After a flawless military career that had seen him rise to the rank of captain in just 15 years, the task of leading the British Military Police’s investigative unit in Basra should have been the crowning achievement for Ken Masters, a soldier for whom, on missions from Afghanistan to Bosnia, the glass was always half full.
“The accom is good,” he told his wife Alison in a letter sent soon after he had reached his garrison in the southern Iraqi city in April last year. “It is air conditioned and we have two windows either end and a real bed and proper mattress, which makes a difference. Missing you all. Love to you and my girls. Daddy xxxooo.” This was the way he signed each of the many letters he sent from Iraq to the home they had made in Portadown, Northern Ireland.
But Capt Masters never made it back. Six months after sending that letter, he walked into his small barrack-room at the Waterloo Lines military camp and took his own life. Aged 40, he was five days away from the end of a tour that had reduced him from a high-flying officer, and prospective Major, to a broken man.http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/features/story.jsp?story=700700
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