The Face of a Thousand Heroes: A Marine’s Battle with Depression
On Saturday, August 20, 2005, two days before Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, a then 23-year-old Steven Ritter of Lafayette, Louisiana was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps.
In the storm’s aftermath, Steven’s father, a mechanical engineer, was sent into New Orleans to inspect structural damage at the Ritz Carlton. Steven joined him, eager to lend his father a hand where he could. “Just tagging along,” he recalls.
What he found upon arrival was beyond anything he could have anticipated. “They had the place sealed off with private military, mercenary types, protecting the property from looters,” he tells me.
“It was hardcore,” he says of the militia-like presence of hired security contractors.
“We show up and my dad’s like, yeah my son’s a Marine, he’s all proud.” It was a declaration that caught the attention of a nearby contractor.
“You’re a Marine?” the guard turned and asked the fresh Lieutenant.
“Yeah,” Steven confirmed.
“Alright, you’re gonna go clear rooms for your dad,” the contractor said, handing him an AR-15. In an instant Steven Ritter went from his dad’s asistant to his armed security detail. “If you see someone and they have a gun, you drop ’em.” Those were his orders, to sweep through the building room by room, and shoot any would-be looters on site.
Thing is, Steven didn’t have any tactical training for clearing rooms. “I was basically just mimicking what I used to do playing Goldeneye 007 as a kid,” he says with a laugh.
“But once you’re a Marine, you’re a Marine,” he concludes simply, as if nothing about that day could have made more sense.
Steven picks me up in a white four door Wrangler at the Stamford train station, where we meet each other for the first time. Patches of browning snow dot the pavement. It’s a short drive through salt covered streets to downtown Stamford, where we park and hop out into the cold.
He’s tall with close cut hair graying at the temples. Steven’s in his mid thirties but his voice carries a youthful enthusiasm. We walk around Stamford looking for a place to eat and settle on a Mexican brunch buffet where we can chat over bloody Marys and coffee.
He’s reluctant to open up about his battles with depression, but feels compelled to share his story.
“On my first deployment we didn’t do shit, but it affected me in such a fundamental way,” he says in between bites. “Just the isolation — even though you’re around people nonstop, you’re isolated.” It’s a common sentiment among those who have deployed, the feeling of being alone in a crowded ship or barracks.
He’d spend a year at home before being sent out on his second deployment.
When he left, his wife was pregnant with their third child.
For nine months he’d serve as a ground advisor to the Afghan National Army.
“Back then there were a ton of insider attacks happening, but we all made it back.” He gives a lot of credit to his commanding officer for bringing everyone home safe.
His homecoming, however, was anything but a celebration.
“There were only twenty-three of us,” he says elbows resting on the table, “and we get off the bus in San Diego, and no one’s there to greet me.”
When he stepped out onto the warm tarmac, Steven picked his way through the gathered crowd of overjoyed spouses, kids, and parents to link up with a Marine buddy who had a couch for him to crash on.
He’d spend the first two weeks back without seeing his wife or kids, including a five month old son he hadn’t met yet.
“That’s when I knew things really weren’t right.”
Steven’s career with the Marines was going well — he’d been awarded medals for his service in Afghanistan and was highly regarded by his peers and superiors — but his marriage was falling apart.
Whether it was for training or a deployment, he was separated from his wife and kids nearly six out of every eighteen months. “It just got to a point where I was never there,” he says.
Steven loved being a Marine, but something had to give. Either he’d leave the military or his marriage would fail.
He decided that his ninth year in the Marines would be his last on active duty, effectively ending a promising military career.
‘Scooping out’ is a phrase used in the aviation community to describe a last ditch effort at saving a failing aircraft.
Leaving the Marines and moving to Harlingen, Texas was Steven’s effort to scoop out their reeling marriage. With his wife living close to her family, and the strain of a relentless deployment cycle behind them, Steven thought they had a real chance to patch things up. He would get a job flying for the border patrol, steady work that wouldn’t take him away from his family. He’d be around for the birthday parties and first days of school. Things would be easier, normal.
“I didn’t have any ammo.”
Steven left San Diego in October of 2015, full of optimism and ready to embrace his new civilian life in Harlingen. He couldn’t have known that the first year he’d spend as a civilian would be the worst year of his life.
During the near decade he spent as a Marine, his entire working career, he had a mission and a community of people who shared his values. When he left the Marines and moved to Harlingen, that all disappeared overnight.
His plan to join the border patrol hadn’t panned out and he was scrambling to find any kind of employment. But quiet Harlingen wasn’t flush with opportunity for a recently discharged Marine with no civilian work experience.
“It was the perfect storm,” he says — no work, a marriage in turmoil, a frail support network, and the mounting remorse of leaving behind a sterling military career. Navigating the civilian world was like learning to walk all over again.
“I had gone through three deployments, and this was by far the hardest time I’d ever had.”
Steven had walked into yet another hurricane, but unlike the aftermath of Katrina, this time his rifle had been taken from him and his uniform stripped away. Instead of looters in the Ritz Carlton, it was his own demons he had to ward off, and he had to do it alone.
