Air National Guard Technical Sergeant David Guindon
April 21, 1956 ~ August 18, 2004
Operation Iraqi Freedom
157th Air Refueling Wing's Logistic Readiness Squadron
New Hampshire Air National Guard
48, of Merrimack, NH; died as a result of service to our country.
Operation Iraqi Freedom
157th Air Refueling Wing's Logistic Readiness Squadron
New Hampshire Air National Guard
48, of Merrimack, NH; died as a result of service to our country.
David stepped off a plane on Aug. 17, 2004, into a cheering throng of friends and family members. Top officers of the New Hampshire Air National Guard had gathered in Manchester to greet four returning members of the 157th Air Refueling Wing.
He had spent the previous six months in Iraq. He returned seemingly happier than he had in a long time. More upbeat than he had been in Iraq, where his weight loss and increasingly withdrawn behavior had worried the soldiers who were there with him. In an interview with the Union Leader he said he missed his wife and daughter, also also a real bed, baths and milk. "It feels fantastic. It's hard to explain it - it feels so good," he said. "I'm just going to take today slow, wake up tomorrow and see what it's like to be back in a normal place."
Sadly, less than 24 hours later, David took his own life, his military uniform and boots on the floor, no note.
David had told his wife he was having trouble dealing with some of the things that were on his mind from being in Iraq. They had planned to talk when she got home that night.
David was the first member of the U.S. Air Force or Air National Guard to commit suicide after a stint in Iraq. He was also part of an unprecedented deployment that integrated the state's airmen with Army soldiers, sending them into a war zone to carry out missions that were nothing like most of the training they'd had.
Those who knew David and were familiar with his unit was doing in Iraq say he and his fellow soldiers were thrust into a situation they weren't ready for. Though the New Hampshire National Guard had already developed programs to help guardsmen adjust to returning home, David's death refocused that effort. Today, an unprecedented level of support exists for guardsmen and their families.
Chief Master Sgt. Ron Nadeau, the top enlisted officer for David's unit and an adviser to the state's adjutant general on Air Force matters, has tried to look at David's death as an opportunity to further improve the state's support system for returning soldiers.
To some who knew him, his this suicide was shocking. He had a wife who was glad to have him back and his daughter Ashley, who was attending navigation school in Alabama was coming home in two days to see him.
David spent most of his adult life in the military, and it was his impressive record of service that led him to Iraq last year. He was born and raised in Springfield, Mass., where he grew up with four brothers and a sister. He enlisted in the Navy after he graduated from high school, and his military career took him to the Marine Corps Reserve, the Air Force Reserve and the Army National Guard. In 1984, he married his wife Sharon, had their daughter and moved to Merrimack in the early 1990s.
In 1997, David moved into the Air National Guard and joined the 57th Logistics and Readiness squad based in Newington, where he was valued for his experience as a helicopter pilot. In his civilian life, he was a quality assurance specialist for the Defense Contract Agency for the Department of Defense in southern New Hampshire, a government job that sent him to Bosnia and Saudi Arabia in the 1990s.
In January 2004, five members of the 157th were selected to serve with an Army battalion in Iraq. David was the oldest and most experienced. The deployment represented a first for the New Hampshire Air Guard members. With the Army ranks in Iraq stretched thin, the Air Force decided to take airmen from different states and integrate them into Army units - replacing Army soldiers with airmen. David and the others, who were selected on the basis of their experience and abilities, learned they were being assigned to Army combat missions, and that they would be driving 5-ton trucks. But until they got to Iraq, they weren't told much else.
Chief Master Sgt. Ron Nadeau, the top enlisted officer for David's unit, who briefed the group, said the airmen were skeptical when they learned they would be working within large Army ranks, instead of th individualized settings they were used to. Nadeau told them, 'You guys are the vanguard. In the future, you guys will be the vanguard of this joint effort between the Army and the Air Force,'” and Dave, of all people, said 'Chief - don't you mean guinea pigs?' And we all kind of laughed."
The five members of the 157th were sent to several different Army bases in the U.S. to receive basic combat training. They left for Kuwait in February 2004, where they had trained in convoy procedures for about 45 days. They went through a six-day field training exercise designed to simulate battle conditions, followed by a six-hour assessment that tested them on different combat scenarios. The unit excelled, and on April 1 they arrived at Camp Anaconda, near Baghdad. There, his fellow airmen say, David began to change.
Guard officials cannot comment on the specifics of the missions the unit carried out in Iraq. The 157th handled security operations for truck convoys, which meant members were charged with manning heavy artillery weapons to protect the trucks. Trained to support refueling missions, the members of the 157th found themselves in the heart of the war, often under fire and inconstant in danger.
