BEAUFORT, S.C. — Tatiana Sowell held her youngest child as she stood amid the rows of white headstones and stately mossy oaks. Her late husband, Logan, was buried in this national cemetery nearly four years ago after taking his life and ending what his widow describes as a ruinous tenure in one of the U.S. military’s most iconic jobs: Marine drill instructor. He was 33.
Nearby, her other children spotted a coin, regarded within the armed forces as a symbol of respect, resting atop his grave. Perhaps, she thought, it was left there by someone who worked with him molding new Marines at Parris Island, just south of here.
Sowell, her gaze wistful, reflected on the times she had driven Logan to work. “It was just quiet,” she recalled. “Peaceful.”
Logan Sowell’s suicide in July 2021 is one of at least seven in the past five years involving the Marine Corps’ stable of drill instructors, according to military casualty reports obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests. In 2023, three occurred at Parris Island within less than three months.
A study completed by the Marine Corps in 2019 found that during the previous decade, 29 drill instructors either ended their lives or openly acknowledged they had contemplated doing so — an aberration the study’s authors characterized as startlingly high compared with the occurrence of suicidal ideation among Marines who had never held that job. Rates of addiction and divorce among drill instructors also were higher, researchers found.
Critics and relatives of those who died accuse the Marine Corps of fostering an environment that contributed to their deaths. They describe routine 90-hour-plus workweeks, sleep deprivation and an always-on culture that frequently caused the job’s requisite intensity to seep into their personal lives, igniting disputes with loved ones. Others detailed bouts of depression or alcohol dependency.
While the adrenaline-fueled assignment has always been high-stress, the 2016 death of 20-year-old Raheel Siddiqui, a Muslim recruit who was found by investigators to have suffered vicious abuse while at Parris Island, led the institution to sharpen its oversight of the men and women who indoctrinate newcomers. There is uncompromising accountability now, which has made the hardships long associated with being a drill instructor dangerously unbearable for some, observers say. They note, too, that the Marine Corps lacks adequate services for those who are struggling and need help, and tacitly condones a culture that stigmatizes those who seek it.
Siddiqui’s death generated acute scrutiny of the Marines’ approach to entry-level training, and the service responded with a heavy hand — prosecuting some drill instructors and making clear that all infractions, real or perceived, would be subject to a commanding general’s review with the possibility of severe disciplinary action.
“We put a drastic expectation on them to act perfect,” said a Marine officer who has supervised dozens of drill instructors. This top-down pressure can render them “terrified of their careers ending,” he explained. “It causes this stress that trickles into their home life.”
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An independent investigation conducted by the Inspector General of the Marine Corps supports that assessment. Concluded in November 2023, the inquiry found “a climate that fosters ‘surviving’ vice ‘thriving’ ” and a perception among staff that drill instructors’ welfare “is of low priority” to leadership. Investigators reported hearing from several people involved with recruit training who observed personnel “ ‘walking on eggshells,’ ‘on pins and needles,’ and generally ‘afraid for their careers.’ ”
One former drill instructor said the experience left him and his family shattered, adding, “I experienced a really, really dark side of myself.”
This account of the mental health crisis afflicting Marine Corps drill instructors is based on more than 30 interviews with service members, their families and their superiors. Several spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid about their struggles or to avoid retribution for criticizing the service.
In response to questions from The Washington Post and Military.com, the Marine Corps acknowledged that its drill instructors have “one of the most demanding roles” within the service and portrayed the findings of this investigation as part of an enduring epidemic affecting the entire Defense Department.
“Suicide rates are shaped by various factors and we as a service are constantly looking for strategies … that could have the most impact at reducing suicide in the military,” said Maj. Hector Infante, a spokesman for the Marines. He pointed to “a myriad of mental, physical, psychological, and spiritual wellness resources” available to all drill instructors, along with their families, and said that “leaders at all levels encourage them to utilize these resources.”
Infante did not address the institutional impact of Siddiqui’s death or how changes implemented as a result have affected drill instructors; nor did he comment on the circumstances surrounding the suicides addressed in this report.
