After Hitting Rock Bottom, an Army Veteran Went for a Run With a Plan to End His Life. Then He Heard a Familiar Military Command He Couldn’t Ignore.

Editor’s Note: This story contains a mention of suicide. If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts or self-harming behaviors, call or text 988 to get help from the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.Jeremy Hurtt woke up that winter morning in 2014, and after staring at the ceiling for a few minutes, headed out for a run, thinking it may be his last.He headed toward the spot where the run—and everything else—could end. An overpass above an interstate in the town of Benton, Arkansas, a mile from the house he had been crashing in for the past few weeks, sleeping on a cold floor, getting by on the generosity of a friend. Money had troubled Jeremy for years. He did odd jobs around town for a few bucks, but mostly was bumming $10 and $20 from friends just to get by. He was 34 years old, with nothing in the bank, no home, no car, not even a driver’s license. All these little indignities, piling up, had started to bury him.And then there were the memories, too.Since finishing a deployment in Iraq in 2008, there’d been lots of days when Jeremy felt down, depressed—and seemed different from the playful, clownish, upbeat guy his Army pals and others had come to know. “He was no longer good-time Jeremy,” one friend says. “He was withdrawn, reclusive.” But he never seriously thought about hurting himself. Until that morning when the indignities were too many, and his mind couldn’t stop wondering why he was still alive and better people weren’t.The overpass was a destination he had crossed before. On walks and runs when he was up for it. At that early-morning hour, semitrucks would be rushing below. He, on the other hand, wasn’t rushing, running at his usual 8-to-9-minute pace, which let his mind race ahead. Running was something he had done occasionally, a means to an end after his return home from Iraq, a way to stay somewhat fit. That morning, running was the means to get where he needed to go.He thought of what would happen if he decided to jump. About the driver whose vehicle would likely strike him once he landed on the road. He didn’t want to cause another person pain. He knew from his time in Iraq the pain that comes with sudden death. But even this good intention couldn’t deter him from running ahead.He gave little thought to what might happen if he didn’t jump.He neared the overpass. A short way to go. The sound of semis intensified. Just a little farther. A railing on the overpass to climb over. The poor driver. One more step.And then he heard something else. Words in his head.Charlie-Mike.If you’ve been in the military, you know Charlie-Mike. You may have heard the call, the command. Jeremy followed it often when stationed in Iraq in the mid–to-late aughts. It was a time when improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and explosively formed penetrators (EFPs) got mentioned on the nightly news as often as sports scores and tomorrow’s forecast. When American troops tried to end chaos in a country exacerbated by American miscalculation.“There’s something that happens in a run where, like, I have breakthroughs and insight.”Charlie-Mike is military code: Continue the Mission. Move forward. In the face of adversity. No matter what.There was no shortage of adversity in Iraq, which the U.S. invaded in 2003. By the time the U.S. Central Command announced the final withdrawal of troops this past September, more than 4,300 American troops had been killed. Jeremy Hurtt served there for 15 months, during the 2006–2008 surge. What he saw and heard, and those he met and those he lost, remain fresh in his mind. He and his troop—Alpha 3/61—were fired upon often; sometimes they stopped until they heard the command. Like the memories of friends who didn’t come home from their deployment, he’s never forgotten Charlie-Mike.At that moment atop the overpass, Charlie-Mike dominated his thoughts—pushing out all others. It triggered, he says now, “a moment of clarity.” Everything is a mission. “You’re not done,” he recalls thinking that morning. “You’re not done until you get to where you’re supposed to be.” To him, that meant he couldn’t stop running—or living.Jeremy ran until he was back at his friend’s house. He had a plan, one he put into action a couple of days later. And as the plan unfolded in the weeks and months that followed, the running intensified. Longer and longer distances. Not fast miles, just miles.But as much as he’s run in the years since that January morning, Jeremy has never outrun what ultimately brought him to the overpass in the first place.He knows he never will.Sandy CarsonJeremy loves to run hills, often recording 2,000 feet of elevation during a 13-miler.