“I missed my friends in San Diego. I missed having a purpose. I missed being a Marine, ya know?”
It was enough to push him down into the depths of a crushing depression. He started to think about hurting himself.
The thoughts would come out of nowhere. He’d be driving around Harlingen, or working at his new job with an insurance company, and they would bubble up.
In the the summer of 2016 Steven told his wife that he was experiencing suicidal ideation. They were sitting by the pool in their backyard.
“I looked her dead in the eye and I told her, I said I’m fucking losing it. I need some time.”
He needed time to work through the months and years of stress, trauma, lost community, and a crisis of identity that continued to plague him since leaving the Marine Corps.
He was seeing three therapists and the VA counselors were calling him daily just to check in. They knew he was having thoughts of harming himself. His brother, knowing how deep a depression Steven was in, was so concerned that one day he drove down to Harlingen and took Steven’s guns away.
Everyone who knew about his mental health struggles seemed to be taking them seriously. Everyone, but his wife. Her response to him that evening by the pool: “You need to get your shit together.”
“Marriage or dating, whatever it is, there’s got to be compromise,” he says shaking his head. But the two were far beyond the point of compromising, and they knew it. Their marriage counselor knew it, too.
In the heat of a particularly volatile argument in the final days of their marriage, his wife — knowing that he was having thoughts of self harm— told Steven he should kill himself. He nearly did. With a collapsing marriage and the pressures of a demanding new career, Steven was at the edge and peering over.
When you tell a therapist or counselor that you’re experiencing thoughts of self harm, one of the first things they’ll say is: Do you have a plan?
Steven did have a plan.
“I knew exactly how I would have done it. I knew exactly how far I had to pull the trigger,” he says. “My wife and kids would have found me with my head blown off in the closet.”
I ask Steven what stopped him from taking his life.
“I didn’t have any ammo. It’s that simple.” Gun regulations prevent carrying firearms with ammunition during interstate travel, so although Steven had his guns, he didn’t have any bullets. It likely saved his life.
“I look at my kids now — how can I imagine not being there for them?” His eyes are glassy with tears and he takes a moment to regain his composure.
“So I struggle,” he says, his voice cracking. “I struggle with being the best dad I can be. I struggle with the guilt.”
I ask him about how the Marine Corps takes care of Marines’ mental health, and he admits that more could be done. “I wish we did a better job on the backside [of a deployment],” he says. “Just looking at how deployments affect people.” Steven never saw a trained therapist while he was on active duty.
The closest thing to a therapist that the military offered on the tail end of his deployments was a Marine Corps chaplain, which Steven says might work for some of the more religious Marines, but wasn’t something he put much stock in.
His family never had a chance to see a therapist, either and he thinks there needs to be more guidance for couples, particularly when it comes to the way deployments affect children.
“Alright, you’ve been gone for six to nine months now. This is how your 3 year old thinks about daddy being home. This is how your five year old, your thirteen year old thinks. Because that seven year old, if you were mad at them when you left, that’s sticking with them, that’s their last memory.” It pains him, the thought of his kids being harmed by the service he performed for his country.
Would counseling have saved Steven’s marriage? It’s not likely. Would it have helped him understand the heightened risk for depression and self-harm that military veterans experience? He believes so.
But there’s still a stigma when it comes to getting treatment for one’s mental health, a stigma that Steven cannot fathom.
“The strongest organ in our body is the brain, but it’s taboo to go get a check-up on it,” he says, incredulous.
And like so many of his veteran brothers and sisters, Steven is not completely out of the woods. “I get lonely, and I get low still.”
“I have a lot of guilt about abandoning [my kids]— being here in Connecticut.” His three kids are with their mother in Texas, and although he facetimes with them, he knows it’s not the same. He thinks a lot about one day having to justify the decision to his three kids. “At the end of this, at least I’m alive. Because I came really close to not being here.”
An Ed Sheeran song plays over the restaurant speakers, its sappy melody mingling with the clatter of plates and the sound of a muffled gunshot no one had to hear.
We order a final round.
Steven worries about what people will think about his struggles. How will people look at him, knowing that he was severely depressed, that he thought about killing himself. Ultimately, though, he feels a responsibility to tell his story, because “somewhere out there another Marine, or soldier, or airman might be going through the same thing I went through.”
“And if telling my story can make a difference for just one person, one person who might be at the edge like I was, then that’s all that matters to me.” His voice shakes, cracking at times, but underneath, there’s a firm resolve.
After lunch we walk by an old colonial era cemetery a few blocks away from his apartment. It’s a peaceful green quad set back among new developments and busy roads.
Work has taken him away from his family and the borderlands of Harlingen. He hates being away from his kids, but regards their time apart as a necessary step towards establishing himself in a career that will make them stronger in the long run.
He wants me to know that while he does get down still, he’s doing well and he’s excited for what lies ahead.
“I choose to live a good, happy, and optimistic life.” It’s a life that now involves open conversations about mental health, and chipping away at the silence that isolates us in times of crisis.
“By telling our stories we can connect with other people, and show that there really is a light at the end of the tunnel.”
