(SFC Spencer Kohlheim right, with his driver and gunner, the day after their truck was hit with an IED in Kirkuk.)
Back in LaGrange
When we see of images of returning soldiers, more often than not we see their homecoming. Young wives crying with joy, the group hugs, the children picked up and spun around. We do not see what happens when the parties are over. We did not see what kind of homecoming Spencer got, or if any of his four children were there. Fellow soldiers said he wanted to out process just as fast as they did, and probably didn’t check any of the boxes which would have kept him at Camp Atterbury longer for mental health evaluations.
“Guys don’t want to sit through no screening,” said Edgar Pimental, an old Guard friend of Spencer’s. “He didn’t want to get kicked out. He wanted to be a career soldier.”
He didn’t indicate that he was suffering from severe headaches. Not to the Army guys. But to his ex-wife and his fiancée it was different. Spencer began telling them how he wanted to get out of Iraq. Krissy Caudill, also of LaGrange, whom Spencer had proposed to on a four-day leave just before the Guard deployed, said she’d talked to him constantly while he was in Iraq. Spencer had bought a cell phone and sometimes called her five times a day. He often told her he couldn't stand it any more.
“What I noticed when he first got back, he looked older physically," Krissy said. "He was very needy, very clingy. There was nothing I could say to him that would ease it, even if he was with me all day, it wouldn’t ease it. I was working at the Chevy dealership in Sturgis (Michigan). He would call my phone non-stop.”
When he wasn’t calling her or at her house, where Krissy lived with her parents and son, Spencer was drinking. Krissy said, “The only thing he did if he wasn’t with me was drink. Very heavily. He’d be at the Legion as soon as they opened for hours upon hours. If he wasn’t there he’d be at Grossman’s or Detroit Street. To me he was intoxicated every day except for five days out of those three weeks when he got back.”
The American Legion at 100 Industrial Parkway in LaGrange looks like a bingo hall from outside. Inside is a square wrap-around bar, a big screen TV, round Formica tables. The walls are lined with photos of uniform veterans who have passed away. Everyone at the Legion knew Spencer. It was his home when he wasn’t deployed. I imagine him there sitting on one of the stools with a beer and a pack of cigarettes talking to the older vets. Spencer could entertain a crowd for hours, and he could be a heartfelt listener. His first night back in town he went to the Legion.
“First thing he said he had to do was karaoke that night,” said Bill Dunafin, a neighbor who’d raised boys Spencer grew up with and who Spencer gave an American flag to whenever he came home from a deployment.
“He actually sang good,” Beth said. “Usually it’s like Spence ok, get off the stage now.”
But Spencer’s step-daughter, Nicole, 24, noticed something different when he called her down to the Legion a few days later. "When we were there that night, he didn’t seem like a person. More like a robot. He'd look through you. He smoked what, fifty cigarettes in like three minutes.”
Beth had been through deployments with him before, and she said that Spencer hadn’t been the same since he came back from Afghanistan. Their Indiana Guard unit went off the road and lost four soldiers to a land mine south of Kabul on that tour. The soldiers killed were part of Kohlheim’s and Clouse's old unit. He tended to blame himself, Clouse said.
“I think Spencer always felt he let those four guys down,” Bill Dunafin said. “He felt that a younger guy took his place; that he could have changed the course of events. He brought the flag home after those four got killed and flew it over the garrison.”
(The 1/151st Calvary pose before the mission from Kirkuk back to Tikrit in early April, '08; SFC Kohlheim is kneeling to the right.)
When he got back from Afghanistan in 2004, Spencer drank a lot. That was part of his decompression routine. But Spencer’s drinking soon exacerbated problems he was already facing at home. He and Beth were splitting up after more than eight years of marriage. “He decided he wanted a divorce, but then two months after the divorce he decided he’d made a mistake. You know where they say, it takes six weeks to adjust to society after a deployment,” Beth said. “Well, it’s true.” And Spencer was acting schizophrenic about seeing their three children- sometimes not seeing them for weeks, other times following Beth driving drunk, begging to see them.
Nicole, who he'd help raise, knew how Spencer was after tours. “It was a ritual we went through,” she said. “He adjusted and we stayed back. The last time he came home, he never did get ok. He was always different after Afghanistan.”
