Soldiers & Suicide: A Warrior Poet’s Nightmare

This heart wrenching take on Soldiers, Veterans, and Suicide was sent into us by Brother Willie Hager and our friends at VetSpeak.

Graphics added by Major Hanafin from public domain sources.

Frankly, it is this aspect of coping, or not coping, with PTSD that concerns us at VT the most when we note that Psychiatrists and Psychologists (meaning well or not) tend to be focusing only on (1) active duty troops admitting PTSD, and (2) what it takes to prepare and send them back into combat as opposed to when they decide, or are forced, to become VETERANS.

VT Editorial Comment: I just finished reading the PTSD Comic Book – Coming Home by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon both experienced as the managing editor and editor-in-chief at Harvey and Marvel Comics with Mr. Colon having worked for Harvey, Marvel, and DC comics giving us such great comic book characters as Richie Rich, the Green Lantern, Wonder Women, Blackhawk, and the Flash. I received Coming Home: What to expect, how to deal when you return from combat from an Air Force Mental Health Clinic. Although in my opinion such effort combined with other innovative approaches to do an end run around the stigma associated with PTSD and Mental Health in general, the theme still remains the same: Troops can stay on active duty, adjust to the endless deployments, and best yet from a Pentagon standpoint be sent back into combat. I personally have a problem with doing this end run around sending Mentally Ill troops back into combat. I would not have a problem with retaining troops on active duty but making them ineligible for re-deployment to a combat zone. Major Bobby Hanafin

There is no better way to express what is missing from approaches like Full Spectrum Warrior, and more to the point the combat simulator Virtual Iraq, and comic book – Coming Home then articulate what is on the minds of Vets who question their role in the war(s) regardless if they are now Vets or still on active duty. We at VT know that both the VA and DoD thus far have done an end run around this aspect of PTSD by IGNORING those troops or Veterans who QUESTION their roles in these war(s).

How does one treat a Soldier or Veteran who questions their role in Vietnam, the Gulf War, Afghanistan, or Iraq – regardless if they are still on active duty or not, and that QUESTIONING is at core of their PTSD.

Even if that questioning of their role in questionable wars aggravates other aspects of their PTSD like those simulated in Virtual Iraq, do these Soldiers and Veterans deserve any lesser concern and treatment?

This is a question of constructive criticism that we pose to those developing and using such approaches at the Pentagon.

However, we already know the answer to this question is ‘force readiness’ trumps all other concerns, because that’s the way it is.

We once heard from a famous man, born and died before most Iraq and Afghanistan Vets were born, these words, “There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why… I dream of things that never were, and ask why not? “

Robert L. Hanafin, Major, U.S. Air Force-Retired, VT News Network

Soldiers & Suicide: A Warrior Poet’s Nightmare…

Carrying a Backpack of Sorrow: Soldiers on the Edge of Suicide

By Nadya Williams. Freelance Journalist, Veterans Advocate, Agent Orange Activist

More of our young Soldiers are now killing themselves than are being killed in our wars in the Middle East. The sad statistics are at the end of this article, but the following poem by a 24-year-old former Marine, who slashed his wrists twice after four years of duty and two tours of combat, tells it all.

You fell off the seat as the handlebars turned

sharp left, throwing your body onto

the hot coals of Ramadi pavement,

intertwining your legs within your bicycle.

Lifeless eyes looking to the sky,

your neck muscles twitched turning your head

directly towards us. Nothing escaped your

lips except for the blood in the left corner

of your mouth that briefly moistened them

until the sand and dust dried them out.

The blood trail went behind the stone wall

where your body was placed, weighed down

by your blue bicycle and we laughed.

I used to fall asleep to the pictures and now

I can’t even bear to get a glimpse.

Excerpted from “The Bicycle” by Jon Michael Turner

The military “broke me down into a not-good person, wearing a huge mask,” Turner told the audience at his poetry reading in San Francisco’s Beat Museum, in North Beach. The event – on the birthday of ‘Beatnik’ literary icon Jack Kerouac – was organized by the venerable Jack Hirschman, San Francisco’s 2006 Poet Laureate, and by the local IVAW (Iraq Veterans Against the War).

