months. Since the early aughts, the Army has overhauled its training methodology at least twice, switching, in 2017, from one that allowed soldiers a year of low-intensity duties after a deployment, known as a reset period, to one that provides for no break in activity at all. Under this model, known as Sustainable Readiness, soldiers return from eight- or nine-month training missions and almost immediately get ready to deploy again. “It is not sustainable, what we are asking people to do,” one high-ranking sergeant says.

Valley had only recently arrived at Fort Riley when his unit, which had just returned from a nine-month deployment to South Korea, began to plan for its next long deployment, to Poland. “The op-tempo was like nothing I had ever seen in 16 years in the Army — and that was Iraq and Afghanistan,” the senior officer in Valley’s brigade says. Most of Carnage’s Bradleys dated back to Operation Desert Storm and had been rarely used during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now soldiers were tasked with fixing them to ensure as many vehicles as possible could deploy with the unit. Often, this required troops to cannibalize components from their most broken-down Bradleys. “We would spend all day fixing a vehicle that would just break the next day,” says one former soldier from Valley’s unit, Hector Velez. One brigade medic told me he spent most of his three years in the Army working on vehicles.

Senior leadership tried to rally their soldiers around the mission of deterrence. “Officially,” says one close friend of Valley’s stationed in Europe, “we’re ‘giving Russia the middle finger’ by ‘showing them we can deploy anywhere by any means with all our gear.’” Unofficially, he adds, “I have no idea what we’re doing here.” Low morale, or what soldiers called a sense of purposelessness, was palpable. “Sometimes we sat around and joked all day about killing ourselves,” says a platoonmate of Valley’s who recently left the Army. “I mean, we were all depressed. Everyone in the Army is depressed.”

Among themselves, soldiers in Carnage talked about feeling disposable — like broken parts on a Bradley. Valley cracked jokes or stuck cigarettes up his nose to lighten the mood among his friends, but with his superiors, he endeavored to do everything perfectly. He tried to memorize the thousands of parts to his Bradley and kept a running list on his phone of not only his own vehicle’s deficiencies but the others’ as well. “Austin worked his ass off,” the squadmate says. “He did everything they asked of him.” There was one evening, Erik Valley recalls, when Austin called him from work, “really pissed off” because no one had been sent to relieve him so he could get dinner before the cafeteria closed. He thought his leaders had forgotten about him. “That shocked me,” Erik said. “Forgot? Something like that would never have happened in the Army I joined in 1987.”

By the spring of 2022, Valley had dropped 8 pounds from his already lanky 150-pound frame. He had trouble sleeping, waking several times during the night. In the morning, he would wake up feeling sluggish and irritable and then drag himself through another 12-hour day. He seemed affectless; one of his supervisors said it was as if he were “moving and talking in slow motion.” When he went home to Wisconsin for a week’s leave that May, Diane immediately noticed the change in her son. “He was saying things like, ‘Mom, I’m so tired, I don’t care about anything anymore,’” she says. “That’s not Austin.” Worried, Diane urged Austin to get help.

That July, Valley walked into one of the clinics at Fort Riley for an intake appointment with a counselor. Though Army bases now offer a range of programs to improve mental health, from confidential stress-management sessions to yoga and meditation, the primary resource is clinical counseling through the Army’s Behavioral Health department, referred to colloquially as B.H., which both providers and military personnel describe as dysfunctional. “It’s like a cesspool,” the former officer at Fort Riley says. “They simply don’t have the resources to give soldiers the help they need.”

There are approximately 21 B.H. officers and civilian counselors in the clinics at Fort Riley serving over 12,000 soldiers. Tara Fields, a former provider at the base, told me its hospital has been running on roughly 40 percent staffing for years.

Valley explained how he was feeling to a counselor and was given an appointment for the following month. By then, his condition had worsened. His unit, the 2-70, was in the last months of preparing to deploy to Poland. He had recently been promoted to gunner, a position he coveted, but he worried about not being “good enough.” He was sleeping even less than he had before, plagued by nightmares and racing thoughts he called the “what ifs”: What if I jumped in front of that tank? At the clinic, he took a test to assess whether he had suicidal ideation, a six-question survey given to every soldier who receives mental-health counseling, at every visit. When asked if he’d wished he were dead or could “go to sleep and not wake up,” Valley answered yes.

