Erin Trieb for NBC News

Monica Velez, pictured in Austin, Texas, had two brothers, Jose "Freddy" Velez and Andrew Velez, both of whom served the U.S. military and both are now dead -- Freddy was killed in action in Iraq, and Andrew took his own life.

Before Army Spc. Andrew Velez left Texas for the final time, he asked his fragile sister to write him a promise – a vow he could carry with him to Afghanistan.

Monica Velez knew she owed him that much. In the horrid weeks after each had lost their beloved brother, Freddy Velez, to enemy fire in Iraq, Monica tried to end her life with pills and alcohol. Now, she put pen to paper: “I will not hurt myself. I will not do anything crazy. I know that Andrew loves me. I know that Freddy loved me.” Andrew folded her note and slipped it into his pocket.

“Don’t break your word to me,” he told her before heading back to war.

Seven months later, Andrew, 22, sat alone in an Army office at a base in Afghanistan. He put a gun to his head and committed suicide. Back in Texas, word reached Monica Velez who, once again, found herself in a dangerous place. Only now, she was alone. Days of alcohol and anti-depressants. Nights of dark thoughts: “It would just be better if I was gone.”

'The storm' is coming
As the U.S. military suicide rate soared to record heights during 2012, the families of service members say they, too, are witnessing a silent wave of self-harm occurring within their civilian ranks: spouses, children, parents and siblings. 

Some suicides and suicide attempts — like those that ravaged the Velez family — are spurred by combat losses.

Others may be triggered by exhaustion and despair: As some veterans return debilitated by anxiety, many spouses realize it's now up to them — and will be for decades — to hold the family together.

Specific figures are lacking as no agency tracks civilian suicides within military families.

However, Kristina Kaufmann, a long-time Army wife, knows of three other Army wives, all friends, who took their lives in recent years.

Courtesy Kristina Kaufmann

"When you know that you are the anchor — and if you go down, the family's going down — the problem is that you can only do that for so long," said Kristina Kaufmann.

One was Faye Vick, described by Kaufmann as “the perfect picture of an Army wife — pretty, nice, always with a smile.” Vick and her family lived around the corner from Kaufmann and near Fort Bragg, N.C. In 2006, when Kaufmann’s husband was in Afghanistan and Vick’s husband was deployed overseas, the 39-year-old mother placed herself, her infant and her 2-year-old son in a car inside a closed garage and started the engine, asphyxiating all three with carbon monoxide, according to Kaufmann and to local news reports at the time.

“And I know of too many others through the grapevine,” said Kaufmann, executive director of Code of Support, an Alexandria, Va.-based nonprofit that seeks to bridge the gap between civilians and military America.

“When you know that you are the anchor — and if you go down, the family’s going down — the problem is that you can only do that for so long,” said Kaufmann. “That population (of spouses) is at the most risk. Because the storm is going to happen when everybody comes home. That’s where we are, unfortunately, going to see an uptick in lots of negative outcomes, including suicide, including suicide among the spouses.”

On Jan. 14, Department of Defense officials acknowledged that during 2012, service members committed suicide at a record pace as more than 349 people took their own lives across the four branches. The military suicide rate is slightly lower than that of the general public. However, one active-duty member died by suicide every 25 hours last year. 

The Army sustained the heaviest branch toll at 182 suicides, which — as NBC News reported Jan. 3 — meant that soldier suicides outpaced combat deaths for the first time, according to Pentagon officials.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta informed Congress last July that American armed forces are in the grip of a suicide "epidemic." 

One of the darkest undercurrents of the glaring statistics is that one suicide in a family boosts future suicide risks for everyone else inside the home. They can be contagious, say experts like Dr. Barbara Van Dahlen, a psychologist in the Washington, D.C., area and the founder of Give an Hour, which develops networks of mental-health volunteers who respond to both acute and chronic situations.

Numerous researchers have explored the so-called contagion effect of suicides within families and “there’s no question the data supports there’s at least a doubling of risk,” among surviving family members, said Dr. Alan L. Berman, Ph.D., executive director of the American Association of Suicidology. The organization strives to better understand and prevent suicide.

“It’s understood that risk, in part, is biological," Berman said, given that disorders like depression have a genetic component. 

“But it’s also based on social modeling behavior: The suicide of a parent presents a model (for children in that family) of how to deal with problems, and that’s no less true for a spouse.”

Added Van Dahlen: "The closer that family member is to you, the greater risk you’re at. We believe, psychologically, it opens the possibility and ends a taboo."