****Jeremy Hurtt comes from Harrison, Arkansas, a town in the Ozarks. When he was a kid, the town had maybe 9,000 residents. “It’s big,” Jeremy, now 47, says with a slight chuckle. “There’s not a town that size for 90 minutes in any direction. Growing up, my cousins called me a city boy because I was from Harrison.”In many ways, it had the comforts—and trappings—of the South. Like nearby Bull Shoals Lake, filled with smallmouth bass that made for easy fishing. Jeremy’s dad, a semipro fisherman, showed him all the tricks. Come the fall, football ruled. University of Arkansas Razorbacks, with their wishbone offense. When he wasn’t watching them on TV, Jeremy played ball himself. Even though he was barely 5 feet when he got to high school, he earned a spot as a wide receiver and safety on the school’s team. But for all the fun, at home his mom, Frances, kept priorities in order. “She was definitely one of those Bible-thumpin’ Southern Christian Baptists,” says Jeremy’s older brother, Jason. “We were raised in the church, and we always had that voice in our head, even when she wasn’t around.”After high school, Jeremy followed many of his classmates to the University of Arkansas. He liked being away from home, living in the bigger city of Fayetteville, far from his mother’s rules. He was social, made friends easily, and bonded with many over his love of the Razorbacks. He attended games, as well as the pre- and postgame tailgates. He could go out on a Saturday night, and Friday and Thursday, too. The parties and the drinking came easy for the garrulous kid from Harrison. But his grades suffered, and by the end of his freshman year, his time in college had ended. Jeremy, who friends say was one of the smartest guys they knew, was “asked not to come back” for year two.That summer, back in Harrison, he kept drinking, hanging out, working a dead-end job at a local newspaper. It was leading nowhere, and that didn’t sit well with Frances. One night he returned home to some tough talk. “My mom basically came to me,” he remembers, “and was like, ‘You’ve got a decision to make; you’re not going to sit here forever. You’re gonna figure out what you’re doing next.’” She’d already done some groundwork for him, talking with a local Army office. Jeremy followed up with a recruiter, thinking it would “get her off my back.” Instead, he was tantalized by prospects of a steady paycheck and career options following his service time. And, the recruiter told Jeremy, it was peacetime. There was no war to worry about. Jeremy enlisted right away and within days was headed to basic training.It was September 1998. Peace wouldn’t last forever.Sandy CarsonJeremy was part of the Alpha 3/61 troop during his deployment in Iraq. Not every soldier he served with returned home.****These days, Jeremy Hurtt loves to run hills. He’ll track his runs, aiming to hit 2,000 feet of elevation during a 13-miler. The effort calms him, lets him think. “The feeling of pushing yourself,” he says, “and trying to improve yourself.”Running and hillwork weren’t always his forte, though, especially in boot camp where, as a college dropout, he was learning what discipline was all about. “I never was a huge running fan,” he says, “and I hated hills. I just couldn’t stand it, you know? I’d get halfway up a hill and just want to quit.”After basic training, he was first stationed in South Korea and then assigned to a communications role in Washington, D.C. Some days he worked in the Pentagon. Life was good. He made friends with the other enlisted soldiers, who got to know Jeremy as the quick-witted guy from the Ozarks. The one who’d send his buddies off-color emails to get a chuckle or impress them by demonstrating how to download music for free. “I was always trying to make people laugh,” he says. They loved hanging out with him, especially after a cocktail or two. “He was a really smart guy, really funny, and he definitely enjoyed the world he was in,” says Dillon Cunningham, who was stationed with Jeremy at the time. He pauses a moment. “And then, you know, 9/11 happened.”Jeremy was not in the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, when a hijacked American Airlines plane crashed into the building, killing the 64 passengers on board and 125 military and civilians; he was doing fieldwork a few miles away. Amid the horrors and chaos of the events unfolding, it would take days before he could contact his mother and tell her he was OK.Until 9/11, Jeremy’s path in the Army had gone according to plan. “My idea was [not] to go anywhere near combat,” he says. But the terrorist attacks that took nearly 3,000 lives changed his mind. One of his grandfathers had served in World War II. Jason, his brother, was already stationed in Turkey with the Air Force. Jeremy no longer wanted to serve within the relatively safe confines of his communications posting, testing radios and satellite switches. In 2003, he asked to be assigned to a cavalry unit so he could prep for deployment. He was 25 years old. “It was just a feeling that this is the moment for my generation,” Jeremy says. “I wanted to be directly involved in whatever came next.”It would take three years before Sgt. Jeremy Hurtt learned what next involved—and how it would test him like no hill ever could.