After a single 60-minute appointment, the counselor suggested medication. Clinicians at Fort Riley have been instructed to assess and diagnose patients thoroughly before taking this step, but counselors I spoke to, citing their heavy caseload, said that the rule is not always followed. (Sly says he was offered medication before he even sat down for an official session.) Valley was prescribed an antidepressant called mirtazapine, the generic version of the drug Remeron. Because of that, he was given a special designation and issued what’s known in the Army as a profile, a health care form provided to a soldier’s command that details his condition and treatment plan. (Soldiers who have received one are commonly referred to as being “on profile.”) Valley’s profile noted that he should not handle heavy machinery while on the medication. Several days after it was issued, he was taken off the gunner position.

“They told me it wouldn’t really affect my job,” he texted Sly.

“They lied,” Sly replied. “B.H. always [expletive] lies.”

Valley’s profile stipulated a 90-day period of medication adjustment, during which he would be marked “nondeployable” unless given a special waiver. Granting medical waivers to troops so they can deploy is a longtime practice in the Army, provided a soldier is not in crisis. “I think being with their teammates in that deployed environment where they are surrounded by their buddies 24/7 is arguably a better environment for them to be in than to be left back in garrison,” one high-ranking official at Fort Riley told me. But it is also a product of the pressure put on units to maintain mandated troop levels for training missions like the one in Poland.

Several Army leaders I spoke with told me they believed the practice of granting waivers to soldiers on profiles for mental-health concerns had become more common over the past five or six years, as unit commanders struggled to meet personnel quotas. These quotas are set at the highest level of the Army and passed down to brigade leaders, who have no choice but to fill them. For the NATO mission in Europe, Valley’s brigade was required to deploy at least 80 percent of its soldiers within the first month of its deployment.

“No one wants to admit that it’s all a big numbers game, but that’s what it is,” one of Valley’s former sergeants says. “If your roster says you need 160 soldiers to make your quota, it doesn’t matter if 40 are broken, 10 are almost dead and the rest are on profiles — you’ll somehow find a way to count them.” I spoke to one soldier previously hospitalized for a suicide attempt, who said his unit commander overrode his profile just so he could deploy and come back a few weeks later — once the quota was met.

In October 2022, a month after starting medication, Valley was asked by his superiors if he would be amenable to telling his behavioral-health counselor that he wanted a waiver to deploy. Valley later told his friends that Carnage Company’s two seniormost leaders presented the scenario in stark terms. The whole unit would be in Europe, except for a small rear detachment of soldiers who were either too sick or had some other reason they couldn’t deploy. He didn’t want to be left behind, they said, especially since they would be training with Polish troops. It was the closest thing to a combat mission that he, as an infantry soldier, could have at this point — and given the war in Ukraine, who knew? Maybe they would see some action. “In his words, they told him that he would ‘probably feel like a shitbag’ if he didn’t come out,’” Sly recalls.

None of his friends thought a waiver for Valley was a good idea. “Those of us who worked with him every day knew he was struggling,” Sly says. “But the leaders guilted him into it, and being Valley, he didn’t want to let them down.”

Though the Army insists it is working to remove the stigma around seeking behavioral-health support, unit leadership often undermines some of its most basic safety protocols. In Carnage, soldiers I spoke to told me, everyone was aware of who was on a profile and who wasn’t — sergeants kept track of their soldiers’ mental-health appointments on a large whiteboard. “That profile really lowered his self-esteem,” Hector Velez, the former soldier in Valley’s unit, recalls.

Valley was still working long hours as the unit scrambled to ready its vehicles for deployment. Though the medication helped with his insomnia, it often left him so lethargic that he nodded off at work or slept through morning formation. Every time that happened, one of Valley’s platoonmates says, the platoon was “smoked” — made to repeat intense physical tasks like push-ups or laps, as a form of discipline. They would line up next to a log, hold it above their heads and move it from shoulder to shoulder, he said, “while Valley stood there and watched.”

At Valley’s next appointment with a counselor, in late October, he said he would like to deploy with his unit, insisting he was feeling much better. His medical records were riddled with red flags. He was still reporting suicidal ideation at least once or twice a month. A provider who knew Valley might have scrutinized his records more carefully, but according to many soldiers at Fort Riley, there is little continuity of care within the mental-health clinics. Valley had never seen this provider before, and he insisted that in spite of his reported suicidal ideation, he couldn’t even remember the last time he had a suicidal thought. The provider took Valley at his word, noting that he was stable on his medication and that therefore she had “no imminent concerns” about suicide.

