Family, Friends Try to Make Sense of Marine’s Suicide : Military: Sgt. Richard Stumpf’s death is being examined by the Pentagon. But for those closest to him, the reason why he killed himself baffles.

Carla Stumpf sat on her back porch, feeling the first jolts of labor pain. It was then that she sensed her husband’s presence nearby, as if he had returned to tell her how he had died.

“I was a man and I was a soldier and I was fighting a war within myself,” he seemed to say. “I died in combat.”

When he died, Sgt. Richard Edward Stumpf Jr. was 24, six years a member of the U.S. Marine Corps, a veteran of the Persian Gulf War and for two years a drill instructor.

He was brash and he sought adventure and he loved derring-do. He liked to swim and to cook and, oh, how he loved to drink beer. He was a happy torrent of a man, broad-shouldered and blue-eyed, with a booming voice that could shake a barracks full of Marines.

But Stumpf had a darker side. He pushed himself unforgivingly. He pulled long hours on the drill field. He was tortured by even the smallest mistake. He feared he could not handle the added responsibility of a child; he anguished over separation from his family and betrayal by the Marine Corps.

And so crumbled the once rock-hard Marine that was Rich Stumpf.

One morning in October, he walked into the Indoor Combat Training Pool at Parris Island, S.C. He climbed atop the diving board. He tossed his hat into the water and he placed an M-16 service rifle under his chin. Before 200 Marines and Marine recruits, in his Marine uniform on a Marine base, Stumpf pulled the trigger.

Who was he?

For the nation’s military, he became another statistic, another line on a press release about the high number of suicides among service members, particularly Marines. His death and others are being examined by Pentagon officials hoping to determine whether, by improving psychological and other support programs, future suicides might be prevented.

“Each one is investigated very, very carefully to get a sense of what may have caused it,” said Undersecretary of Defense Edwin Dorn.

Making sense of Stumpf’s journey to life’s end will not be easy. He was complex and sometimes rash, often inexplicable in his sudden turns of emotion. Even after his body was lowered into a grave in the national cemetery in Bourne, Mass., his death baffles.

To some, he died making an angry statement against the Marine Corps, a sort of “Here’s to you for driving me to do this.”

“He was obviously striking back at something he loved the most,” said Carl Peterson, a former career Marine and a municipal judge who visited Stumpf on his last weekend, in a jail drunk tank.

But Depot Sgt. Maj. James E. Moore, who supervised Stumpf’s drill instruction, said it was impossible to “really, really tell who he was angry at.” He thinks of Stumpf and he asks: “My God, what could cause a person to do that, and to do it in that way?”

Lt. Cmdr. Charles Quarles, a chaplain who counsels troubled Marines, tried to draw Stumpf out of his depression in his last month at Parris Island.

“It’s very possible he was mad at the Marines,” Quarles said. “It’s extremely possible. It makes sense. It’s logical. But is it the truth? Who knows? I think he was a man in a lot of pain for a lot of reasons.”

In Arcadia, where his widow and 2-month-old son now must build their life without him, they will always suspect that the military, combined with Stumpf’s own desire to be the best Marine, sent him to an early death.

“If I’m angry at the Marines, it’s only because they put the weapon in his hand,” Carla Stumpf said. “They could have prevented that. But ultimately, the decision to do what he did was his.”

She met him in high school. He had moved to Florida with his family from Connecticut. He loved to swim and hunt seashells. He performed magic tricks. He liked movies with plenty of action and food with lots of garlic. He learned to cook and to bake bread. He had a Doberman pinscher named Drock, said his father, Richard E. Stumpf Sr.

He and Carla began dating at age 15 in Sarasota, Fla. Like all things, he threw himself completely into their courtship. He painted “I Love Carla” across his bedroom wall.

He also discovered beer, fast cars and a knack for ditching school. He graduated from Riverview High only after repeating his senior year. “He was looking for the biggest challenge he could find,” Carla said. “Some guidance and a place to fit in. He wanted to go where he could find some adventure. And once he joined the Marines, he knew that was his destiny.”

Enlisting in 1988, he was sent to boot camp at Parris Island. He excelled at swimming. To toughen him up, they made him march on all fours. He loved to push his body, the building of a man, the long hours, the long march and always the challenge. He graduated 13th in a class of 85 recruits. Seemingly overnight, the kid was a Marine.

A year later, he married Carla in a ceremony at the Ringling Circus Museum in Sarasota, the bridegroom resplendent in his dress uniform. But his dedication, even then, tilted more to the Corps. He had her name and a rose tattooed on his left arm, but on his right shoulder in big letters was “USMC.” And below that, the Marine Corps symbol: the eagle, globe and anchor. Inside Carla’s wedding ring, he inscribed the Marine Corps motto: Semper fidelis.

It was always the Marines, and Carla would often feel second in her husband’s devotion. It was a situation she would have to cope with during their long periods apart.

Just a year into their marriage, he volunteered for the Persian Gulf War. For eight months, he served as a squad leader in the Marine infantry but still found time to play the mischievous boy in a man’s war. He refused to take drugs to ward off chemical illnesses. Once his squad ran off with an Iraqi ambulance. He passed out M&Ms; sent from home.