“The thousands of service members who have killed themselves,” she added, “they leave in their wake thousands of family members who are now at risk for that same kind of decision."

'I completely lost myself'
The cascade of Velez family tragedies began with pure valor.

On Nov. 13, 2004, Army Cpl. Jose “Freddy” Velez, 23, sprayed bullets at insurgent forces — covering fire to allow other U.S. soldiers time to retreat from an enemy strong point in Fallujah, Iraq. After his ammo ran dry, Freddy Velez was shot and killed. The Army awarded him the Bronze Star and Silver Star.

Courtesy Monica Velez

"There are days I'm still overwhelmed. And if I sit and think about it, I feel like I wouldn't have to live through all this pain if I just let myself go," said Monica Velez, who shared family photos of brothers Freddy and Andrew.

Andrew, then serving with another unit in Iraq, told Monica of escorting his brother’s body home to Lubbock, Texas — a job, he said, that required unzipping his brother’s body bag at every stop to re-verify Freddy’s identity.

During the trip, Andrew called his sister repeatedly while en route home and screamed into the phone for nearly two consecutive hours, “like somebody was killing him,” she said.

“There was nothing I could do,” Monica Velez recalled. “The operator kept cutting in (to request additional payment for the call) and I just said, ‘Add it to my credit card.’ He just wailed. That travel home, I think is what eventually broke him.”

Weeks later, Monica broke.

She doesn’t know how close she came to death the first time she tried to end her life. She never was told how slow her pulse became that night. She just remembers regaining consciousness at a hospital in Killeen, Texas — home to Fort Hood, where Freddy was based. She awoke with an IV plugged into her arm. A doctor handed her a list of local psychiatrists then discharged her.

Velez tried, she said, to seek help for her deepening depression but was told that her health insurance would not cover counseling.

Her grief was rooted in a difficult childhood, she said, that forged "tighter than tight" emotional bonds between Velez and her two brothers, turning the siblings into a mutual support group.

“When Freddy passed away, I went through a really hard depression,” she said. “I went to the emergency room for anxiety attacks. I couldn’t breathe. But nobody knew how to deal with me so they just gave me Ativan (an anti-anxiety drug) and Hydrocodone (a pain killer).

“I started drinking heavily and taking the prescriptions. And one day, I just felt it would be better off if I wasn’t around and decided to take all of the pills. Grief can bring you to that breaking moment.”

Soon after, in February 2005, Andrew sent his older sister (then 25) an email: “We need to be stronger. We need to protect each other.”

Though he was the youngest of the siblings, Andrew always was “the strong one,” his sister said. “But he and Freddy were inseparable.” Near the end of 2005, Andrew told his sister he was redeploying to Afghanistan because, she said, “I think he felt closer to Freddy there.”

From March through July of 2006, the two swapped calls and emails. In Afghanistan, Andrew grew increasingly despondent, she said, over the unraveling of his marriage and family in Lubbock. He had three children. But he worried, too, about his sister’s state of mind.

“We could both hear it in each other’s voices. He was scared I was going to do something. I was scared he was going to do something.”

He did. Andrew’s suicide on July 25, 2006, drove Monica, at first, into 20-hour workdays at a domestic violence shelter. She wasn’t sleeping or eating. Eventually, she was drinking again, “from the morning until I passed out,” she said. “Then, doing it again the next day.

“I completely lost myself. I resigned my job. I stopped paying my bills. I got evicted. I was prescribed anti-depressants. I noticed taking the pills and drinking got me out of the emotions. So I found myself in a dangerous place very quickly.

“Again — several trips to the ER (for overdoses). I’m not sure why I wasn’t ever held there. In my down periods, I would tell myself it would just be better off if I was gone.”

In 2008, a friend at Fort Hood, Texas, connected Velez with the Tragedy Assistance Program For Survivors (TAPS), a resource for anyone who suffers the loss of a military loved one.

“That was the first time anybody had offered to help me with the depression and the grief.” she said.

'Family units breaking down'
Kaufmann, who lost three Army-spouse friends to suicide, argues that military-family suicides should be tracked and researched by the Department of Defense to help mental-health experts begin to slow or stop the problem. She knows, however, such an accounting is not likely. 

“I get the sense that people in the military think that by including families into this kind of discussion — particularly when you’re talking about the (broader) mental-health impacts on family members — they look at that as something that will only add to the problem. Whereas, we believe that it would prove to be a solution,” Kauffman said.