Ultimately, the decision on whether to request a waiver for Valley fell to his battalion commander, Lt. Col. Michael Kim. As the date of its deployment neared, the 2-70 was having trouble making its quota. They were hovering around 75 percent, according to one officer who recalls meetings where his colleagues agonized over how to increase the numbers. Carnage, with about 150 soldiers, had by some accounts a particularly high number of soldiers designated “nondeployable.” Commanders were scrambling, numerous sources told me. “Instead of saying, ‘OK, who is nondeployable,’” one former platoonmate says, “it was more like, ‘Who is the least nondeployable we can still deploy?’”

The Army’s procedure for sorting through that question is a meeting known as a profile scrub that happens on every base before deployment. According to the former officer at Fort Riley, battalion leaders and medical and B.H. personnel discuss every soldier on profile, writing their names on a whiteboard. The meeting takes place in front of all the staff or company commanders, many of whom do not need to know about soldiers’ medical status, she notes. Then the doctor goes through the list and tells the battalion commander if each person is waiverable or not. One of Valley’s former sergeants told me that there was robust discussion within the company about whether to move forward with a waiver request for Valley. “As I recall, the initial consensus was ‘no,’” he says. “And then battalion called, and it became ‘yes.’”

Since 2008, military command has tried to exert more control by making mental-health units answerable to brigade leaders, who write their annual evaluations and control their career prospects. Commanders can exert pressure to adjust treatment plans or request waivers to allow soldiers to deploy, and providers, many of whom are themselves young, inexperienced and overworked, feel they are unable to push back. “You have to make a choice,” one B.H. officer told me. “Your career or the lives of your soldiers.”

In 2021, a counselor at Fort Riley who refused to sign off on returning a severely depressed pilot to duty was removed and threatened with investigation, according to multiple sources. The counselor’s caseload of patients was given to other clinicians. Soon after the counselor was removed, one of those patients, a lieutenant being treated for suicidal ideation, committed suicide.

When I spoke to the B.H. officer about this, she blamed the system for this tragedy. “Putting unit readiness above a soldier’s welfare is unethical and negligent, but there is no accountability for the higher chain of command to do the right thing for these individual soldiers,” she says. “The accountability is: Meet these training timelines, meet these deployment schedules, meet these personnel quotas.”

In mid-November 2022, as the first wave of soldiers from the 2-70 deployed to Poland, the battalion’s B.H. officer, Capt. Melissa Samio, filled out a waiver request form citing Valley’s “symptom improvement” and his stability on medication, writing that he was now “good” with “no required follow-up.” Based on his medical records, it is unclear whether Samio, at least the fourth B.H. provider Valley had seen since his first appointment in July, had met Valley before this date. Two days later, a memo using the same language was submitted by the 2-70’s commander, Lieutenant Colonel Kim.

Now that his deployment was becoming real, Valley began to have second thoughts. He told his family that his medication wasn’t working anymore, though he continued to feel the side effects. “We all thought he was overmedicated,” his father says. Valley told his parents that one of his rotating cast of counselors didn’t think his deployment was a good idea. They never learned which one, because this information was not reflected in the records they obtained. Valley’s latest counselor, a civilian social worker at the hospital, diagnosed his increasing anxiety over deploying as “undue concern.”

“No one is listening to me,” Valley said to his mother. He had told the platoon medic that his medication was no longer effective and reported that he was having “active” thoughts of suicide. There is no mention of this in the social worker’s notes. “What I’ve observed,” the former officer at Fort Riley says, “is that a lot of the providers are just so burned out and so detached and overwhelmed, you could tell them just about anything, and it doesn’t get in.”

By Thanksgiving, with most of his buddies already gone to Poland, Valley was resigned. “The Army’s gonna do what it’s gonna do,” his father recalls him saying. On Dec. 5, Valley’s waiver was approved. On Dec. 7, in a last attempt to stave off deployment, he scheduled an emergency session with the social worker and reported that he was now having active thoughts of suicide, “with method.” She made a few important notes — stating that Valley’s depressive symptoms had worsened, and recommending a follow-up appointment — but as Valley didn’t say he had an active suicide plan, he was again reported as not under “imminent threat.” The social worker marked Valley as “psychologically fit for duty.”

Four days later, he left Kansas for Poland.

