Air Force veteran’s suicide sheds light on female soldiers and PTSD

[Jazzy]

It’s a chilling statistic: Twenty-two United States veterans commit suicide a day, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. One recent victim: Thirty-year-old Air Force Reserve Capt. Jamie Brunette.

Capt. Brunette, the youngest of five children from Milwaukee, had served two tours of duty in Afghanistan during her 11-year Air Force career. On Feb. 9, police in Tampa, Fla., found her dead from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. Her family and friends came together this week to honor Brunette’s memory and raise awareness about posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), something Brunette’s friends say was hard for her to talk about.

Brunette’s friends and family gathered this week in Tampa to celebrate her life, but talk quickly turned to depression and PTSD, parts of Capt. Brunette’s life her roommate says she rarely spoke about.

“Jamie was very private, so she only opened up to me about her experiences if I had asked about it,” Milner says. “I was considering joining the Air Force last year, and I asked Jamie to tell me what a normal day was like in Afghanistan. She told me it was pretty scary. Her troop would be under mortar attacks on a daily basis, where they would have to run to the bunkers and death was just like a normal thing.”

Her friends say Brunette was getting help from the VA for PTSD.

Both Aguiar and Milner agree that their friend was suffering from PTSD and think more needs to be done for women coming home from combat missions overseas.

“I think women are just more emotional creatures as it is, and I mean that’s just my opinion,” Aguiar says. “When you are enlisted in the military, You have to have some sort of built-up emotion guard, and you have to kind of amount to the male aspect of it and be just as tough. So I think that they kind of put up walls to be strong as maybe their male counterparts. There needs to be more of a focus on women in the military.”

Research suggests that female veterans are far less likely than their male counterparts to take their own life, but female veterans are three times more likely to kill themselves than women who have never served. That is something Capt. Brunette’s family and friends hope her death will bring to the forefront.

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Do you think there needs to be more of a focus on women in the military? Why/Why not?