Lance Cpl. Harry Lew was with 2nd Battalion, 3rd Marines, in Afghanistan when his life unraveled. As first reported last week, Lew committed suicide in April after he was allegedly hazed for falling asleep on post. Struggling to handle the stress, he put the muzzle of his M249 Squad Automatic Weapon in his mouth and pulled the trigger, according to a report outlining a military investigation into his death. In its print edition this week, Marine Corps Times outlines what happened in significantly more detail. Leveraging nearly 100 pages of documents and interviews with Lew’s father and Marine officials, I…
Browsing: Military suicide
Some of you may remember the blog post I wrote last month about Sgt. Ian McConnell, a friend of mine that I met last year in Marjah, Afghanistan. McConnell killed himself on July 4 with a self-inflicted gunshot wound, shocking friends and family alike. His family decided to go public with his story through this blog in hope that it might help someone else. Through this ordeal, I’ve had the luck to get to know Ian’s sister, Meg. Last night, she shared that she has been writing about her brother’s death on her blog, On the Homefront. A recent excerpt…
This is one of the hardest pieces of journalism that I’ve written in a long time. As it appears online, the family members of a friend of mine — Sgt. Ian McConnell, 24 — are traveling today from Camp Pendleton, Calif., to his hometown in Woodbury, Minn. They’re preparing for his funeral at Fort Snelling National Cemetery, a U.S. cemetery in nearby Minneapolis. It’s common that when a person dies with most of his or her life seemingly ahead of them, friends and family create online memorials. Ian is no different. His sister, Meg, posted one on Facebook over the…