With the binge drinking, Spencer eventually ran afoul of local law enforcement and left a threatening message on an officer's phone, but instead of being charged, Beth claims it was arranged through the National Guard for Spencer to go through six months of outpatient mental health and alcohol counseling at the Northern Indiana Veteran’s Hospital. According to Beth, it’s unclear whether he was cleared by the VA or whether there was any communication between a VA counselor and the unit Kohlheim volunteered to go to Iraq with. Obviously Spencer wouldn’t highlight his post-deployment problems if he wanted to go.
“He never did talk about it,” Nicole said of Afghanistan. “But he used to be the coolest dad. We’d camp out in Army tents. For him to change it was rough on everybody. This time when he came home I just assumed he was the same.”
SFC Kohlheim was awarded two purple hearts in Iraq. That meant he'd been wounded on two separate attacks. They were concussions; invisible wounds that caused migraines and feelings of depression according to family and close friends.
"The IED is our number one injury right now," said the manager of seamless transition program for returning soldiers in the Northern Indiana VA Health Care System. "It can cause dramatic brain injury without being hit by fragments. Depression is a standard reaction to Traumatic Brain Injury and readjustment from combat is enough to create depression and anxiety."
It’s been widely reported and discussed that the Pentagon decided not to award the Purple Heart to veterans and soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress, even though approximately one-third of veterans have reported dealing with symptoms of combat stress or major depression, and the New England Medical Journal has linked depression to multiple concussions.
Sgt. Clouse was there when Kohlheim got out of the base hospital after the second IED attack. “He had constant headaches,” Clouse said. “He was taking meds all the time; those heavier Ibuprofen they give you after the IEDs. There would be very few days that he didn’t have a headache. He’d start to take his food back to his room to eat by himself.”
But Spencer didn’t tell his Guard buddies about feeling depressed, not even Sgt. Clouse. “He was depressed during his two week leave this summer, but he didn't tell me till he got back to Iraq,” Beth said. “He called me on July 4th and he was crying. He said he couldn’t tell me till he got back that he was depressed. That was his excuse for not seeing the kids. He said he’d been that way since he’d been hit by the first IED. He said he could only sleep two hours at a time and he had headaches. His hands shook most of the time."
During his leave, Krissy said, “He’d constantly think of not going back. We went to Florida to his Mom’s and he didn’t want to leave there. I tried to tell him he didn’t have that much time left. (But) even up to two weeks before he came home from Iraq he was very depressed and upset. He was tired of it. He was at his breaking point.” 
(Spencer and his financee, Krissy.)
“I talked to him on his R-n-R after he was wounded,” Bill Dunafin said. “That was the first time he ever told me, I don’t want to go back.”
Joe’s Story
In East Chicago IN, two hours and a world away from the snowy fields of LaGrange, factory smoke bleeds into the distant Chicago skyline. I visit another veteran from the same deployment to Iraq. He’s just bought a neighborhood bar with his brother. I tell him about my visit to LaGrange, about what happened to Spencer. Joe (not his real name) stares into the dimness past the pool table. He didn’t know Spencer. Since being home, he tells me he’s been drinking a lot too. But not tonight. He’s trying not to drink on the nights he’s working.
Joe tells me about waking up in the middle of the night less than a month after he got home from this tour. He got out of bed, put on his camo pants and walked outside his house into the snow in bare feet looking for a Port-a-John. His wife had to get up to tell him to come back inside. He said he didn’t remember anything the next morning.
This tour was his second to Iraq. During Joe’s last tour his job was to search and remove IEDs buried on routes before the Army drove on them. He says he can’t count the number of bodies he saw on the roads of Mosul, or the number of bullets he shot into shattered buildings. He told me about buddies who lost it and started shooting randomly on the streets.
Joe had a bad time when he came home to East Chicago after that first tour. He was depressed. Worse. He began having suicidal thoughts. He said it came on him like a cold grip one day and didn’t let go. It wasn’t until his wife came home one afternoon and caught him in the garage with a rope over the rafters, that she made him get help. He saw a counselor under his wife’s medical plan.