“Today is my birthday, but it doesn’t really feel like it,” Valley wrote in his journal on Dec. 17, 2022. He was 21. He had arrived a week earlier at L.S.A. South, his unit’s base in the Polish woods near the border with Germany. It was a raw facility, with little more than a dining hall and a recreation tent where soldiers could play video games or watch TV. The soldiers were housed in 50-person tents arranged around a two-mile track, with a helicopter landing pad in the center. The winter was bleak and desolate, with temperatures in the single digits; it was dark for half the day. A few of the soldiers who had deployed to Afghanistan told their friends they’d had better conditions in Helmand.

The unit had come to Poland as part of the joint U.S.-NATO mission to support Ukraine and prevent further Russian aggression. For the members of Valley’s company, they might as well have been back in Kansas, remaining mostly on base, doing the same sort of vehicle maintenance they did at Fort Riley. They had deployed with more than 80 percent of their equipment, meeting their readiness quota, but according to several soldiers, most of their vehicles barely worked. “If we had an enemy who had functional weapons and knew how to use them, we’d stand no chance,” Sly says. (The Army said in a statement that its vehicles were in a “high state of readiness.”)

Valley spent his birthday thinking about suicide. He went out to smoke a cigarette in the hopes of easing his mind, but he wrote in his journal that it didn’t help. He had envisioned how he would do it: He would go to the base’s shooting range, gun holstered, and then, just when the ready-to-fire order was given, he would put his pistol to his head. He told no one about this vision. Instead, he told Brandon Uttaro, the friend he confided in the most, that he probably shouldn’t be trusted with a weapon.

Senior Army officials told me that any soldier who is deployed after receiving a waiver for a health condition must be sent to a location where they can receive a similar level of care. This was not possible for Valley. There were only two B.H. officers embedded with the 3,000-odd soldiers of 2nd Brigade, split among bases in Poland, Kosovo, Bulgaria, Romania and Germany. Half a dozen or so counselors with the Army’s confidential counseling service also deployed with the brigade but could usually be reached only by phone, as they, too, were spread across the region. Valley asked about the availability of therapy almost as soon as he got to Poland, but was told it could take weeks to get an appointment. Providers were booked solid for telemedicine sessions and rarely made it out to remote bases like L.S.A. South, where the only reliable resource was the chaplain.

Valley spoke to the chaplain but told friends it didn’t help. “I don’t know what I can do anymore,” he told Uttaro in a text message. “I’ve tried everything.” Uttaro had recently been sent to Kosovo, and he urged Valley to talk to his leadership. “Please?” he said.

“I don’t want to get kicked out,” Valley said.

“It’s better than being dead,” Uttaro said.

In late December, Valley was transferred out of Carnage to serve as the driver for the battalion’s sergeant major. He now lived and worked in a different part of the base from his former squadmates, whom he rarely saw. “I feel like a big piece of me was stolen,” he texted Uttaro.

One of Valley’s sergeants, Howard Fritch, told me that shortly after Valley arrived in his company, he pulled Fritch aside and told him that he didn’t think he should be in Poland. Fritch, who had not been advised of Valley’s mental-health history, was “confused about how he got sent out,” he says, and approached one of his superiors. No one in company leadership had been made aware that Valley had been struggling. “We were not advised of anything,” Fritch says.

By early February, according to a note in Valley’s medical records, his company leadership was informed that he was exhibiting depressive symptoms and suicidal ideation, but Valley still received no formal behavioral-health counseling. Instead, Fritch and another soldier told me, some of Valley’s squadmates were instructed to keep an eye on him. They did the best they could, making sure Valley ate his meals with them and went with them if they left the base to go out in town.

One weekend, one of Valley’s buddies managed to get them weekend leave, and they went to Berlin. During that trip, he seemed like his old self, his friend says. They went clubbing, got drunk and visited Checkpoint Charlie, the famous Cold War border crossing between East and West Berlin. When they got back, he seemed better, his friend says. He even talked about enrolling in college so he could become an officer. But after a few weeks, he was down again.

In early March, Valley’s girlfriend broke up with him. Valley, according to many of his friends, had a hard time accepting it. Around this same time, he was taken off mirtazapine and put on the antidepressant Celexa. Valley had been complaining that the mirtazapine no longer worked for him, but there are no notes in Valley’s medical records that explain why this switch was made or if the prescriber was aware of Valley’s psychiatric history.

