Behavior: From Euphoria to Suicide

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After his release, Brudno avoided the public events that many psychiatrists feel are slowing the recovery of P.O.W.s; the hoopla deprives them of the quiet they need to sort things out emotionally. But nothing in Brudno's private world was quite right any more. He was painfully aware of the time he had lost. Captivity, he wrote in a letter three months ago, "was an emptiness that could never be described." As a result, he continued, "I find myself just out of a time machine. What sadness I feel in having missed so much."

He was sad, too, about the emotional troubles that his wife had developed in his absence. In prison, he had become a different person. Captivity, those close to him believe, stripped away his emotional resources until the man who came home had little strength left to face a complex world. "He lost all flexibility," Robert Brudno said. "To him, disappointment and misfortune were disaster. All the normal problems of repatriation were crises." Though Robert considers it "simplistic" to ascribe his brother's death to the antiwar movement, he does observe that "it hurt

Alan that so many Americans were against the war." Atlanta Psychiatrist Alfred Messer suggests that Brudno may also have felt isolated. "Maybe the reason he wrote his suicide note in French was to emphasize, however subtly, that people just don't understand the pain of the P.O.W."

Hoping to ease the pain, Brudno turned to a psychiatrist for help. It was not enough to prevent his death. Eight days before he killed himself, he went to Gloucester, Mass., and sat for a portrait he planned to give his wife, instructing Artist Armand Sindoni to paint him "without a smile." As he accepted payment of $100, Sindoni said that he hoped his subject would visit Gloucester again. To this Brudno replied prophetically, "I won't be back."