“I never wanted to talk about it,” Joe said. “You know, that soldier pride thing. But the doctor makes you talk about it. I didn’t think it would help,” Joe shrugged. “I guess it did.”
“Spencer never got to the first step”
Spencer’s old friend Edgar Pimental, 43, of Bern IN, also struggled with suicidal thoughts. “I’ve been there five or six times,” said Pimental who was deployed with Kolheim to Bosnia and has struggled through years of post-deployment depression following two tours to Iraq. “I popped a bunch of pills more than once,” Pimental said. “On my second year of therapy I’m just now getting a sense of what’s working for me. Every time I think about it (suicide), I think of one reason why I shouldn’t do it. Spencer never got to the first step.”
Soldier suicide is increasingly one of the Army’s greatest problems. According to one active duty brigade commander, every two days a soldier tries to kill him/herself. The US Army reported that the number of soldiers who died by suicide in the month of January 2009 surpassed the number of soldiers killed in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan (24 suicides to 16 combat deaths). In 2008, suicides in the Army rose for the fourth straight year. (Army statistics including the Reserve and Guard confirm 128 suicides in 2008 with 15 more deaths under investigation, a record since the service began tracking the statistic in 1980.)
As with many Guard soldiers I’d met, their time overseas created chaos on the home front. Whether wife or girlfriend, there seemed to be a point when the distance burned the mistrust into every word spoken over the phone. Women at home were more likely to have affairs, but that didn’t stop the soldiers sometimes. Spencer was no different. In Afghanistan, Spencer supposedly had an affair with another female soldier. When he got home he thought he wanted a divorce from Beth, eventually they did. In Iraq he had Krissy, who became his fiancée just before he deployed, but when he came home to LaGrange, she was immediately spooked by his emotional swings.
“He came to pick me up in Kentucky on the third day he was released from Camp Attebury,” Krissy said. “He started talking and it ended up in an argument about his ex-wife, about problems she caused. He freaked out and started yelling at me. He said he couldn’t take it and opened the truck door and acted like he was going to jump out on the highway.”
Krissy decided to break up with Spencer, to give them both a break, she said until he could sort out his depression. He said all he needed was her, but she believed he needed professional help. Krissy said he carried big Ziplock bags full of pills he received from the Army. Some were muscle relaxers, others heavy Ibuprofen. She also claims some of the pills were anti-depressants, but that he would never take them.
“When I was at work he’d call me all day long,” Krissy said. “It got to the point I didn’t know what to do for him. (Finally) he went to the Veteran’s Affairs hospital at Fort Wayne. Neither of us understood why they wouldn’t see him. The receptionist said she denied him because he was active duty. She said he had to wait a week or two weeks, I believe, but first he had to be cleared through his unit.”
(left to right- Nicole, Bill Dunnafin, and Beth inside the Legion.)
Being rejected at the VA really hurt Spencer. According to both Krissy and Beth, he felt betrayed; felt that as a veteran the country had turned its back on him. But his thinking was clouded, and when he wasn’t running to the Legion or other bars in downtown LaGrange, he was calling Krissy or leaning on his ex-wife and also possibly his past girlfriend from Afghanistan. Krissy started to lose trust in him.
“Somebody should have given him an alternative,” Beth said. “If there’s counseling for family members, and you’re active duty, then you still have Tricare (the military’s health care package). You should be able to see someone. They should say look, if you’re doing this badly you should see someone.”
“The VA should have given him a spot,” said an active duty soldier currently deployed in Iraq and a friend of the family, “There’s always somebody. If they can’t do it they give you the number of someone who can on the spot. It’s either they didn’t do their job, or he pushed away, one of the two. If he got turned away, someone didn’t go through the right protocol.”
A brigade commander of multiple deployments to Iraq offered a different view. “He should have known better,” the colonel said when I asked him his opinion on Spencer’s case. “How could a senior Non-commissioned officer who’d served that many years not know that he would be on active duty orders for 180 days and he would fall under (the active duty medical care system)? I cannot believe he would have gone to the VA unless he knew he wasn’t going to get help. And if he knew it, maybe that’s why he went.”
