Captain Paul Mackay Print Page 
On the second-last day of 2013, a stranger arrived in Saranac Lake, a 5400-person mountain town 112km shy of the Canadian border. Set amid the patchwork of forest preserves and villages, Saranac Lake is the “Capital of the Adirondacks”, a one-time best small town of New York, and the place where I’m from.
He was a 31-year-old infantry captain in the Australian Army who had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder after returning from Afghanistan two years before. He arrived on the one bus that comes each day: an Adirondack Trailways coach that chugs slowly uphill from Albany.
To get to Albany, he’d travelled more than 17,000km. He was good looking – wholesome and tidy, with intelligent eyes. He’d been a battle captain in Afghanistan’s Oruzgan province, near Kandahar, working as part of Mentoring Task Force 3 with about 700 other Townsville soldiers. But he had a medical review coming up and, his family would later tell the police, he feared he might be discharged.
On New Year’s Eve, he bought a shovel and a blanket at the shopping plaza and set off on foot towards Lake Placid.
The railway tracks cut through a marshy area, continued through the few houses that make up the hamlet of Ray Brook and past the gates of the jail. At noon, two guards on their lunch break saw a man in winter gear walking steadily east. Just beyond the prison was the trail to Scarface Mountain. From the trailhead to the summit, it’s a 5.6km climb that takes about two hours in summer. In late December it would have been slower, the route covered by snow, crisscrossed with animal trails and slick with ice. At some point, the man walked off the trail and into the unmarked woods.
The snow came as predicted. Three days later, the news would hit the town paper: A young Australian, Paul McKay, had disappeared in the North Country, last seen in Saranac Lake.
Paul had been missing for five days when, on January 5, 2014, the Saranac Lake police briefed rangers on the case. Ranger Scott van Laer set the terms of the search. He walked out to his backyard, up into the woods, and towards a big ice floe. “When I started out that day I didn’t believe I was going to find him. I thought there was no chance,” he recalls. At first he thought he’d come upon an illegal hunting camp.
Paul’s body was next to a boulder, hands in his pockets, beside a trench. His things were tucked between the rocks and the shovel lay nearby.
A local coroner determined Paul’s death was a suicide due to intentional hypothermia and emaciation. Mayor Clyde Rabideau announced the news on Facebook. Within hours, the post was liked and shared thousands of times. Locals wrote to express their sorrow, to say how they’d felt that they’d somehow known Paul. Others wrote with more bitterness: “RIP Paul, another soldier let down by the system.’’ At the funeral, friends speculated over why he’d gone where he had. To his mother, it seemed Paul was on a religious quest, following a star he didn’t understand.
Since 2000, data suggests nearly three times as many active Australian soldiers and nearly five times as many veterans have committed suicide as have died in Afghanistan. But before Paul, almost none had been nationally recognised.
“He could have easily died in Australia,” said Troy Rodgers, a Townsville veterans’ assistance worker. “But if he committed suicide here, no one would ever know about it. Obviously he had a clear thought in his mind that he’s going to do it and do it in a way that will make some noise.”
John Bale, CEO and co-founder of Soldier On, agreed. Before Paul’s death there had been a near blackout on news of the growing number of soldier suicides. It wasn’t so much that Paul changed the conversation, said Bale: “It didn’t exist in conversations before this. It does now.”
Why Paul did what he did will likely remain a mystery. Perhaps his unforgiving drive and perfectionism set him up to come apart in the face of the horrors he saw in Afghanistan.
Perhaps he needed more help than he got.
Excerpt from Pacific Standard Magazine, 24 July 2016.
Location
| Address: | Lloyd Street, NMW, Gallipoli Barracks, Enoggera, 4051 |
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| State: | QLD |
| Area: | AUS |
| GPS Coordinates: | Lat: -27.424955 Long: 152.986661 Note: GPS Coordinates are approximate. |
Details
| Monument Type: | Plaque |
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| Monument Theme: | People |
| Sub-Theme: | Tragedy |
Dedication
| Actual Monument Dedication Date: | Monday 14th February, 2022 |
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