Either way, several Army behavioral health care specialists I spoke with found the choice of Celexa troubling, as it is part of the class of antidepressants that comes with a black-box warning, because it can increase suicidal thinking in some young patients. “I’d argue that a 21-year-old soldier who has a history of suicidal ideation and is still adjusting to a new environment warrants a closer look before putting them on that drug,” says one B.H. officer informed of the details of the case.

“I’m losing my mind,” Valley texted one of his sergeants about a week after starting the Celexa. He begged for help: “I need an actual B.H. person.” On March 9, after three months of asking for therapy, Valley was finally given an appointment with Melissa Samio, one of the two B.H. providers embedded with the unit, who was now stationed in Bulgaria. Samio hadn’t seen Valley since she requested his waiver at Fort Riley in November. Now, during a video session, Samio asked Valley how he was feeling. “Really, really shitty, ma’am,” he said, according to her notes. He told her about his breakup and said that he had thought about suicide that morning. “Everything’s falling apart,” he told Samio. Concluding that he was an “intermediate risk” for suicide, Samio issued a new 30-day profile that barred him from carrying or firing a weapon. After the session, she reached out to the battalion primary care officer to arrange for Valley to be evaluated in person. The officer, Samio later noted, never called her back.

Under Samio’s orders, Sergeant Fritch was assigned to administer Valley’s medication, and a small group of fellow soldiers, designated as “battle buddies,” was instructed to watch him around the clock, even when he went to the bathroom or shower. Most of them, Fritch told me, were in their early 20s. Fritch himself was 24. David Rudd, the University of Memphis psychologist, sees the assignment of suicide watch to nonclinicians as dangerous. “It’s a myth that somehow a unit can effectively do a suicide watch,” given their lack of specialized training, he says.

For all of its stated commitment to suicide prevention, the Army only recently released its suicide-prevention policy, three years after promising it. The policy does not provide additional guidance for how soldiers or officers are supposed to respond if someone in their ranks is contemplating suicide beyond what’s offered in the annual 60-minute module that has been in place for years — a program called “Ask, Care, Escort.” The soldiers in the 2-70 said this mainly consists of asking someone if they feel suicidal, “and if they’re honest and said yes,” Sly explains, escorting them to someone higher up.

“I’m so sorry you have to do this,” Valley apologized to his friends. He texted his father to tell him. “I just want to feel normal,” he said. But the next day, he felt worse. During an emergency session with Samio that evening, Valley said that he was suffering dramatic mood swings he described as “happy, sad, insane” and had spent most of the afternoon ruminating about suicide. Samio changed her assessment of Valley to “high risk.” Still, she agreed to allow him to travel to Nowa Deba the next morning with a small group of soldiers selected to help set up the 2-70’s new base. After the session, Samio made another call to the battalion primary care officer to request that Valley be seen by the medical team before his departure, but it is unclear if she reached him, and Valley left the base without being checked out.

As the bus wound its way along the snowy highways, Valley stared at his phone. A friend in Kansas had sent him his ex-girlfriend’s Tinder profile. He texted his friend Brandon Uttaro in Kosovo. “I’m serious about killing myself now,” he said.

“Don’t,” Uttaro urged him helplessly from 900 miles away.

Valley texted one of his sergeants. “I need to talk to you later.” The sergeant didn’t respond. Valley texted a few others.

Yo, I really need to talk later.

Hey man I’m really sorry I’m going nuts.

He called a buddy at Fort Riley, twice. His friend didn’t call back.

Many hours later, after Valley vanished into the woods, Fritch blamed himself. He had been assigned to room with Valley and went with him to dinner, then back to their quarters to unpack. But then Fritch got a phone call to check on some vehicles, and Valley said he was tired and wanted to sleep. “I left him alone for five minutes,” he told me. This gave Valley the opportunity to leave his room and gather the supplies he needed from friends like Sly, who, as they were now in different companies, had not been told about the suicide watch. Sly was angry not to have been informed, and he was even more angry about what happened after Valley was cut down from the tree and saved. “The Army was given a miraculous second chance to help him,” he says. “Despite that chance, they changed nothing.”

At the hospital in Germany, Valley was diagnosed with acute adjustment disorder and borderline personality disorder. “A diagnosis of borderline personality disorder during a three-day hospitalization is highly questionable, especially in a 21-year-old male who was considered a good, strong soldier,” says Dr. Stephen Xenakis, the retired general, who is trained in child and adolescent psychiatry and reviewed Valley’s records this year with his parents’ consent.