The Marine Corps operates two recruit training depots, or boot camps. Most recruits who enlist west of the Mississippi River complete the 13-week program in San Diego. Those who join in the eastern United States filter through Parris Island. In the past year, the Marines have brought in more than 30,000 enlistees, most not long out of high school.
The task of turning them into warfighters falls to roughly 1,300 drill instructors, who over a three-month cycle might work 120 hours some weeks, former personnel say. In teams of three or four, they supervise platoons of 60 to 80 recruits around-the-clock, typically waking for work at 2:30 a.m. and rotating overnight responsibility. In a standard two- or three-year tour, drill instructors might do as many as nine cycles.
They are a national symbol of discipline, intimidating and seemingly indefatigable, and many who spoke with The Post and Military.com characterized the assignment as the most rewarding of their careers. But for some, the drill instructor’s imposing persona belies a far darker reality, one marred by debilitating stress, exhaustion and, in the most dire circumstances, a hopelessness difficult to overcome.
One evening in May 2021, Tatiana Sowell, then 36, recorded an angry encounter with her husband after hiding his car keys to keep him from driving drunk. Logan had been drinking more than ever, she said, recalling her fear that he might hurt her or someone else.
As their baby cries on the recording, Logan is heard yelling, his voice hoarse. “I don’t give a f---,” he says, challenging his wife to report him to a superior at the depot. “ … All I’m gonna do after that is blow my goddamned brains out.”
She never made the call. Weeks later, Logan was dead.
In recounting her husband’s downward spiral, she said he became overwhelmed by the pressure to be perfect at work and the guilt he felt being apart from their family. “That’s not the person he wanted to be,” she said.
‘Unrealistic expectations’
The Marine Corps, Infante said, invests “a great deal of effort” to ensure that drill instructors are “not only physically but also psychologically prepared for the rigors” of their assignment. He cited a screening that all prospective drill instructors do before they are cleared to attend the service’s 11-week preparatory school, where a formal psychiatric evaluation is performed. Personnel are “continuously supervised by their command leadership teams and peer group for possible warning signs … and, if issues arise, are given the opportunity to seek assistance,” he said.
While the Pentagon has worked to expand mental health services throughout the military, it has run headlong into a nationwide shortage of qualified providers. There are eight for boot camp personnel in San Diego and 15 at Parris Island, Infante said.
Former drill instructors acknowledged the screening they received before starting to work with recruits, but said that such help is needed most after the job begins — and that too often it’s difficult to obtain a timely appointment without declaring a full-blown crisis.
The job’s unspoken expectations also can have a chilling effect on any impulse to seek care, they said, describing a prevailing reluctance to be away from work — for mental health reasons or even a family event — for fear of leaving teammates shorthanded.
And then there is the sense of having an image to uphold.
Marine Corps tradition discourages drill instructors from showing emotion, other than intense acuity or anger, while around recruits. They are meant to be models of peak physical fitness — and always in character. Most recruits, in turn, revere their drill instructors, seeing them as “perfect, just immaculate, like gods or goddesses,” said one Marine who spent three years at Parris Island. But there are “a lot of unrealistic expectations” from leaders and peers alike, she added.
Another former drill instructor recalled struggling while going through a divorce, and feeling shunned and ashamed by colleagues after he vocalized that he might need help. “Nobody wanted to talk to me,” he said. “ … It’s like you’re the plague.”
By his third boot camp cycle, the slightest aggravation could trigger an eruption — and that intense anger was hard to turn off at home, he said. An unwashed dish left in the sink or a child’s candy wrapper on the floor could send him into a rage, he explained. He turned to alcohol to cope, he said, telling himself, “Let me just have a drink, just to calm myself down so that I don’t overreact when I might talk to my children.”
It was in his fifth cycle that he began to experience suicidal thoughts, he said. At the same time he sought mental health care, however, he was mistrustful of the personnel in charge of scheduling appointments and declined to disclose the extent of his distress. They told him to come back in two weeks, he said, because so many recruits were ahead of him awaiting care.
