The Day He Left the Base for Good
As his psychiatrist, I should have been able to stop his suicide
Published in
8 min readFeb 9, 2024
TW: Suicide, Child Sexual Violence
October 2008, I’d been deployed to a remote base outside Mosul, Iraq for about two months, long enough to settle into a routine. I spent most of my days in a small building just off the base’s air strip. It had been…