Maj. Chris Hurley, operations officer for the 157th and David's supervisor, was not in Iraq but kept in close contact with the unit. He said the environment is unpredictable and unimaginably harsh, especially for those involved in convoy operations. Hurley said 'the Iraqis would actually send children out to blow up truck convoys, so when children were seen in the road, the soldiers were told to actually keep going and run right over them," Hurley's said, "because if they stopped for the children, as would be the norm, there was a possibility that these children could be armed or wired with explosives." It was the first time the state's Air Guard members, who tend to specialize in defense tactics, had done anything like it, he said.
"They're literally the last people you'd expect to be on the other end of a spear," Hurley said. "I do support the fact that we're over there helping our fellow service units. But in their case, I don't think the training was adequate. I think it was a rush job. These guys weren't prepared for what they saw." David's convoy was attacked at least once, early in his deployment, when a bomb exploded under the truck in front of him. He was not injured. The unit traveled all over Iraq and carried out more than 100 missions. The work was grueling, the living conditions were 130-degree heat, power outages, mice and sand fleas adding to the stress.
David's unit was also put into an unfamiliar Army structure at Camp Anaconda. They lived in crowded tents with members of a truck company. David was known for being very organized and struggled with the way they had to live out of their bags and scramble for supplies. It was noted by the airmen who served with him in Iraq that they were deeply concerned as the months passed, and that they feared for David's well-being during that time. He became isolated and stopped going to meals and lost weight. His friends had to drag him to the dining tent. He spent the rest of his free time lying on his cot, staring at the ceiling and not speaking. His fellow airmen said the only time he seemed normal was when he was out on missions. Soldiers who had known David for years said he was not the man they once knew.
Staff Sgt. Moisan, a good friend of his said and the others had assumed that because of David's extensive military experience, he would be the group's unofficial leader. Instead, they got to Iraq and ended up taking care of him. He said he thought David might have been extremely ashamed of this, because he knew everyone was looking up to him and that David was afraid that his anxieties and going back and forth to the doctors might jeopardize his position with the Air Force and that he may end up being discharged because of it.
Master Sgt. Phil Cote decided David needed help and started taking him to a psychiatrist, who put him on several different medications. Despite working alongside Army soldiers, David was evaluated by an Air Force doctor. Maj. Hurley now believes an Army doctor used to dealing with ground troops, might have been better equipped to identify symptoms of post-traumatic stress. Hurley kept in touch with Sharon Guindon during this time. She was increasingly concerned toward the end of David's deployment and wanted him home.
In August 2004, David and 3 fellow airmen were headed home (MSgt Cote remained to train their replacements). On 30 hours of plane travel to get back to New Hampshire, colleagues noticed that he seemed to relax and even cheer up. It was like the old David was back. Reports say he was talking very positive, talking about things he had to do when he got back and seemed generally good natured, knowing that he was going home.
When members of the Army Guard return from tours of duty, they report to an Army base for a few days of debriefing before they go home. They get medical screenings, do paperwork and attend workshops educating them on the difficulties they can expect in adjusting to being back. This is done to lessen the sometimes brutal impact of re-entry into normal life and to help soldiers prepare for the shock of going from a desert filled with explosions to sitting at a kitchen table with their children. "...in our modern world, you can be in combat one day, seeing little kids get shot in front of you," Maj. Hurley said, "then 24 hours later be back at home, as David was, and your wife goes to work and you're sitting alone in the house."
The re-entry programs that send soldiers to Army bases post-deployment were developed for Army Guard members, the Air Guard did not have such a program then. The leaders of the New Hampshire Air Guard, knew that the 157th's experiences were not typical. Early on in the unit's deployment, one of the five airmen from the 157th briefly returned to the United States because a relative was ill. While he was back, his conversations with Nadeau and others made it clear that the members of the 157th might need a lot of support when they returned.
The New Hampshire Air Guard worked with the Veterans Affairs hospital in Manchester, developed a re-entry program for the 157th. Members of the unit would receive counseling sessions in the days after they landed, and they organized meetings to give the families guidance on what to expect. The program was put into place by the time the 157th returned.
But instead of reporting to a base after leaving Iraq, the Air Force sent David and the others straight to New Hampshire. Their plane was scheduled to arrive on Aug. 18, with the 157th's arrangement for the airmen to attend counseling the next day. But the plane arrived a day early, and the unit's leaders sent them home with orders to report back in a day for evaluations and counseling.