****Come fall in the Ozarks, the Buffalo River, where Jeremy and his friends used to raft in the summer, is still just deep enough for one last excursion. And the Arkansas Razorbacks are back on the field, offering once more a promise to their diehard fans.But in the fall of 2006, Jeremy was in Iraq and missed all that. Home was 7,000 miles away—and somehow felt even farther. On his first full night in Baghdad, a rocket struck his barrack. It didn’t explode, and no one was injured, but Jeremy now had firsthand experience of combat life. “It wasn’t like that all the time,” he says. But it was clear to him that “there are people who want me dead. They are going to try to kill me.”For much of his time, Jeremy and his troop were on security detail. They patrolled sectors in Sadr City and East Baghdad, scanning rooftops and street corners, searching for “high-value targets” to capture or kill. “There’s some combat; occasionally people shoot at you,” he says. “It’s a lot more common for them to try to blow you up.”He recalls just one of many incidents. One afternoon in 2007, Alpha 3/61 was southwest of Sadr City. They were in six armored vehicles, Jeremy with his M240 machine gun on lookout in the third Humvee. Without warning, an EFP, the most lethal form of homemade explosive used against Coalition troops during the war, tore through the backside of the lead Humvee. The warhead narrowly missed Sgt. Matt Haeffner, Jeremy’s roommate, who sustained a concussion in the blast.As Haeffner recalls, Jeremy was one of the first in his troop to check on him. “We’ll be friends forever because we shared crazy moments like that,” says Haeffner, who was awarded a Purple Heart following the EFP attack. “My wife calls it trauma bonding.”Sandy CarsonChallenge coins and memorabilia from Jeremy’s time serving in Iraq.Not all of Jeremy’s friends in Iraq made it home. Sgt. Eric Snell, a father of two, was killed during a small-arms fire in Baghdad. He was charismatic, Jeremy remembers, a former pro baseball player with the looks of a model. And there was Sgt. Alexander Fuller, who died when his Humvee struck an improvised bomb. “His wife was pregnant with their first child,” Jeremy says. Jeremy knew both Snell and Fuller from his earliest days in the Cavalry. And then there were the eight men from his troop who died in a vicious battle in Afghanistan. That was hard on Jeremy, who, by then, had finished his deployment and was back in Arkansas and a world away from the fighting.The distance added to his sense of guilt. Should he have re-upped for another tour and gone with his former troop to Afghanistan? Why did Snell and Fuller die, and not him? Why did the dumb drunk, as Jeremy thought of himself, get to live and those men did not?“I always thought it’s a trade that anybody would have made. If you could trade me for Fuller and he gets to see his daughter grow up—I think people would make that trade,” Jeremy says. “And keep Snell around for his kid; that trade would make sense.” He pauses for a second. “To me, it just always seemed like a cruel joke—those people didn’t get to experience their lives, and I was still here.”So he’d keep asking himself, “Why should I be alive when better people weren’t?”****Back in Arkansas, Jeremy didn’t forget what he saw, and what he was missing. He couldn’t find much work, but found plenty to drink. Within a year of returning home, his weight went from 170 pounds to 230. In Iraq, he ran occasionally, when the situation allowed, sweating in the desert heat. So when he got prodded by friends to enter a local weight-loss competition, he turned to running to peel the pounds away. “I was running up and down hills and in the heat and humidity of Arkansas,” he says, “so it came off pretty quickly.”Bringing order and routine to other parts of life proved more challenging. For a time, he returned to the University of Arkansas, starting fresh. He tried majoring in broadcasting but never made it to graduation. He found a variety of part-time jobs, including production work at an ESPN radio affiliate. Nothing stuck. A girlfriend came and went. Alcohol was the only constant.And the memories.Fireworks on the Fourth of July or at a football game made him edgy. He’d drive through an underpass, see trash on the side of the road, and wonder if it was concealing an IED. He’d suddenly remember Snell. “He was my favorite soldier ever, and got killed the day I went on leave,” he says, his eyes watering. He waits a moment. “That all rolled up into the guilt, everything, I felt for a lot of years afterward.”Friends and family noticed a different Jeremy from the one they knew before deployment. “I remember linking up with him a few times, catching up, and it was like a shell,” Dillon Cunningham recalls. “He was there, but there wasn’t anything solid in there. You could quickly tell he was not operating at the specs we used to expect from him.”Once they began to notice the changes, his friends and family began to worry.Twenty-two. It’s a number “that really sticks heavily in most military guys’ heads,” Jason says. For nearly a decade, 22 referred to the number of deaths by suicide among U.S. military veterans each day. Several suicide prevention organizations have 22 in their names. The number is on flags and tattoos to promote awareness. Various versions of a 22 Push-Up Challenge ask participants to do 22 daily push-ups for 22 days. Even though the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs downgraded the number of suicides to 17.7 per day in 2024, 22 remains code for those in the know.Jason worried his brother might become a statistic.As much as he’s run in the years since that January morning, Jeremy has never outrun what ultimately brought him to the overpass in the first place. He knows he never will.