Days later, he confided in a superior, who placed a call on behalf of the drill instructor, an intervention he now considers lifesaving. That got him on a priority list for treatment, which continued regularly through the end of his assignment more than a year later, he said.
Reflecting on the experience, he said that he’s unsure what would have happened if he hadn’t gotten help, and that the process of seeking and obtaining care must be improved if the Marine Corps is serious about ensuring that those who need help can access it. If a drill instructor visits mental health services, he contends, it’s almost certainly no trivial matter. “They’ve got family stuff, serious depression,” he said. “It’s something serious.”
Former staffers at the recruit depots say the job’s unique stress can be traced in part to the fallout from Siddiqui’s death, a criminal case that exposed the propensity among some drill instructors to physically abuse recruits. Siddiqui, a Pakistani American from Michigan, died at Parris Island on March 18, 2016, after trying to escape his drill instructor by jumping 40 feet off a stairwell.
In pursuing accountability, the Marine Corps accused 15 drill instructors of violating military criminal codes. One, Gunnery Sgt. Joseph Felix, was sentenced to 10 years in prison. During his trial, former recruits testified that they were singled out by their drill instructors because of their Muslim faith, alleging instances of being hog-tied and verbally abused — and, in one case, of being ordered into a clothes dryer that instructors then turned on.
Demands for institutional change quickly followed, and the ensuing crackdown has endured. In 2019, The Post reported on a raft of additional hazing cases that resulted in drill instructors facing disciplinary action. Last year, another was sentenced to six months for mistreating subordinates.
Three suicides in three months
At Blackstone’s Cafe in downtown Beaufort, there is a memorial to Angel Acosta III, who was 25 when he died by suicide. He was the kind of person who would help a friend move furniture day or night, and check in on people going through tough times, said Alison Senna, a manager at the restaurant who hired Acosta part time after leaders at Parris Island removed him from the drill field for disciplinary reasons. “These billets … it’s a lot of stress,” Senna said.
Savannah Giesler, Acosta’s fiancée, said he was sidelined for failing to report a “fight club” among recruits. His command investigated him, demoted him and cut his pay, paralyzing him with anxiety about whether he would be able to cover his bills and provide for a baby the couple had on the way, she said.
The year before he died, local authorities responded to a domestic dispute at the couple’s apartment and notified officials at Parris Island that Acosta was struggling with alcohol, according to a copy of the Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office investigation into his death. Acosta told law enforcement then that he would get help, the report says. The investigation does not indicate whether base officials intervened after they were made aware of the situation.
By the time their baby was born in August 2023, Acosta was owed a $15,000 reenlistment bonus that, for reasons that remain unclear, hadn’t been processed, the sheriff’s investigators learned. On Sept. 19, 2023, Acosta contacted his unit to ask about the money, according to the sheriff’s report, which includes transcriptions of numerous text exchanges found on his phone.
In one, sent hours before he died, Acosta alluded to his struggles since he was removed from drill instructor duty, telling a friend: “I’m f------ close to just ending s--- man. Ever since I f----- up my career I done just hit rock bottom.”
The baby, Acosta’s only child, and was just a month old when Acosta died after a night of heavy drinking and what an account in the sheriff’s report indicates was a heated argument with Giesler.
Last fall, after The Post and Military.com made inquiries with the Marine Corps seeking clarity on the status of Acosta’s reenlistment bonus, Giesler said she received an unexpected deposit of $15,000 from the federal government.
Several former drill instructors, backed up by the Marine officers who supervise them, described similar struggles with alcohol and significant problems sleeping, even after they had completed their assignment and moved on to other jobs. There are well-established links between an extreme lack of sleep and the risk of suicide, said Matthew Nock, a Harvard psychology professor who has studied such patterns in the military.
“If you’re really stressed, and you’re not able to really address the stress, and from [lack of] sleep you’re feeling really disinhibited — that can be a problematic combination,” Nock said. “And if this is happening for an extended period of time, I can see one wanting to escape from that kind of situation, if there’s not an end in sight to it.”