“We’ve approached this very myopically. More than half of soldiers are married. Soldiers come with families. And the military has a maddening way of both dismissing families and holding them accountable at the same time. It’s frustrating for us, not only when we’re trying to get our husbands help, but also when you have the family units breaking down,” she added. 

NBC News requested to speak with officials at the newly formed Department of Defense suicide-prevention office about the issue of suicides within military families and whether tracking is needed. A DOD spokeswoman said, however, that the office is only working to address active-duty suicides. The interview request was not granted.

Van Dahlen, meanwhile, believes that asking DOD to track military families is an unreasonable expectation to place on the agency when it already is facing budget cuts.

Even if the DOD wants to — and many of my colleagues there desperately would want to devote resources to this — those resources are not going to be there,” she said. Rather than putting "the screws to DOD" and doing "even more with even less," Van Dahlen believes public-private partnerships should be encouraged "to figure out how we can (address) this together."

'Like an airborne disease'
More than eight years after Freddy’s combat death, and more than six years removed from Andrew’s suicide, Monica Velez annually runs the Marine Corps Marathon in Washington, D.C., in honor of her fallen brothers.

Matt Slocum / AP file

Monica Velez cleans her brother's name, engraved in a memorial at Fort Hood, Texas.

But, now living in Austin, she acknowledges she still struggles with what she calls, “those thoughts.”

“There are days I’m still overwhelmed. And if I sit and think about it, I feel like I wouldn’t have to live through all this pain if I just let myself go. It doesn’t just go away. But you learn how to cope. You learn better coping skills,” she said, adding she gained those tools from TAPS.

Army officers at Fort Hood have occasionally asked her, she said, for ideas to help them prevent the rising military suicide rate. She watches that tally, too.

“The numbers take my breath away. I know it can be overwhelming for the Army generals on the other end of the table trying to figure this problem out. Because it’s like an airborne disease going through the building and you’re trying to figure out how to stop it before it gets to you," she said. 

“But it’s coming at a really fast rate, and it’s inevitable.”

Related stories:
Military suicide rate set record high in 2012
The enemy within: Soldier suicides outpace combat deaths in 2012
Some wounded vets shine on 'Alive Day,' others wear black 

Courtesy of Rebecca Morrison

Ian Morrison and Rebecca Morrison, taken at Fort Hood in Texas the day he deployed to Iraq as an Army Apache helicopter pilot. He flew 70 missions in Iraq. In March this year, Ian Morrison committed suicide in Texas at age 26.

The call she placed, and the advice she received, didn’t simply allow Rebecca Morrison to survive one of her worst days. The words she heard, she said, saved her life.

Before a Fort Hood memorial service to honor her husband – an Army chopper pilot who ended his life – Morrison grabbed a scrap of paper from her nightstand, read the scrawled number, and dialed up the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors (TAPS). In that pitch-black moment, she needed answers to two desperate questions. On the other end, Kim Ruocco listened. Seven years earlier, Ruocco had lost her husband, a Marine major, to suicide.

“I can’t even breathe,” Morrison began, through sobs, from her Texas home. “How do you breathe?”

“It will just come,” Ruocco replied from the TAPS office in Arlington, Va.

“How can I ever be happy again?”

“It doesn’t get less painful,” Ruocco told her. “After time, it just gets ... less present.”

Six months later, Morrison, 25, is breathing. She’s also teaching third graders, running, riding her horse, and — Thursday — remembering Ian on what would have been his 27th birthday. She's also speaking at anti-suicide events and launching a suicide support group near Dallas — all of it, she added, because she placed that call. But with one U.S. service member committing suicide every 19 hours, it’s the breathing that Morrison mentions first when asked how TAPS helped her most.

“Once you lose someone to suicide, you are so prone to suicide yourself. I got to that point. If they hadn’t been there, I wouldn’t be here,” she said. “Every widow I’ve talked to, every family member, has felt that way. You just want to be with that person more than anything. I mean, he was my husband. They’re saving the lives of the survivors.”

The suicide crisis inside the military has, indeed, injected fresh urgency into the larger mission of TAPS, a peer-based, emotional support group for families who have lost active-duty military members overseas or at home. It also has “stretched” the nonprofit’s budget and 53-member staff, said Bonnie Carroll, who founded TAPS in 1994 after her husband, Brigadier General Tom Carroll, was killed in a plane crash.