He found nothing in Valley’s behavioral-health history to support a diagnosis of B.P.D. His symptoms — suicidality and feelings of emptiness or low self-esteem — can be present in many other more common psychological illnesses, like depression. Young adults with personality disorders generally do not perform well in the military, Xenakis points out, and have frequent conflicts with superiors and other interpersonal issues. But Valley’s superiors, and his counseling records, consistently describe him as “polite,” “forward-thinking,” high-functioning and eager to improve.

Borderline personality disorder can qualify a soldier for rapid discharge from the Army. Because it is considered a pre-existing condition, soldiers who receive the diagnosis can be denied disability benefits and may even receive less-than-honorable discharges, effectively blocking their access to any military benefits, including those granted by the G.I. Bill.

Valley was adamant that he did not want to be discharged. The inpatient-care team in Germany noted that he had responded well to treatment, including a new prescription for Prozac. They recommended that, before a decision was made about his status, Valley be “afforded a greater opportunity to engage in more extensive care.” But instead of creating a plan for that treatment, they sent Valley back to Kansas only with the recommendation that he attend therapy sessions once or twice a week. It would prove to be a crucial misstep.

Valley was released from the hospital on Friday, March 17, with papers indicating that he was no longer suicidal, but his next B.H. appointment wasn’t until the following Monday. Escorted by his company commander, Capt. Alex Savusa, he flew back to Kansas. His mother says she had spoken to Savusa on the phone and was assured that Austin would be hospitalized, and she was shocked when her son called her to say he was back at his barracks. “He told me he was on duty,” she says. “My reaction was, Whoa, whoa, whoa — what’s going on here?” Accompanied by a friend, Austin was going off-base to eat, shop and visit his storage unit. Like his ex-wife, his father was horrified. “He’d just hung himself and now he was free-ranging,” Erik says.

At the brigade’s headquarters at Fort Riley, a handful of officers and senior enlisted soldiers had been tasked with managing the roughly 1,000 troops who had not deployed. There was no plan in place for what to do with Valley over the weekend, and Savusa and the brigade’s senior enlisted officer for the 2-70’s rear unit once again relied on the ad hoc battle-buddy system they had in Poland. Valley’s friends checked in and spent time with him, but no one followed him to the bathroom or did anything else that might have felt intrusive. “He wasn’t, like, physically watched, because anybody who goes through that stuff doesn’t want to be, like, in prison,” one of his battle buddies said. I asked this soldier how you watch someone without physically watching them. “You can’t,” he admitted. “It’s a messed-up system.”

The following Monday, Valley was escorted by a sergeant to the hospital, where he had a behavioral-health intake appointment and was once again assessed as a “high risk” patient. Fort Riley has an intensive outpatient program that would have required Valley to visit the hospital for counseling three or more times a week; he expressed interest in this program, but according to one officer apprised of the situation, the head of behavioral health at the hospital said he didn’t think it was necessary. Instead, Valley was put on the schedule for weekly therapy sessions. “I’d never seen anything like that — this soldier hung himself,” he told me. “I was just speechless.”

Valley went back to his room and texted his mother. “I will never get out of this hole,” he said. “It’s dug too deep.” He added that he wanted to go to sleep and maybe not wake up. Diane forwarded the message to Erik and his wife, Stephanie, an Army Reserve officer and registered nurse. Erik called the behavioral-health department at the hospital but was told that privacy laws prevented them from sharing information about a patient. “We weren’t asking for information,” Stephanie says. “We were trying to provide them with information so they had a clearer picture.”

By the middle of Valley’s first week back at Fort Riley, Stephanie called Savusa and tried to appeal to him as a fellow officer as well as a parent. “I really had to ask him, as a peer, if he understood the seriousness of this, and the implications,” she recalls. As a critical-care nurse, she had worked with suicidal patients. Without regular monitoring, a person would probably try suicide again, she told the captain. Savusa, she recalls, was sympathetic but said they simply didn’t have the manpower for a sustained watch. “He told me, ‘It’s not the Army’s job to babysit these children,’” she says. (Savusa declined to comment.)

