Air Force commander grapples with servicemember’s suicide

YOKOTA AIR BASE, Japan — While most people hunkered down for the night as a typhoon pounded the Tokyo area, an American airman plunged to his death from the 11th floor of a nearby hotel. Before dawn, Yokota base commander Col. Mark August received one of those calls that almost always bring a different kind of turmoil.

August learned he had lost a man — the first since he rose to command level 15 years earlier.

 

“When you get that phone call first thing in the morning — no one wants to get it, but when it happens, it triggers a very specific response, an AFI-driven response,” August told Stars and Stripes a few weeks after the death last fall.

Read the entire article here.