Air Force Reserve Capt. Jamie Brunette seldom spoke about her deployment to Afghanistan, recalled her roommate, Heather Milner.
One exception was when Milner told Brunette that she was thinking about joining the Air Force.
"She said: 'Don't enlist; Afghanistan was the worst experience of my life;'" Milner Brunette said in a Feb. 24 interview.
Friends and family suspect something happened to Brunette in Afghanistan that which may have contributed to her taking her own life. Tampa, Florida, police found Brunette, 30, dead in her car on Feb. 9. While the medical examiner is still determining the cause of death, preliminary indications are that it was a suicide, a police spokeswoman told Air Force Times.
The Tampa Tribune first reported about the many questions surrounding Brunette's death on Feb. 22.
Brunette confided in Milner that she was seeking treatment from the Department of Veterans Affairs Department for pPost-tTraumatic sStress, but she did not say why, Milner told Air Force Times.
On rare occasions, such as Memorial Day, Brunette would bring up her time in Afghanistan, Milner said. It was an emotional topic for her.
"I knew that obviously it was sitting in the back of her head," Milner said. "I just didn't know any details," Milner said. "I knew it bothered her, obviously, because it would come out at times."
Brunette's job in Afghanistan was as a contracting officer. From their occasional conversations, Milner believes that Brunette's duties included transferring money to Afghans for local projects, and that could be a matter of life and death if the money was late.
Once, Brunette was on the phone with an Afghan man with whom she had dealt for months, and it was clear someone else was with him.
"Obviously they were talking in their language that she should couldn't understand, but it sounded like, basically, the person on the phone was being pressured to get to the money, so he was telling Jamie, 'I need it, I need it, I need it,'" Milner recalled. "It sounded like he had a gun to his head, and then she heard a shot and then he just wasn't there anymore."
Brunette also told Milner about having to run to the indirect fire bunkers during a mortar attacks.
"She had a gun on her at all times and it was just like death was a normal thing, like it happened every day," Milner said.
Air Force Reserve Capt. Jamie Brunette, who was found dead on Feb. 9 of an apparent suicide. Her friends and family believe her deployment to Afghanistan may have contributed to her death.
Photo Credit: Courtesy Jackie Leverich
Brunette deployed to Afghanistan from August 2012 to March 2013, her former squadron commander Lt. Col. George Scheers said at her Feb. 15 memorial service at MacDill Air Force Base, Florida. She worked out of Camp Phoenix in Kabul and Camp Stone in Herat.
She began her career as an enlisted aAirmaen and then went on to graduate from Officer Training School to become a "phenomenal officer," Scheers said at the service.
"Her quest for excellence and drive for success extended far beyond the walls of the squadron," Scheers said. "She earned a perfect score on every fitness test in her Air Force career and won first place in over 20 5K runs on base. She embraced her passion for fitness and she led the contract effort to repair our running trail along Bayshore Boulevard. She also oversaw the renovation of the Surf's Edge Club just a few blocks east. Jamie accepted every challenge with a smile; I never heard her complain. I'm proud to have been her commander and share in her success."
But after she returned from Afghanistan, Brunette became distant from her family, said her older sister Jackie Leverich.
Her family was shocked when Brunette left the active-duty Air Force because she loved the service, said Leverich, a commander in the Coast Guard.
"She didn't want to deploy again," Leverich said in a Feb. 23 interview. "We tried asking her, 'Why are you getting out?' And she said, 'I can't deploy again; I don't want to deploy again.' And then when we tried to ask her about experience over there, she wouldn't tell us anything."
Brunette never told Leverich about her experiences under fire, so Leverich assumed her sister had not seen much combat as a contracting officer. That's why Leverich suspected that her sister did not want to talk about Afghanistan because she had been sexually assaulted while deployed.
"She had talked about that she had struggled over there and that she had an experience that she didn't want to talk about, and so from talking to her friends this week, my gut feeling says that something really bad happened and I'm guessing that that's what it was," Leverich said.
The Office of Special Investigations does not have any record of Brunette making allegations that she was sexually assaulted, said OSI spokeswoman Linda Card.
This did not come as a surprise to Leverich.
"I know OSI doesn't have a record of it because I'm pretty sure she never reported it," Leverich said. "I said I suspected something like that happened because of things she had told her friends after she came back. She never confided in me but I had a crash introduction to hundreds of people who knew her last week."
Shortly before her death, Brunette broke up with her boyfriend, but Leverich does not think that was the event that pushed her sister over the edge.
"I think there were a lot of things, so I don't think we can pinpoint it on any one specific thing," Leverich. "I think that was probably a sign though along with pushing people out."
Brunette took great pride in her military service, her sister said. She loved life and would always cheer you up if you had a bad day.
"We never in a million years would have thought it would have ended like this," Leverich said. "If Jamie's death can help with anything it is: There is help available. People need to know that they can go ask for it and they're not alone when they get back.
"For whatever reason, for whatever happened to her, I think that she felt alone and that she couldn't ask for help. I don't know if she was getting it or not from the VA. It sounds like maybe she had started down that road. I wish we could have done something to help her. We didn't see it because she was so good at hiding it."