Courtesy of Bonnie Carroll

Bonnie Carroll founded TAPS in 1994, two years after her Army husband, Tom, was killed in a plane crash. When Rebecca Morrison called TAPS last April, Bonnie answered the phone.

“We are the alumni association for those who have died in the military. There is no one else that does this,” Carroll said. “Whether it’s a motorcycle crash or a death in combat or a suicide, for the family, it’s the same knock on the door, the same folded flag.

“We’re seeing an increase in the death rate, in the casualty rate, but from the public’s perception: ‘Oh, the war is over and everybody’s home and they’re safe.’ Well, in a skewed way it almost seems like you’re safer in a deployed environment. You’re less likely to die there of a hostile attack than you are to die here.”

Some increasingly sad statistics: During the first nine months of this year, 247 Army troops — including active-duty soldiers, National Guard members and reservists, have committed suicide, according to a Department of Defense report last week. (The Army is the only military branch that issues monthly press statements on suicides). In 2012, the Army suicide rate has climbed over last year, despite myriad anti-suicide initiatives, conferences and medical studies as well as prevention promises and get-help pleas both inside and outside the branch. Meanwhile, within the Navy, Marines and Air Force, another 126 service members combined have taken their lives this year, reports ArmyTimes. 

As America transitions from a decade of war toward a hopeful peace, TAPS has rarely been busier. The organization, which staffs a 24-hour hotline, is fielding, on average, 111 calls per day, Carroll said. From November 2011 through this past September, TAPS began working with 4,138 new survivors.

In the military community, the TAPS team is considered credible, Carroll said, because each member has lived that moment.

“The traumatic death of an immediate loved one will knock you out and sometimes kill you. You really need to deal with it on a very deep and serious level,” Carroll said. “And the absolute best support — what we’re really finding with our suicide survivors — is that unless they’re talking with another mom found her son after he died by suicide, they’re just not going to talk.”

As its staff now connects, on average, with 376 new survivors per day, TAPS is feeling the urgent need “to definitely do more,” Carroll said.

But on an already-tight budget, seeking extra dollars to meet the crisis requires a delicate, high wire walk worthy of a Wallenda: A nonprofit must project fiscal stability while also demonstrating its growing obligation.

“After 9/11, why did people continue to give to the Red Cross even though it was funded in the billions? It’s because people give to organizations that are financially sound. Which is counterintuitive. You’d think they’d give to the ones that have a more desperate need for the funding,” Carroll said. “So it’s a really tough balance there. We are financially sound. We take every penny and put it toward appropriate programs. We have wonderful partners. But we are constantly searching to meet that need.”

TAPS spends $450,000 per month, Carroll said. In addition to its paid staff and the 24-hour hotline they manage, the group publishes a quarterly magazine and stages dozens of survivor events around the country, including a conference for military-suicide survivors earlier this month in San Diego.

Funding is funneled to the nonprofit from neighborhood bake sales on to large checks from corporate partners, including foundations affiliated with Prudential, New York Life and Hasbro.

“There is no membership — no fees, no dues,” Carroll said. “The cost of admission is the sacrifice of a loved one. And the care they receive is forever and always.”

TAPS further squeezes its budget by leveraging a 1,000-plus legion of volunteers — survivors who are, themselves, at least two years beyond their own loss and trained in how to support the newly bereaved. That network is the bittersweet result of the mounting losses on the home front: as more service members die after returning from war, more of their survivors are volunteering with TAPS.

“That is the holy grail of why this works. It’s a concept of: when you help another person, you continue your own healing,” Carroll said.

Courtesy of Bonnie Carroll

Bonnie and Tom Carroll. They met in Alaska in 1988 during a massive attempt to save three gray whales trapped beneath pack ice.

This is the sacred notion that inspired Carroll to build TAPS. While working for the Reagan White House, she met her Army husband, Tom, on a massive spread of pack ice in Barrow, Alaska, in 1988 amid a globally watched effort — dubbed “Operation Breakthrough” — to free three trapped gray whales. That rescue inspired the 2012 film "Big Miracle."

Tom, portrayed by Dermot Mulroney, and Bonnie, portrayed by Vinessa Shaw, later married. Their wedding — complete with a cake topped by icing-laden whale replicas — was re-enacted in the film. (Their characters had different names in the movie — a choice made by the filmmakers because “Big Miracle” is not a documentary).

“That’s Tom, that’s us. He’s that guy, and I’m that White House girl,” Carroll said.

Four years after the whale rescue, Tom Carroll died along with eight other soldiers in an Army C-12 plane crash in Alaska.