Valley’s family believed he was being denied access to appropriate care. “He kept saying he needed help, and no one was helping him,” Diane says. “For two weeks straight, he would call me every night and vent, and every night I’d have to talk him down.” Austin’s conversations with his family took on an erratic and desperate tone. He told Diane that he thought he had a parasite growing in his head. He accused Erik, who had been managing his money while he was deployed, of trying to steal from him, and told a friend that his dad had insulted him after his failed suicide attempt. He accused his sister, who texted him regularly, of abandoning him. One night he called his mother, sobbing that he needed help and saying that he wanted to take all his pills. The next day he texted to apologize, writing, “I’ve been having weird mood swings.” A bit later, he added: “I’m not going to get better mom. This is with me forever now.”

Valley’s superiors, one of whom told me they met every week to discuss his situation, saw a much different Austin. Shortly after arriving at Fort Riley, Captain Savusa tried to impress upon Valley the need to demonstrate his commitment to staying in the Army. Fearing an early discharge, Valley took this warning seriously. He accepted whatever responsibility he could, serving as a battle buddy for a fellow soldier who had been sent back from Poland for surgery. He struck his leaders as a soldier who was trying his best to get better — and, as they saw it, was gradually improving.

In a few weeks, he had gone from having a regular escort to his appointments to being able to roam around the base relatively freely, with regular text and phone check-ins with his sergeants. (According to Valley’s phone records, these generally took the form of brief text exchanges between Valley and his squad leader, Sgt. Armando Cazarez. “Up?” Cazarez texted. “Up,” Valley wrote back.) He started working out at the gym and bought a car. “The situation as I understood it was: ‘He’s saying he’s fine, he looks fine, he’s acting fine. There’s no major red flags,’” one of Valley’s former sergeants says. “If you knew Valley, that is exactly how he would try to seem to his leaders.”

Valley’s discharge papers from the hospital in Germany stated “No alcohol.” Alcohol use can worsen behavioral-health conditions and can also interact negatively with psychiatric medication. Despite this warning, by the start of April, Valley was drinking heavily. As with other behavioral-health recommendations, it is the soldier’s command that has the final decision, and one officer from Valley’s unit told me that prohibitions against alcohol use are almost never enforced. Valley was also left to administer his own meds, and he told one buddy that he had stopped taking them. The friend, unaware of Valley’s medication protocols, told no one. “What I want to know is,” Diane says, “where were the people with a mature mind-set to stop any of this?”

That same week, Valley asked for a four-day pass to leave the base over Easter weekend. The medical team had approved Valley for Fort Riley’s intensive-care program, which he was scheduled to begin on April 11. An official agonized over whether to give Valley the pass. But the behavioral-health officials, loath to impose too many restrictions on Valley, encouraged it. The official gave in.

On April 6, in the evening, Valley left the base with some friends and headed to Manhattan, Kan., where they spent the night barhopping. At some point that evening, Valley saw his ex-girlfriend walk into a bar with another guy. He proceeded to drink himself into a stupor.

“It [expletive] me up,” he told a friend the next morning. He sounded as if he were still drunk.

That afternoon, he walked into a pawnshop to buy a gun. Federal law prohibits people who have been involuntarily committed to a psychiatric ward or institution from purchasing a firearm, but Valley had voluntarily checked into the psych ward at the Army hospital in Germany after his suicide attempt. Army records show that Valley was marked as “high risk” and was prohibited from handling weapons on base, but federal law dictates that the policy can’t extend beyond the installation’s gates. It also does not apply to personally owned firearms. Without any red flags appearing on his federal background check, Valley was able to buy a Taurus 9-millimeter pistol, which he brought back with him to Fort Riley later that day. He texted Uttaro to tell him. “How the [expletive] you have a pistol on high risk?” Uttaro asked.

“America,” Austin replied.

On the night of April 10, Valley spent several hours drinking heavily in his barracks and then drove to his ex-girlfriend’s apartment in Topeka. He arrived just before midnight, and called her, but she didn’t answer. “Can I just get one last kiss,” he texted. “It’s an emergency.”

“Go to the emergency room then,” she replied.

“I don’t think you understand,” he wrote.

Valley vomited in the parking lot and texted her a few more times. Then, carrying the pistol, he entered the building and pounded on her door. She called the police and locked herself in the bathroom. Valley forced his way into the apartment; a police unit, sirens wailing, grew closer. By the time officers arrived, he was bleeding from a gunshot to the head.

