Nate Evans had three children depending on him and held down a good job running a hyperbaric chamber at a hospital.
But what he really wanted was to go to war.
In 2008, as the U.S. death toll in Iraq and Afghanistan approached 5,000, Evans became a medic in the Navy Reserve and was assigned to a Marine company.
“He wanted in the trenches,” said his wife, Catherine Evans. To her relief, he never deployed to either war.
But that did not save him. Evans, 28, killed himself last November near his home outside Salt Lake City — one of at least 524 U.S. service members who took their own lives in 2012.
His case was hardly unusual. The most recent Pentagon data show that a slight majority — 52 percent — of troops who have killed themselves while on active duty were never assigned to Afghanistan or Iraq.
The numbers, from the years 2008 to 2011, upend the popular belief that a large increase in suicides over the past decade stems from the psychological toll of combat and repeated deployments to war.
To researchers trying to unravel the causes of the rise, the statistics suggest that the mental health and life circumstances of new recruits are at least as important — and possibly more so — than the pressures of being in the military. It is clear that some enter with a predisposition to suicide and that stressors other than war are pushing them over the edge, experts said.
“A lot of the risk for suicide in the military is the stuff they bring with them,” said Dr. Murray Stein, a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Diego, who is studying suicide in the Army.
Among the unanswered questions: Did the type of people volunteering for service change after 9/11, when going to war — and dying — went from being an abstract possibility to a significant risk? One theory is that more recruits have backgrounds and psychological histories that make them prone to suicide.
“Wartime is almost certainly going to be different than peacetime,” said Ronald Kessler, a Harvard sociologist and suicide authority.
For Michael Griffin, enlisting in the Army at age 25 was a last-ditch effort to right his life. A former skinhead, he was struggling to find work, and he and his wife had separated.
“He thought the military would provide structure and allow him to support his son,” said his mother, Cherei Griffin, who now lives in Utah.
He joined at a time when the military had temporarily relaxed its entry standards because of a shortage of volunteers — a two-year period whose importance in the suicide rate remains a subject of debate.
On his application, Griffin was less than truthful. He denied having ever taken drugs. His widow, Megan Griffin, said he was a heavy drinker and had used methamphetamine around the end of high school.
He also failed to reveal that he had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, which became known to the military only in the wake of his suicide in May 2009.
Griffin had been in the Army just eight months — all of it spent in the U.S. — before he went absent without leave and shot and killed himself in Westminster, Calif., not far from where he grew up.
“He was in a hole and couldn’t get out,” said his widow, who shares a house in Lakewood with their son and her parents.
Less than 20 percent of the suicide victims in 2011 had been diagnosed with a mood disorder such as depression, according to Pentagon data. Experts say that is certainly lower than the actual rate, suggesting that mental illness often goes undetected during recruitment and then remains hidden.
Though help is available, many service members still see psychological problems as a shameful obstacle to career advancement. A 2008 study showed that they were up to four times as likely to reveal emotional troubles when their responses were anonymous.
Robert Koyle was training to be an Air Force intelligence analyst when his wife discovered a six-page document called “The End” on his home computer.
It described his frustration with what he saw as a culture of bullying in the military, his difficult childhood in Lancaster, Calif., and how his marriage had saved him. His wife, Roni Koyle, said that she urged him to seek help but that he said there was nothing to fear. Besides, he told her, seeing a psychologist would prevent him from getting the security clearance he needed.
“He felt he was finally doing something with his life and didn’t want to get kicked out,” she said.
Eventually he got the clearance, and the couple moved to Anchorage, Alaska, where Koyle worked 12-hour shifts in a windowless room eavesdropping on foreign radio signals.
He killed himself at home Dec. 3, 2011, using his own gun. He was 26.
Traditionally, the military has been healthier than the general population, physically and mentally.
Screening of recruits, fitness standards and ready access to medical care gave the armed forces an advantage. The suicide rate among active-duty military personnel was about half that of civilians with similar demographic characteristics.
But after the war in Afghanistan began in 2001, the rate began to climb.
By 2009, it had risen nearly 80 percent to 18.3 out of every 100,000 service members. In the Army, it reached 22.4 suicides per 100,000 soldiers.
The rates leveled off over the next two years as the military encouraged troops to seek psychological help and expanded its treatment options. The Pentagon has not released the 2012 rate, but the total of 352 suicides — compared with 299 in 2011 — suggests that it may be on the rise again.
In addition to those suicides, 172 reservists and National Guard members who were not on active duty took their own lives last year, according to statistics provided by the service branches. The Pentagon does not include those cases in its data.