The commander admitted that screening soldiers for combat trauma can be problematic because it’s based on “self-assessment”. “Whenever you have a system open to self-assessment, it will only be accurate if the soldier accurately reports what he’s been exposed to,” he said.
Edgar Pimental agrees with the commander up to a point, but admitted that he and many Indiana Guardsmen think of the VA first whenever they have a problem. “Spencer may have known it, if he was in his right mind,” Pimental said. “I think he was really trying to get help, but in the wrong places. The bar, the VA, a girlfriend that was leaving him…If Kohlheim was at his (Army) job, he would have been in his right mind tactically, but you’re talking about a soldier who’d been through two IEDs and you’re asking him to think like a civilian?”
“The (VA) told him he would have to make an appointment for February since he was still active duty,” Beth said. “I don't understand how they can turn away a soldier just because they're active still. I mean honestly, I fear for other families to whom their soldier has been told 'If you need help-get it pronto'. He tried and couldn't get any help."
“Concussions,” Pimental said, “Most definitely they can have that effect. I constantly felt pains in my head from how it kept hitting the top of the Humvee (from two different tours to Iraq). If he got hit with an IED, his head pain could interfere with anything. That’s one of the issues I’m dealing with now,” said Pimental who's been medically discharged for constant headaches and goes to a VA psychiatrist regularly. Pimental claims his therapist said that (Spencer) was scheduled for an appointment a couple of weeks after. “She said the ball was dropped on that one.”
“Although Spencer flew off the handle sometimes, he was still the greatest guy in the world to me. When he drunk he was always happy,” Pimental added. “What ever happened in Iraq, he experienced it really bad.”
"I don't know how to fix it"
According to Krissy on the night of December 18th, Spencer was drinking downtown at Detroit Street Bar with his brother and called her to come down to meet him. He was clearly intoxicated, she said and he talked to her non-stop about betting back together.
“I told him being drunk one night in a bar is not going to solve it,” Krissy said. “He didn’t have any patience. He knew he couldn’t fix it. He thought if I said ok, it would all go away. He said he wanted to come home with me. I told him my Dad didn’t want that. He got in the truck with me and we started arguing. I told him to get out and call me in the morning. He got out of the truck and punched the passenger side door. I told him he needed to stop. I called my friend who was the bartender and she told him to calm down before the cops come. He said call the fucking cops, I don’t care. He went to his car and tried to give me his ATM card. He said take it and you’ll be fine. I told him I didn’t need his money, I needed him to be ok. He said, I know, but I don’t know how to fix it.”
“He said they denied me anyways, I have no where to go,” Krissy said. “Three days prior he called me at one am in the morning and said he was going to kill himself and I got up and went to his grandma’s. The first time he was passed out in his car in the driveway and the second time he was passed out on the couch. This time he turned his car sideways in the middle of the street to block me from leaving. He’d never done anything like that before. I started to get mad and a little scared. I called my dad. My dad said the first place he was going to go was to our house, so my dad recommended I go to a family friend’s house.”
Krissy eventually made her way back to her parents that night and Spencer continued to call her with increasing panic. “By the time he got to his grandma’s he tried my cell phone, but it was upstairs. I had 52 missed calls from him in 8 minutes. He called my parents home phone at 3:14 am. He was a nervous wreck. I needed to talk to you, he said I don’t know how to fix this, I don’t know how to fix this. We talked for maybe six minutes. He said I can’t fix this. I told him I loved him and to go to sleep. He said he was out in the garage and had just opened one of his lockers from Iraq. There was silence for a little bit. Then he was balling hysterically. He said I want to say I love you and you were the one I wanted to be with for the rest of my life. I asked him why he was saying this. I can’t take it Krissy, he said, I hope that everything will be ok for us and you too. Just remember I love you, I will be in my garage. He said I’m going to chill out here for a while, I love you, I love you.”
“I called his grandma’s phone, he didn’t answer. I was tired and it was 3 am. I just thought he was doing what he’d done before- pass out.”
"He’d talked about killing himself three times"
All the facts are unclear but sometime in the early morning of December 19th Spencer went to his grandmother’s garage. Friends and family speculate he may have been trying to say goodbye to them throughout the night. Hindsight and guilt will often do that. Sometime after he got off the phone with Krissy for the last time, he looped a rope over the rafters of his grandmother’s garage. Spencer hanged himself with his phone still displaying Krissy’s house number.