Nadeau remembers feeling relieved when he saw David at the welcome-back ceremony. He was smiling and seemed untroubled. "I looked Dave in the eye, because I knew he had had some problems over there," Nadeau said. "And I said, 'Are you okay?' He said, 'Chief, I'm home now. So I'm okay.' It was like that was the medicine he needed."
The next morning, David urged his wife to go to work, telling her he felt fine, but that he was tired, jet-lagged and just wanted the house to be quiet so he could sleep. She left reluctantly. Tragically she returned home to find David. When news reached the New Hampshire Guard leaders, they quickly decided to bring MSgt. Cote home from Iraq early. They contacted David's fellow airmen and brought them in for counseling. They were devastated, especially Cote who was in tears.
David's death launched a huge wave of second-guessing and deeply shook the Guard's leaders, in part because they had considered themselves ready to handle the aftermath of the unit's deployment. Maj. Hurley said, "I was the one who said, 'Why don't you just go home?' "If there was anyone in the chain that screwed up, it perhaps falls on me. I think about that day all the time, and I feel so terrible. I think, if he'd only come in on time and not a day earlier. But I didn't see it in him. I saw nothing that made me think twice about letting them go. I think what really shocked us was how it happened. I believed we'd refined our process to the maximum extent."
Immediately after David's death, the Air Force elected to keep the Air National Guard out of the next Army rotation until the training for such deployments could be further developed. Nadeau said the suicide forced him and other leaders to consider whether they had failed David at any step. When the members of the 157th got called up, the Army needed help, fast. The soldiers who went were participants in a deployment that was still a work in progress. Since then, the Air Force has altered its training for airmen who are deployed to Iraq so they are better prepared. A convoy school instructing all airmen in the new strategies of war has been developed at an Air Force base in Texas, airmen are given more training with the equipment they could end up using. "The Air Force is now changing its training policies to emphasize to soldiers that they may someday have to be in combat," Nadeau said. "But they didn't get that. They'd fired an M-16, and they did the obstacle course. But as far as getting the mind ready for combat, very little was done."
Maj. Hurley believes David left Iraq with no plan to end his life. He believes his joy at returning was as genuine as the excitement with which he spoke about the rest of his summer, his eagerness to take out his boat and go walking with his dogs. He believes David simply crashed, alone, perhaps when he least expected it. "The final act might have been suicide," Hurley said, "but he was killed by the war."
His awards and decorations include the Army Combat patch. *If you have additional information on David's awards, please contact us.
David is survived by his wife Sharon Guindon and daughter Ashley Guindon, and his extended family.
He had spent the previous six months in Iraq. He returned seemingly happier than he had in a long time. More upbeat than he had been in Iraq, where his weight loss and increasingly withdrawn behavior had worried the soldiers who were there with him. In an interview with the Union Leader he said he missed his wife and daughter, also also a real bed, baths and milk. "It feels fantastic. It's hard to explain it - it feels so good," he said. "I'm just going to take today slow, wake up tomorrow and see what it's like to be back in a normal place."
Sadly, less than 24 hours later, David took his own life, his military uniform and boots on the floor, no note.
David had told his wife he was having trouble dealing with some of the things that were on his mind from being in Iraq. They had planned to talk when she got home that night.
David was the first member of the U.S. Air Force or Air National Guard to commit suicide after a stint in Iraq. He was also part of an unprecedented deployment that integrated the state's airmen with Army soldiers, sending them into a war zone to carry out missions that were nothing like most of the training they'd had.
Those who knew David and were familiar with his unit was doing in Iraq say he and his fellow soldiers were thrust into a situation they weren't ready for. Though the New Hampshire National Guard had already developed programs to help guardsmen adjust to returning home, David's death refocused that effort. Today, an unprecedented level of support exists for guardsmen and their families.
Chief Master Sgt. Ron Nadeau, the top enlisted officer for David's unit and an adviser to the state's adjutant general on Air Force matters, has tried to look at David's death as an opportunity to further improve the state's support system for returning soldiers.
To some who knew him, his this suicide was shocking. He had a wife who was glad to have him back and his daughter Ashley, who was attending navigation school in Alabama was coming home in two days to see him.
David spent most of his adult life in the military, and it was his impressive record of service that led him to Iraq last year. He was born and raised in Springfield, Mass., where he grew up with four brothers and a sister. He enlisted in the Navy after he graduated from high school, and his military career took him to the Marine Corps Reserve, the Air Force Reserve and the Army National Guard. In 1984, he married his wife Sharon, had their daughter and moved to Merrimack in the early 1990s.
