Suicides of Houston Army Recruiter and His Wife Leave Questions of Struggle That Endured After Iraq

Tweet War--huh! What is it good for?
Not humanity, obviously.

Portion below; whole sad story here: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/5788103.html

Mounting pressure

Making matters worse, Andersson felt uncomfortable in the role of salesman for the Army. He was painfully honest with prospective recruits, even if his candor turned them off, she said.

"He was morally opposed to putting more young men into that situation, where they could be injured or killed or see the things he'd seen," Maxey said.

His superiors repeatedly criticized him for failing to meet his goal of signing two new recruits a month and assigned him five-page essays or extra duty as punishment, she said. In February 2006, he was passed up for promotion to staff sergeant.

"It wasn't that he was lazy or not working. It's just that he was not getting recruits and being punished for it, constantly," she said. "It was just not the job for him."

Andersson was proud to be a soldier, but he wasn't cut out for recruiting, said his friend Chris Rodriguez.

Long hours, few days off and mounting pressure to deliver fresh volunteers made life "truly awful," Rodriguez said in a series of e-mails and a telephone interview with the Houston Chronicle from Anbar Province in Iraq, where he was serving a tour of duty at the time of Andersson's death.

''In the recruiting station I was at, a good third of the people went on antidepressants while working there," said Rodriguez, who met Andersson in Texas while assigned to the Houston Recruiting Battalion. "You could come to work as motivated as you wanted, but as soon as you passed the threshold of the doorway, it'd suck the life away from you. Looking around, you'd see miserable people."

If recruiters failed to sign up enough prospects, their commanders told them they were failures, Rodriguez said. "They tell you, 'That's why your buddy in Iraq doesn't have a full battalion, because you're letting him down,' "he said.

The stress took its toll. Back in Iraq, Rodriguez had nightmares about his time recruiting in Houston.

"The pressure recruiting puts on you wears you down so badly," he said. "We often said that we'd rather be in Iraq than recruiting. It's true."