“It was almost 11 am (the next morning) that his grandma found Spencer after she called his brother looking for him,” Krissy said. “His brother Ryan supposedly sent him a text message- Are you still alive?”
“He had said to me three times four days before he did it, because he didn’t think we were going to get back together, that he should have just died in Iraq and I would have loved him forever,” Krissy said.
On Route 9 heading out of LaGrange, IN, there's a cemetery on a hill. One blizzarding January day, I drove out there in a rental car and asked the groundskeeper to take me to Spencer Kohlheim's grave stone. At first we couldn't find it. Then the groundskeeper kicked some snow off a name plate the size of a rolled up newspaper. Spencer's gravestone was flanked by two frozen tall boys of Miller Lite and a bottle of Fire Schnapps, with a partially covered wreath below.
“I don’t think it was planned,” Edgar Pimental said. “I think he was in one of those moments when nothing went right all day. I ask myself every day, why didn’t this guy call me?”
Krissy too is often wracked with guilt. “I think back now if I’d just let him sleep on our couch that night, he would have stayed. My Dad agreed. But others said it would have just postponed it. When he was in Iraq he’d held his gun up to his head. He called me later crying and said I’ve done something I thought I’d never do.”
Spencer's step-daughter, Nicole remembers a few days before. “The last time I saw him he came and took me to the license branch to get my driver’s license (renewed), and it was the old him again. We talked, he asked about school, about so much more than he has asked about in a long time. We got in the car, he told me he wanted to take me home. I just want you to know you’re doing a good job, he said. I just laughed at him. The next morning they called us and told us they’d found him."
“He was supposed to make First Sergeant. He was kind of excited about that. We talked about a Cleveland game this summer,” said Bill Dunafin shaking his head. “Spencer was like one of my boys. I watched him grow up. Whenever he was deployed he called. He called me from Bosnia on Father’s Day.”
"He was loved by a lot of people," Beth said, "and he helped a lot of people, but just couldn’t seem to help himself."
The announcement in the Ft Wayne area paper read:
SPENCER D. KOHLHEIM, 38, of LaGrange, died Friday, Dec. 19, 2008, 11:46 a.m., at his residence, due to Mild Traumatic Brain Injury.
Born May 23, 1970, in LaGrange, to Harry and Maureen Giles Kohlheim, Spencer was a 1989 graduate of Prairie Heights High School.
Following his graduation, he enlisted in the United States Army, where he was currently ranked as a Sergeant First Class.
Nearly four months later not much about Spencer’s death is any clearer. “It will probably be the hardest thing I have to deal with in my life,” Krissy said. “There’s a lot of things I still don’t know and will probably never know. I’m very, very confused. I’m more up in the air and hurt that I couldn’t make it ok. (But) he went through two divorces… and had a breaking point. I went through the blaming myself thing. There’s way too much I don’t know.”
The financial entanglements for the three children Beth had with Spencer seem far from sorted out. “As of right now my gas ran out,” Beth said at the end of January. “The VA was supposed to come for my VA benefits. The main thing I need is social security and VA benefits just to pay the bills. They’re saying it’s all held up with the will.”
In trying to sum up who Spencer was, Krissy said, “He loved what he did in the Army, but he just had enough. He was at the point where he was tired. He wanted to come home and live a normal life. As many deployments and tours and as much as he’d done for this country, he couldn’t get help. He got denied. That made him more mad than anything."
"He was for the most part a really happy person who would do anything for anybody. He was a great father. He had a ton of friends, so many the church couldn’t even hold all the people. He was very well loved in LaGrange. It confused and shocked a lot of people. His biggest thing was he felt like a daddy to 47 soldiers. They looked up to him.”
Baghdad- On a day filled with two showy events, the real story was the bombing in Kirkuk. Thirty-three dead. Not to be morbid, but problems in Kirkuk underlie country-wide problems in the transfer of Iraqi forces taking over security in major Iraqi cities and the much-publicized failure of first round bidding for oil service contracts.