In 1997, David moved into the Air National Guard and joined the 57th Logistics and Readiness squad based in Newington, where he was valued for his experience as a helicopter pilot. In his civilian life, he was a quality assurance specialist for the Defense Contract Agency for the Department of Defense in southern New Hampshire, a government job that sent him to Bosnia and Saudi Arabia in the 1990s.
In January 2004, five members of the 157th were selected to serve with an Army battalion in Iraq. David was the oldest and most experienced. The deployment represented a first for the New Hampshire Air Guard members. With the Army ranks in Iraq stretched thin, the Air Force decided to take airmen from different states and integrate them into Army units - replacing Army soldiers with airmen. David and the others, who were selected on the basis of their experience and abilities, learned they were being assigned to Army combat missions, and that they would be driving 5-ton trucks. But until they got to Iraq, they weren't told much else.
Chief Master Sgt. Ron Nadeau, the top enlisted officer for David's unit, who briefed the group, said the airmen were skeptical when they learned they would be working within large Army ranks, instead of th individualized settings they were used to. Nadeau told them, 'You guys are the vanguard. In the future, you guys will be the vanguard of this joint effort between the Army and the Air Force,'” and Dave, of all people, said 'Chief - don't you mean guinea pigs?' And we all kind of laughed."
The five members of the 157th were sent to several different Army bases in the U.S. to receive basic combat training. They left for Kuwait in February 2004, where they had trained in convoy procedures for about 45 days. They went through a six-day field training exercise designed to simulate battle conditions, followed by a six-hour assessment that tested them on different combat scenarios. The unit excelled, and on April 1 they arrived at Camp Anaconda, near Baghdad. There, his fellow airmen say, David began to change.
Guard officials cannot comment on the specifics of the missions the unit carried out in Iraq. The 157th handled security operations for truck convoys, which meant members were charged with manning heavy artillery weapons to protect the trucks. Trained to support refueling missions, the members of the 157th found themselves in the heart of the war, often under fire and inconstant in danger.
Maj. Chris Hurley, operations officer for the 157th and David's supervisor, was not in Iraq but kept in close contact with the unit. He said the environment is unpredictable and unimaginably harsh, especially for those involved in convoy operations. Hurley said 'the Iraqis would actually send children out to blow up truck convoys, so when children were seen in the road, the soldiers were told to actually keep going and run right over them," Hurley's said, "because if they stopped for the children, as would be the norm, there was a possibility that these children could be armed or wired with explosives." It was the first time the state's Air Guard members, who tend to specialize in defense tactics, had done anything like it, he said.
"They're literally the last people you'd expect to be on the other end of a spear," Hurley said. "I do support the fact that we're over there helping our fellow service units. But in their case, I don't think the training was adequate. I think it was a rush job. These guys weren't prepared for what they saw." David's convoy was attacked at least once, early in his deployment, when a bomb exploded under the truck in front of him. He was not injured. The unit traveled all over Iraq and carried out more than 100 missions. The work was grueling, the living conditions were 130-degree heat, power outages, mice and sand fleas adding to the stress.
David's unit was also put into an unfamiliar Army structure at Camp Anaconda. They lived in crowded tents with members of a truck company. David was known for being very organized and struggled with the way they had to live out of their bags and scramble for supplies. It was noted by the airmen who served with him in Iraq that they were deeply concerned as the months passed, and that they feared for David's well-being during that time. He became isolated and stopped going to meals and lost weight. His friends had to drag him to the dining tent. He spent the rest of his free time lying on his cot, staring at the ceiling and not speaking. His fellow airmen said the only time he seemed normal was when he was out on missions. Soldiers who had known David for years said he was not the man they once knew.
Staff Sgt. Moisan, a good friend of his said and the others had assumed that because of David's extensive military experience, he would be the group's unofficial leader. Instead, they got to Iraq and ended up taking care of him. He said he thought David might have been extremely ashamed of this, because he knew everyone was looking up to him and that David was afraid that his anxieties and going back and forth to the doctors might jeopardize his position with the Air Force and that he may end up being discharged because of it.
Master Sgt. Phil Cote decided David needed help and started taking him to a psychiatrist, who put him on several different medications. Despite working alongside Army soldiers, David was evaluated by an Air Force doctor. Maj. Hurley now believes an Army doctor used to dealing with ground troops, might have been better equipped to identify symptoms of post-traumatic stress. Hurley kept in touch with Sharon Guindon during this time. She was increasingly concerned toward the end of David's deployment and wanted him home.