“When Tom was killed, that was my family. Now I have this extraordinary family of tens of thousands of incredible Americans who have made the ultimate sacrifice for this nation’s freedom,” Bonnie Carroll said. “We’re a family healing together."

Courtesy of Rebecca Morrison

Last weekend, Rebecca Morrison ran the Army Ten-Miler in Washington, D.C. to help raise money and awareness for TAPS - and as part of her own healing following the loss of her husband.

Now, Rebecca Morrison wants to join that family.

With a degree in counseling and the life experience of a survivor, she’s hoping to eventually work with TAPS.

In the meantime, she already has become closely aligned with the nonprofit. On Oct. 21, she ran in the Army Ten Miler — which started and finished at the Pentagon — and helped raise money for TAPS. In June, she spoke as part of a TAPS survivor panel during the annual Department of Defense/Department of Veterans Affairs Suicide Prevention Conference in Washington, D.C. And in July, Kim Ruocco of TAPS asked Morison to share her raw story for a Time magazine cover piece on military suicides titled “One A Day.”

“For me to feel better about this, I have to help other people,” Morrison said.

“Bonnie, Kim and everybody made that possible. Through speaking out, I have been able to heal.”

More content from NBCNews.com:

• Federal jury acquits cousins of gay hate crime in landmark case
• Bullet in chest doesn't stop N.Y. cop from catching suspect
• Surprise intruder: 300-pound deer breaks into Philadelphia home
• Hurricane Sandy could be a 'Nor'easter on steroids'
• Illinois hoarder ordered to get rid of hundreds of birds

Follow US news from NBCNews.com on Twitter and Facebook

Charlie Mahoney / Prime for msnbc.com

Kim Ruocco poses outside her home in Newbury, Mass., on Thursday. Ruocco is the national director of suicide education and outreach at the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors, or TAPS. Marine Maj. John Ruocco, her husband, killed himself after a deployment in Iraq in 2004.

For the family and friends of service members who died by suicide, Memorial Day can be not only a solemn day, but also a painful reminder that military suicides are not treated the same as combat deaths. 

Kim Ruocco, the national director of suicide education and outreach at Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors, or TAPS, has experienced this isolating grief firsthand. This weekend, she is bringing together about 100 suicide survivors at TAPS' annual Memorial Day weekend National Military Survivor Seminar and Good Grief Camp for Young Survivors.

"[Suicide survivors] are surrounded by people whose loved ones were killed in action," Ruocco said. "There's a real sense that their loved one's death was not an honorable death."

Ruocco's husband, Marine Corps Maj. John Ruocco, killed himself seven years ago. He was a Cobra helicopter pilot who ran 75 combat missions during a five-month deployment in Fallujah, Iraq, in 2004. He had struggled with depression in the past, particularly after a training accident in the 1990s when two Cobras collided in midair, and he lost four friends.

In February 2005, while living temporarily in a hotel room near Camp Pendleton in California, awaiting a redeployment to Iraq and considering mental health counseling, John Ruocco hanged himself. 

"He was so ashamed of being depressed and not being able to do his job," Kim Ruocco, 49, said. He was going to seek treatment, but she believes that "when he sat there and thought about what it meant to get help, how people would see you, how young Marines viewed him, how his peers viewed him ... he thought the problem was him."

Kim Ruocco, who has a master's degree in social work, provides counseling resources to suicide survivors, helps family members secure benefits and facilitates support groups. TAPS also tries to change procedures and policies that can be hurtful to suicide survivors, such as the exclusion of service members who died by suicide from state memorials and the distribution to suicide survivors of different Gold Star pins than the ones given to families when a service member dies in action.

This weekend's four-day event for survivors is expected to draw more than 2,000 participants. It will feature panels and peer support groups on dealing with grief, sessions on spirituality and meditation, and events for children.

In 2011, 301 active-duty service members died by suicide, according to the Department of Defense. More than half of those deaths occurred in the Army, where the suicide rate last year was projected at 24.1 per 100,000, outpacing the national rate adjusted for the comparison of 18.6 people per 100,000. A study released earlier this year by the U.S. Army Public Health Command found that the number of active-duty soldiers who committed suicide increased 80 percent between 2004 and 2008.

Related: Still in gear: Injuries don't stop veterans on 100-day bike trek

Though the Department of Defense has worked to de-stigmatize mental illness in recent years through various initiatives and training programs, challenges remain. On Thursday, Maj. Gen. Dana J.H. Pittard, commanding general of Fort Bliss in Texas, retracted a blog piece he posted on Jan. 19 in which he called suicide "an absolutely selfish act." 

