Nah, he went into the military at age 19 during Vietnam and claimed it kept him from ending up in the slam, actually.
He volunteered into the AF to avoid likely getting drafted into the jungle as an infantryman with a bad draft number in the lottery. Trained up as airframe mechanic... and ended up loading bombs on planes in a base in Thailand for his tour overseas. Some of the planes didn't come back. The bombings that were unannounced by Nixon and the loss of some friends in his work groups seemed to fuck him up pretty good. He struggled to ditch drug and alcohol addictions and eventually took his own life when he was in his early 50s.
I chalked up a lot of his emotional turmoil not just to the war but also to his being the youngest kid and having become an afterthought to my dad and step-mom after their respective divorces, their marriage and the related blending of our families. He was at a pretty vulnerable age, 7 or 8. Our mother died of cancer not long after the divorce, so he was returned from her parents' home to life with the still seemingly honeymooning lovebirds... and the older kids were already well off to college. So he, a slightly older bro and a couple step bros in their early teens were basically like excess baggage to the two adults charged with their upbringing. It was hard for us older kids to watch from a distance and surely harder to live through for them. At the time they sometimes seemed to have a lot of fun. Under the veneer of all that though was palpable loneliness that sometimes shone through in letters we exchanged. That particular bro always signed off with ".. but everything's ok here."
Everything was surreal there, as we all later on used to reveal and chew over together.
We have all eight of us laughed sometimes about how close we thought we all were and yet in some respects we were all like strangers spending time in the same hotel for awhile now and then. It's great that later on we did all become a lot closer. No one can take that away from any of us, nor the individual memories we all have of particular other times earlier with each other while still kids.
But to say it was ok then when it wasn't? That was how he coped with the occasional horror shows as the honeymooners' marriage went sour over time. Kids do what they have to do to stay on the planet, to extent they can manage it, including splitting off reality entirely and making up their own realities a day at a time. It can be pretty hard to get through that wall later on... from either side of it!
Scenarios like that are not uncommon, and don't have an inevitably bad outcome, but it's easy enough to see how things can go south and stay there for some of us. It's probably true that joining the AF helped my bro later on manage to stay on the planet and a free man as long as he did. He learned some transferable skills, experienced some of the upside of an orderly life, had military service and gained skills that underwrote his job searches pretty well later on, and made him a nominally attractive mate (twice), although his marriages didn't work out, which certainly did not surprise me and may not have surprised him either. He claimed to be at fault in the failure of both, and both times for being more of a loner than his other half.
Somewhere he left his ability to engage fully with people half-formed, back when he was that neglected kid. Anyway he was here with us "as long as he could be" -- as a friend of mine once helpfully put it when we were talking about the futility of dissecting the "reasons" for any suicide. When it all got to be too much, he made that call for himself and there would have been no deterring him. And yes it was a suicide via handgun.
I have tried to let all the "if only" thoughts go and just hang onto the fine parts, of which there are so many left to my memory (and little details of my house, which he helped renovate).
But it's not lost on me that give or take a few turns of fate, these two kids in Florida who may well be charged with the crimes of adults could have been my youngest brother. He just had enough of a decent run of luck for long enough to let him find a better path than this girl and boy have landed for themselves.