Valley was taken to a hospital in Topeka, where he was admitted to the I.C.U. and put on life support. The Valleys received a call from a nurse and immediately drove 12 hours to Kansas. No one from Fort Riley had reached out to them, Stephanie told me, and for most of the night, Valley lay in the I.C.U. alone. “The abandonment,” Stephanie says. She held Austin’s hand, thinking of something she had said to Savusa. She warned him in their phone conversation that following a suicide attempt, the most dangerous time for a second attempt is in the following month. Austin shot himself on April 11, 2023, exactly a month after he hanged himself in Poland. The next morning, he was declared brain-dead.

Word reached Poland immediately that a soldier from the unit had died by suicide. The chaplain gathered the soldiers who had gone to Nowa Deba with Valley back in March and told them who it was. He encouraged them to talk to their buddies if they needed support, and reminded them that they had good leaders. The squadmate who had found Valley in the woods told me he stood there in disbelief. For a month, he had suffered nightmares about the experience. There had been no real discussion within the unit after Valley’s suicide attempt, no real acknowledgment that it had happened. A B.H. counselor had visited Nowa Deba, but offered little meaningful support. “He advised me to drink water,” the squadmate says. After hearing about Valley’s death, he told me, “I went back to my room and sat there for a long time and didn’t leave until the next day.”

The soldiers of the 2-70 were told to go back to work and instructed not to post about Valley on social media. A few days later, at Nowa Deba, Valley was given a cursory memorial service. For many, it felt to them as if their grief was brushed aside, along with the gravity of what had happened. Their leaders advised the soldiers not to feel guilty, as there was nothing they could have done, Sly told me. He disagreed: “There were plenty of things that plenty of people could have done.”

A thick layer of humidity hung over the Valleys’ five-acre property in Kewaskum, Wis., when I visited last summer. Sitting at his kitchen table, Erik, a burly, bearded man in his mid-50s, was hunched over his laptop, scrolling through photos on Austin’s Facebook page. “Like here,” Erik said. “See how happy he looked? He was doing good here.” Taken during a training exercise in the Mojave Desert in March 2022, the photo showed Austin in a flak vest, wraparound shades and a green watch cap, posing with his buddies on a rocky hillside. “I miss my son every minute of every day,” he said.

For months, Erik Valley spent his days going through the boxes of papers Austin left behind, combing through Austin’s phone and text messages, as well as his medical records, which Erik notes are incomplete, to try to piece together an explanation of how his son was allowed to try to kill himself — twice. There have been four investigations into Valley’s suicide, one conducted by the Topeka Police and three by the Army. Erik has filed several Freedom of Information Act requests for more of Austin’s medical and other records and has enlisted the help of Wisconsin’s junior senator, Tammy Baldwin, who wrote to the Army on the Valleys’ behalf, but they have not received the Army’s final investigative report.

Of the 20 or more soldiers interviewed for this article, most now say they’re leaving the Army. Sly finished his contract in November. “I couldn’t do it anymore,” he says. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to have faith in this Army if it’s so willing to just abandon the individual for the sake of the collective and still manage to fail the collective.”

Last June, Diane received a text from one of Austin’s battle buddies saying that a supervisor had asked him to make a statement that Erik was “a reason that everything happened” because of the harsh comments Austin claimed he’d made about the first suicide attempt. That soldier told me that the supervisor who’d approached him about it was Staff Sergeant Cazarez, who was tasked with checking in on Valley at Fort Riley and who seemed worried that The Times was reporting on the suicide. “I really wasn’t supposed to talk to you,” the soldier says. (Cazarez, who has left the Army, denied that he asked soldiers to implicate Erik; the Army said in a statement that “no member of the command asked soldiers to lie.”)

Erik was outraged when he heard what Cazarez had reportedly asked the soldier to do; he denied that he ever stole from Austin or ridiculed him after his suicide attempt. “People want to shift blame from themselves to me,” Erik says. “That’s just dereliction of duty, plain and simple.” Erik told me that he’s been “pro-military” all his life. “The Army I joined was all about honor and courage, and doing the right thing, telling the truth,” he said. “So show me your integrity by holding those responsible accountable. Otherwise, soldiers will continue to die, and during peacetime, not combat, for no good reason.”

If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.

Additional research by Amber Von Schassen.

Janet Reitman is a contributing writer for the magazine. Her upcoming book from Random House traces three decades of political and economic upheaval that have broken people’s faith in the promise of America. David Guttenfelder has documented the U.S. military at war for more than a decade as a photographer, including years spent in Afghanistan and Iraq. His coverage also includes the struggles of service members who return home and are at a high risk for suicide.