"I am personally fed up with soldiers who are choosing to take their own lives so that others can clean up their mess," he wrote. 

Dennis R. Swanson, a public affairs officer at Fort Bliss, told msnbc.com that the post was written in an emotional moment after Pittard had attended two memorial services for soldiers who killed themselves, and then learned of a third suicide. In the 2012 fiscal year, there have been six suicides at Fort Bliss. 

In his retraction, Pittard apologized for his "hurtful statement," which he said was "not in line with the Army's guidance regarding sensitivity to suicide." 

Can WWII film hidden by Army help veterans?

"We must continue to do better each and every day, reaching out, encouraging and helping those in need," he wrote. 

Ruocco worries that Pittard's original comments, which were removed from his blog, may have done damage. "By saying those words, he is telling the troops and their families that thinking about suicide is a weakness, it's not a mental illness," she said. 

Culture of stoicism
Leslie McCaddon, 36, knows this conflict well. Her husband, Army Capt. Michael McCaddon, a doctor, killed himself in March. McCaddon, who served on a bomb squad on a deployment to Bosnia in the 1990s and was a first responder at the Oklahoma City bombing, battled severe depression for seven years and had a family history of suicide.

McCaddon said she urged him to seek help and he sporadically attended counseling sessions. But Michael, 37, was in his residency at Tripler Army Medical Center in Hawaii, and the demanding schedule made it difficult to seek intense treatment, she said. Michael also did not want to let his colleagues down or become a liability, McCaddon said. 

Watch US News videos on msnbc.com

"Personally, I have visions where mental health counseling is as standard and routine and mandatory as physical training," said McCaddon, who will attend the TAPS gathering for the first time with her three children this weekend. "All the men and women can grumble and say that’s a waste of time, but they’d still go because it’d be their place of duty. Someone like Mike, if he’d been told he had to be there, he would have gone."

McCaddon believes that the military culture of stoicism, and the stigmatization of mental illness, kept her husband from seeking help for fear of ruining his career. Many service members worry that they'll be passed over for promotions or even discharged after admitting and receiving treatment for a mental illness, Ruocco said.

'Somebody's got to talk to people'
It is the same fear that Bob Bagosy says keeps friends and colleagues of struggling service members from admitting how severe mental health issues can be. His son, Tommy, was considering in-patient mental health treatment in 2010, but repeatedly heard from fellow service members that it might hurt his career. Tommy, a 25-year-old Marine sergeant, had completed a tour in Fallujah, Iraq, from 2006 to 2007, and a second tour in Afghanistan in 2009. He sustained a traumatic brain injury during his deployment and had post-traumatic stress disorder.

When he threatened suicide to his wife, Katie, she asked Tommy's psychologist at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina to mandate in-patient treatment. Tommy was brought in to make those arrangements, but then walked out of the office, and after an encounter with the military police, shot himself to death.

Military women and suicide: Home safe but not sound

Bagosy believes that Tommy's life might have been saved had there been more candid discussion about struggles like his. "Somebody's got to talk to people," Bagosy said. "They've got to hear that just because you’re a Marine, and you survived the wars, does not mean you're not subject to having these thoughts."

Bagosy, a former Marine reservist, does his part by telling Tommy's story to groups of Marines, urging them to seek help if they need it.

He has been involved with TAPS' suicide survivor program since 2010 and will attend the gathering this weekend. "This group of people became my other family, my surrogate family. It’s an automatic bonding," he said.

Providing that support is the core of Ruocco's work, and her focus is helping survivors change their perspective on the tragedy they experienced. Their loved ones served and sacrificed, sustaining psychological and sometimes physical wounds, Ruocco tells survivors -- they just died differently.

"How they died defines it instead of how they lived," Ruocco said. "I try to get them to shift to how they lived."

Rebecca Ruiz is a reporter at msnbc.com and a 2011-2012 Rosalynn Carter Mental Health Journalism Fellow. Follow her on Twitter here.

Related stories:

• Can WW II film long hidden by the Army aid today's veterans?
• Veteran fights VA to keep PTSD diagnosis
• Video: ‘Got Your Six’ campaign takes up veteran issues
• Son defies odds to walk into returning soldier's arms
• Facebook campaign remembers a fallen soldier
• Navy family starts unique deployment ritual
• Army program aims to predict soldiers' resiliency