“The power that the brain has when you get yourself in certain situations—if you don’t have those people to talk to, you do just fall down a drain,” Jason says. “And the unfortunate thing is, so many people don’t know who to talk to. A perfect example is Jeremy; he lost his buddies. Those may have been the guys he talked to and that he felt good with. Well, they’re gone, and so he starts going down that drain.”Jason became Jeremy’s lifeline. On that morning in 2014, when Jeremy didn’t jump from the overpass, he got back to his friend’s house and called his brother, who was living outside of St. Louis, several hundred miles away. He didn’t talk about his suicidal thoughts, but asked for help finding work, getting back on track. Jason didn’t hesitate. He got Jeremy a job on his crew that worked on upgrading cell towers. He’d be on the road a lot, and the hours would be unpredictable, but the work would be steady and bring in a paycheck—and a group of coworkers to be around. And after his shifts, Jeremy could go for a run, which he often did, in the same pair of basketball sneakers he wore to work.Jeremy never sought professional counseling, but he suspects he was suffering from PTSD. Getting psychological help is not something many veterans choose to pursue, his brother says. “When you come home, and you go talk to someone that has the sheepskin on the wall,” Jason says, “they say they know how a brain works. [But] you start talking to them, and there’s a major disconnect. These people have no idea what you’re talking about.”Jeremy found a different kind of help, a different way to cope. The simple act of putting one foot in front of the other that brought clarity to his mind like nothing else. It interrupted the repetitive negative thoughts rumbling in his head. “So many troops find things to soothe their pain—if that’s gentlemen’s clubs, beer, drugs, whatever,” says Jason, who now works as a helicopter pilot for the FAA. “Jeremy was smart enough to channel that into running, and running was that savior for him.”Jeremy started paying off debts. With the technical skills acquired from his past communication job, he eventually got a job with a company doing software testing. By 2018, he had saved enough to buy a place in a wooded, secluded area back in the Ozarks. Hills were nearby. That was when his love for accumulating elevation kicked in. He entered some races—he’s run the Little Rock Marathon three times, with a PR of 4:55:58—but preferred running solo.And on those solo runs, he could finally start processing what he lived through in Iraq.****Jeremy has never mentioned his run to the overpass to Jason or Matt Haeffner or Dillon Cunningham. In fact, the only person he’s told is his wife, Stacie. They met online before his deployment to Iraq and stayed in touch for nearly a decade. In 2014, they reconnected. Stacie was living in Nashville at the time, and Jeremy was in the area working on a cell tower job. They went on a few dates, kept texting and calling when Jeremy’s job was done and he was back in Arkansas. Then, at the end of 2019, when Jeremy was living alone in his house in the woods, he texted Stacie that he wanted to be more serious. “He had been running,” she remembers, “and he was like, ‘I really think we’re supposed to give this a real shot.’ I was like, ‘OK, let’s figure this out.’” She packed up and moved to Arkansas. “We were engaged in a few months,” she says with a smile.And by 2021, they were married. Friends from around the country came to the wedding. They saw the Jeremy they remembered from before Iraq. Sort of. The night before the wedding, a group of Army friends got together in his house. The laughter was flowing, and so were the drinks. But before it got too late, Jeremy told his buddies he was headed to bed. “You can imagine military guys—we were like, ‘Oh, come on, man. You’re getting married. Screw that,’” Dillon says. “And he was like, ‘I gotta run a half marathon in the morning. I run a half marathon every Saturday.’” On the morning of his wedding, Jeremy ran, showered, and made it to the ceremony with time to spare.This past June, Stacie and Jeremy welcomed a new member to the family. Baby Josephine. She keeps Mom and Dad busy, so Jeremy has cut back on running. He might get a short one in during the workweek. Come the weekend, though, Stacie gives him the green light and lets him go long. And at an 11-minute pace, he runs his half marathon.Sandy CarsonJeremy and his wife, Stacie, recently welcomed a daughter, Josephine.“I don’t think it was trivial that I ran to that overpass,” he says, sitting in the den of their home outside of Houston, where they moved just before Josephine was born. “There’s something that happens in a run where, like, I have breakthroughs and insight. And I think that’s what happened that day. The mile I took to run to that overpass gave me just enough to be in a moment. It all kind of clicked into place.” Jeremy waits a second. He thinks back a dozen years. “I was—excuse my frankness—bullshitting away the opportunity. I had to be here, in this experience of being alive.”Just then, Josephine starts stirring. Jeremy Hurtt has to go. He has a mission to get back to.Charles Butler, a former editor at Runner's World, now teaches journalism at the University of Oregon. With Matt Long, he wrote The Long Run: A New York City Firefighter's Triumphant Comeback from Crash Victim to Elite Athlete.