It sounds like Mr. Deats is the kind of teacher we need more of these days. I am pursuing my degree to become a high school history teacher, with the hopes that my personal experiences in life and time in the military will positively augment my classroom and inspire the next generation. In high school, I took a stagecraft class as an elective for three years. Mr. Arduser was our teacher, and he showed us basic carpentry skills and the work that goes into building sets for theater productions. He always went above and beyond, offering guidance on how to turn our interests into a career. His dedication and passion left a lasting impression on me, and I aspire to bring that same level of commitment and enthusiasm to my future students. Although I am older than most applicants, I believe my diverse life experiences will be an asset in the classroom. My life has been driven by service to my community. I joined the US Army right out of high school in 2008, thinking I had found my forever job. Unfortunately, four years later, my career was ended by several injuries, leaving me to rediscover who I was as a person. It took some time, but when I dove back into serving the people and community around me, I began to find success. I have had the opportunity to speak to various industries about the impact they can have in helping veterans like myself find work, purpose, and a new mission in life. These experiences have reinforced my desire to contribute to society through education. I am passionate about teaching history because I believe that understanding our past is crucial for building a better future. I have a family now, and when I decided to pursue a career in education, my wife simply laughed and told me I would be the most popular history teacher at the school because of my inability to contain my excitement about the topic. This enthusiasm is something I am eager to share with my students. My goal is to create a dynamic and engaging classroom environment where history comes alive, and students feel inspired to learn and explore. By drawing on my personal experiences and passion for history, I hope to make a meaningful impact on the lives of my students, helping them develop critical thinking skills and a deeper understanding of the world around them. Thank you for considering my application. Your support will help me turn my dream of becoming a world history teacher into reality, allowing me to inspire and guide the next generation of leaders and thinkers.

Unfortunately, I understand the pain of this topic all too well. My name is Steven Le Noir and over the last 14 years, I have lost almost 15 of the men I served with in the military to suicide. The hardest one to handle was the loss of my former platoon sergeant, Sergeant First Class Christopher Curtis. He served over 20 years in the Army, was involved in the invasion of Iraq, and led multiple platoons through tours of Iraq and Afghanistan. I met him in 2009 when I joined the unit after my rotation in South Korea was over. He was the kind of man that put all of his soldiers first and kept morale high with jokes and pranks on everyone. He had already received two Purple Hearts by the time I got to the unit. When I first arrived at the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division, we were told that we were not deploying for at least two years. The unit had just rotated back from Iraq, and our Cavalry squadron had been lucky enough to have had zero casualties. The time off was supposed to allow the unit to relax, spend more time with their families, and decompress from a very high operational tempo. Less than two weeks later, we had another briefing, and the plans changed; we were headed to eastern Afghanistan in 10 months. The first time I noticed that SFC Curtis was struggling was right before we stepped off on a night patrol while we were out training. He had just given the orders to the platoon and was laughing and joking, but then I found him behind our Humvee, crying his eyes out and clearly needing some type of help. I was the gunner on his truck, and so we spent a lot of time together. Over the next few months, I started to understand a lot more of the toll that the global war on terror had been putting on men like him. Outside of the truck and in front of anyone else, he was calm, collected, and an absolute beast of a leader. In the moments he thought no one was watching, he was a tired and broken man. I did not recognize it at first, as I idolized him and wanted to have a career very similar to his. I was 19 years old when I first met him and had only been at one other unit in the Army. I had broken my back and caused nerve damage, as well as received a traumatic brain injury (but did not know it at the time), at my previous unit. On our work-up to the Afghanistan deployment, I attended the Defense Language Institute to learn a rare and regional dialect of Arabic called Dari. After I graduated from the school, our platoon had to go through a medical readiness process before the deployment. New standards had been put in place, and I was disqualified from joining my platoon on the deployment. To make it worse, I was forced to watch them leave as my world shattered around me. I was being medically retired from the Army, the only career I had ever wanted. On the day they boarded the planes to Afghanistan, SFC Curtis came and hugged me. He told me they would be okay and I would see them again on the other side. I never did. My retirement was pushed through, and I was out of the Army before they came back. No one from my platoon was killed on that deployment, luckily. However, since 2012, three members of that platoon, including SFC Curtis, have taken their own lives. He made it to retirement, and about a year after he retired, he decided to take his own life, leaving a wife and children behind. I have been angry with every one of them that have gone that route. I have learned that the anger does nothing for me except continue the hurt. Now, I reach out to everyone I can that I served with and make sure they know they are not alone. I am not perfect about it, but I also learned from SFC Curtis that sometimes we are not tougher than life. I have a wife and three children now that I cherish more than anything in this world. Unlike the men I served with that made that decision, I seek help when I need it. It can be absolutely terrifying to let my wife see me so vulnerable, but I let her know when I am truly struggling. I make sure I am always there for my family and my team, but I also lean on them from time to time. I wish SFC Curtis had leaned on us sometimes; maybe he would still be with us. I do not know if this is something that we overcome, but I do what I can to have direct conversations with my friends about it, if I think they are starting to lose the fight. This has helped some of them and it helps me as well. Thank you for letting me share his story with you and talk about the topic of Veteran suicide.