In August 2004, David and 3 fellow airmen were headed home (MSgt Cote remained to train their replacements). On 30 hours of plane travel to get back to New Hampshire, colleagues noticed that he seemed to relax and even cheer up. It was like the old David was back. Reports say he was talking very positive, talking about things he had to do when he got back and seemed generally good natured, knowing that he was going home.
When members of the Army Guard return from tours of duty, they report to an Army base for a few days of debriefing before they go home. They get medical screenings, do paperwork and attend workshops educating them on the difficulties they can expect in adjusting to being back. This is done to lessen the sometimes brutal impact of re-entry into normal life and to help soldiers prepare for the shock of going from a desert filled with explosions to sitting at a kitchen table with their children. "...in our modern world, you can be in combat one day, seeing little kids get shot in front of you," Maj. Hurley said, "then 24 hours later be back at home, as David was, and your wife goes to work and you're sitting alone in the house."
The re-entry programs that send soldiers to Army bases post-deployment were developed for Army Guard members, the Air Guard did not have such a program then. The leaders of the New Hampshire Air Guard, knew that the 157th's experiences were not typical. Early on in the unit's deployment, one of the five airmen from the 157th briefly returned to the United States because a relative was ill. While he was back, his conversations with Nadeau and others made it clear that the members of the 157th might need a lot of support when they returned.
The New Hampshire Air Guard worked with the Veterans Affairs hospital in Manchester, developed a re-entry program for the 157th. Members of the unit would receive counseling sessions in the days after they landed, and they organized meetings to give the families guidance on what to expect. The program was put into place by the time the 157th returned.
But instead of reporting to a base after leaving Iraq, the Air Force sent David and the others straight to New Hampshire. Their plane was scheduled to arrive on Aug. 18, with the 157th's arrangement for the airmen to attend counseling the next day. But the plane arrived a day early, and the unit's leaders sent them home with orders to report back in a day for evaluations and counseling.
Nadeau remembers feeling relieved when he saw David at the welcome-back ceremony. He was smiling and seemed untroubled. "I looked Dave in the eye, because I knew he had had some problems over there," Nadeau said. "And I said, 'Are you okay?' He said, 'Chief, I'm home now. So I'm okay.' It was like that was the medicine he needed."
The next morning, David urged his wife to go to work, telling her he felt fine, but that he was tired, jet-lagged and just wanted the house to be quiet so he could sleep. She left reluctantly. Tragically she returned home to find David. When news reached the New Hampshire Guard leaders, they quickly decided to bring MSgt. Cote home from Iraq early. They contacted David's fellow airmen and brought them in for counseling. They were devastated, especially Cote who was in tears.
David's death launched a huge wave of second-guessing and deeply shook the Guard's leaders, in part because they had considered themselves ready to handle the aftermath of the unit's deployment. Maj. Hurley said, "I was the one who said, 'Why don't you just go home?' "If there was anyone in the chain that screwed up, it perhaps falls on me. I think about that day all the time, and I feel so terrible. I think, if he'd only come in on time and not a day earlier. But I didn't see it in him. I saw nothing that made me think twice about letting them go. I think what really shocked us was how it happened. I believed we'd refined our process to the maximum extent."
Immediately after David's death, the Air Force elected to keep the Air National Guard out of the next Army rotation until the training for such deployments could be further developed. Nadeau said the suicide forced him and other leaders to consider whether they had failed David at any step. When the members of the 157th got called up, the Army needed help, fast. The soldiers who went were participants in a deployment that was still a work in progress. Since then, the Air Force has altered its training for airmen who are deployed to Iraq so they are better prepared. A convoy school instructing all airmen in the new strategies of war has been developed at an Air Force base in Texas, airmen are given more training with the equipment they could end up using. "The Air Force is now changing its training policies to emphasize to soldiers that they may someday have to be in combat," Nadeau said. "But they didn't get that. They'd fired an M-16, and they did the obstacle course. But as far as getting the mind ready for combat, very little was done."
Maj. Hurley believes David left Iraq with no plan to end his life. He believes his joy at returning was as genuine as the excitement with which he spoke about the rest of his summer, his eagerness to take out his boat and go walking with his dogs. He believes David simply crashed, alone, perhaps when he least expected it. "The final act might have been suicide," Hurley said, "but he was killed by the war."
His awards and decorations include the Army Combat patch. *If you have additional information on David's awards, please contact us.
David is survived by his wife Sharon Guindon and daughter Ashley Guindon, and his extended family.