“He was one of the first to go and one of the last to come back,” Carla remembered. “If he hadn’t served there, he would have been even more tortured. He was not afraid to die. Through my entire life with him, he made that clear to me and everyone. He was going to die with that uniform on.”

He came home not a casualty, but a hero nonetheless. At his parents’ First Methodist Church in Meriden, Conn., he stood up in uniform to the applause of the congregation. He gave a brief speech about duty and honor, and vowed that as long as there were Saddam Husseins in this world, he would always be a Marine. He cried that day, a crack in his tough Marine armor.

“He wanted to be the picture-perfect Marine,” said his mother, Mary Stumpf. “He strove. He was never content with any particular rank. He had to just go for the next and the next and the next.”

He and Carla would separate again. He went to the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo, Cuba, for three months to help process Cuban and Haitian refugees. When he returned, they bought a house at Camp Lejeune, N.C. Then came another separation when he left Carla at home for a choice assignment as a drill instructor 100 miles down the coast at Parris Island.

To make it through training school, he learned 75 pages of drill movement, proved himself again on the field, underwent a dozen uniform inspections and memorized countless Marine Corps rules and regulations. But the rewards could be high. Two years as a drill instructor would mean a shot at meritorious promotions and special consideration for assignments. He would be gone all day and many nights, working, training, drilling boys into men. He would love it.

“The only thing I want to do is better the Marine Corps,” he told the Navy Times in an interview last February. “I wanted to come down here and put 110% into these kids so that when they get out in the streets, they’ll have a role model to look back at and be able to keep that esprit de corps flowing through their veins.”

And drill school wasn’t that tough, anyway. “I’m not a scholar or anything,” he said. “I had my few beers during the week and did what I had to do.”

For 20 months he was alone with his Marines. In July, his relatives attended a recruit graduation. One recruit, Pfc. Joseph L. Gillick, suddenly broke down in tears in front of his drill instructor. Asked later why he was so moved, Gillick barked back in Marine cadence: “That man is Sgt. Richard Stumpf. He changed my life.”

Carla was pregnant by then. They decided that in September she would move to Arcadia to be with her mother, Judith Leipold, to await their first baby. Stumpf would join them on the due date.

But by the end of summer his mood began to darken. In phone conversations, he would not tell Carla why he was depressed. Instead, he rambled, once suggesting that they legally separate, several times hinting that she would have to raise the baby alone. And then he began to doubt the Marine Corps.

“He knew what the Marine Corps expected of him, and he pushed himself even further,” she said. “We were talking every day. It was all about him and his state of mind. He was constantly saying he was overwhelmed. He felt he had let himself down. He said he wanted out of Parris Island, something I never thought I’d hear from him. He called it a hellhole.”

She begged him to seek counseling, but Marines mask their emotions. He was drinking more, and, when only the happy-go-lucky Stumpf shined forth, no one suspected any problems.

“He was very fun-loving, he liked to have fun,” said Michelle Russom, a bartender at the Port Royal Pub, an after-hours spot for Parris Island Marines.

She had met him in those last weeks and never once thought he was depressed.

Others missed it too.

“On two occasions that I spoke with him, he said nothing,” Moore said.

Added Staff Sgt. Troy Stables, who once supervised Stumpf at Parris Island: “The week before, he was fine. He was laughing and joking.”

On Friday, Oct. 28, he slammed his yellow Volkswagen Beetle into another car in Beaufort, S.C., near the base. He was arrested for driving while intoxicated. The accident occurred at 10:30 p.m., and he told police he had had “eight beers before leaving Parris Island at 4:30 and had been drinking ever since.”

At the police station, he couldn’t understand the simplest directions for taking a Breathalyzer test. Finally, he tested at a blood-alcohol level of .22, more than double the legal limit. He was jailed overnight. Judge Peterson visited him the next day to set bail. He saw a Marine at the end of his career.

A retired Marine himself, Peterson knew all too well how a drunk driving charge could end a career in today’s military. Looking at Stumpf in his cell, in his orange jail jumper rather than his shiny Marine uniform, he saw “a guy who was a sergeant, who had been on the selection list for staff sergeant, who probably had once been on the right track.”

Stumpf called Carla shortly before he was released on Saturday, Oct. 29. He was paranoid about his Marine superiors. “They’re watching me,” he told her. “They’re waiting for me to screw up. They’re trying to get me.”

Carla was frantic. “I think by that point his mind was made up. There were tears in his voice.” Three times she called the base and urged his commanders to immediately send him to counseling. She said they did not understand him, that he would not be able to cope with the arrest, that he needed help now.

She said she was told that counseling would begin first thing Monday, Oct. 31.

But on Monday morning, Stumpf went instead to the base armory and checked out the M-16 rifle. Then to the pool and the diving board. One shot under the chin, and his body toppled into the water. None of the startled Marines realized at first what had happened. Then the water turned red.

Stables prepared him for burial in his dress blue uniform and white gloves. He shined Stumpf’s shoes and brass, and he escorted the coffin to the cemetery in Massachusetts.

Carla never saw her husband’s body. She had gone into labor, and, on the day of the funeral, at the moment taps were sounded over the grave, she gave birth to their son, Asher Richard Edward Stumpf.

Asher, from the Bible, means “happy one.”