The Marine Corps, Infante said, has instituted rules aimed at promoting “sustainable sleep health.” An internal memorandum obtained by The Post and Military.com indicates that in the summer of 2023, leaders at Parris Island and San Diego prohibited drill instructors from working more than 90 hours a week without a waiver from their command. It’s unclear how the policy is being enforced and whether it is benefiting personnel.
In some cases, survivors said, their loved ones entered the assignment with existing challenges that steadily worsened as they navigated the job’s unique pressures and stressors.
Katelyn Kleffman, whose husband, Courtland Bates Wind, died by suicide in July 2023, said he had a history of depression and over time came to live in fear of being kicked out of the Corps — whether for misconduct, allowing a recruit to die, or seeking time off for mental health and receiving a bad prognosis.
His challenges were compounded by the death of a recruit, 19-year-old Dalton Beals, and the attempted suicide of at least one other, Kleffman said. Initially, Beals’s death was blamed on hyperthermia arising from the arduous final test recruits must complete. A second autopsy said it was related to a preexisting heart condition. One of Bates Wind’s colleagues, Staff Sgt. Steven Smiley, was tried on charges including negligent homicide. Smiley, who had maintained his innocence, was acquitted in June 2023. Bates Wind died weeks later at the age of 27.
“People, in general, have problems in their personal lives,” Kleffman said. “But when you have the drill instructor job, it amplifies those problems because of how long you’re away from home, how tired you are.”
Kleffman has retained an attorney, Shiraz Khan, to explore the possibility of litigation against the federal government. In an interview, Khan faulted what he said is a culture that stigmatizes drill instructors who seek mental health care, effectively discouraging them from doing so. “A lot of these … families,” he added, “could have avoided the pain that they’re dealing with now.”
Khan also represents the family of Yliana Hernandez, whose parents, Leon and Raquel, described her as a rising star with all the traits of a stellar Marine. Hernandez had been meritoriously promoted and was eager for the challenge of training recruits, they said, though she soon found herself disagreeing with the way her platoon operated. She seemed particularly distraught by some of her colleagues’ view that boot camp could serve as a funnel rather than a sieve to remove poor performers, her parents recalled.
Hernandez’s parents encouraged her to ask for help amid the growing stress and exhaustion they saw in their daughter. “And she would say, ‘No, that’s not how it works. We can’t say nothing,’” her mother recalled. “ … People don’t listen.”
She served two cycles as a drill instructor before being temporarily reassigned as a recruit swim instructor, said a colleague still on active duty. The job was intended to be a break, but it isolated Hernandez from her closest co-workers amid a difficult divorce, her colleague said. Her family and friends saw a swift change in the vibrant young woman the Marine Corps itself once spotlighted in a video on resilience. “That spark,” the colleague said, “was gone.”
Hernandez knew she needed help but refused to seek mental health care on base, her parents said, because she was loath to visit a facility where recruits she had trained would see her. She worried that exhibiting such vulnerability would burst the veneer of toughness she had shown them on the drill field. Her phone calls to other providers advertised on base went unreturned, they said.
Acosta’s death on Sept. 20, 2023, may have been a breaking point. The two were friends, and she was shocked by his death, her parents said.
Hernandez was found dead in her apartment two days later. She was 25.
“She was the best of the best,” her father said, recalling his daughter’s drive to succeed. “But you still gonna have issues no matter what. And they didn’t provide the help that she needed.”
Veterans and service members experiencing a mental health emergency can call the Veterans Crisis Line, 988 and press 1. Help also is available by text, 838255, and via chat at VeteransCrisisLine.net.
About this story
This article was produced in partnership with the Washington Post.
Story editing by Zachary Fryer-Biggs, Travis Tritten, and Andrew deGrandpre. Photo editing by Max Becherer. Copy editing by Katy O’Hara, Thomas Heleba, and Martha Murdock. Design editing by Madison Walls.