Jon read from his small, self-published book “Eat the Apple” and from several large pages of dark green hand-made paper – the product of The Combat Paper Book Project, where 125 vets, ranging from World War II through Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, shredded their uniforms to make books for their poetry. “Poetry saved my life,” Jon told us, more than once.

(Photo at right: Jack Hirschman, 2006 Poet Laureate of San Francisco, with Iraq War vet, Jon Michael Turner)

The Burlington, Vermont native was accompanied by his father and step-mother on a coast to coast series of readings from the little book whose name comes from a play on the word “core.” The flyer for the evening reading stated:

“There’s a term ‘Once a Marine, always a Marine,’” Turner says, ripping his medals off and flinging them to the ground. As the room explodes in applause he adds, “But there’s also the expression:

‘Eat the apple, f*ck the corps.

I don’t work for you no more!’”

Jon walks with a cane and was physically injured in battle, but only his poetry reveals his invisible wounds, as in these excerpts from “A Night in the Mind of Me – part 1”

The train hits you head on when you hear of another

friend whose life was just taken.

Pulling his cold lifeless body from the cooler,

unzipping the bag and seeing his forehead,

caved in like a cereal bowl from the sniper’s bullet

that touched his brain.

His skin was pale and cold.

It becomes difficult to sleep even after being

physically drained from patrols, post,

overwatches and carrying five hundred

sandbags up eighty feet of stairs after

each post cycle.

The psychiatrists still wonder why we

drink so heavy when we get home.

We need something to take us away

from the gunfire, explosions,

sand, nightmares and screams……….

I still can’t cry.

The tears build up but no weight is shed.

Anger kicks in and something else

becomes broken.

A cabinet

An empty bottle of liquor

A heart

A soul.

People still look away as we submit ourselves

to drugs and alcohol to suppress these

feelings of loneliness and sadness,

leading to self mutilation and

self destruction on the gift of a human body.

The ditch that we dug starts to cave in.

And from “A Night in the Mind of Me  –  part 2:”

Laughter pours out from the house as if nothing

were the matter, when outside in a chair, underneath

a tree, next to the chickens, I sit,

engulfed in my own sorrows……

Resting on the ground is my glass,

half filled with water but I don’t have

enough courage to pick it up and smash it against

my skull so that everyone can watch blood

pool in the pockets where my collar

bones meet my dead weighted shoulders,…

Every time I’m up, something pulls me down,

whenever I relax, something stresses me out,

every time a smile tugs on my heart, an

iron fist crushes it, and I sit outside in a chair,

underneath a tree, next to the chickens,

away from the ones that I love so

that my disease won’t infect them.

Sorrow and self-pity should be detained,

thrown into an empty bottle and given to the

ocean so that the waves can wash away the pain.

One wonders why this slightly-built, sensitive young man joined the Marines in 2004 at the age of 18 (he was sent first to Haiti at the time of the US-backed February coup that ousted the populist and democratic President Jean-Bertrand Aristide). Jon revealed that he came from a military family whose participation in every American conflict stretches back to the Revolutionary War. His father is clearly too young to have gone to Vietnam, but could have easily been in one or both of the Bushes’ wars. Jon’s big brother is also a soldier, ironically now in Haiti after the earthquake.

Of the American military, Jon now writes in ”What May Come”:

tap, tap

That’s the sound of the man at your door,

I’m sorry but you won’t see your son alive anymore,

my name is Uncle Sam and I made your boy a whore.

And, from “Just Thoughts”:

I often wonder

if this will be the rest of my life.

Schizophrenic, paranoid, anxious.

That guy that walks around the city center that

people steer their children away from.

“Mommy, who’s that man walking next

to the crazy guy?”

“Oh that’s just Uncle Sam sweetheart, he takes

the souls from young men so that

they have trouble sleeping at night”

“It takes the Courage and Strength of a Warrior to ask for Help” – we’ve all seen the ads, on billboards and busses, with the silhouette of a down-cast soldier against a back drop of the stars and stripes, and a 1-800 Help Line just for vets, provided by the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Veterans Affairs.

VETERANS TODAY EDITORIAL COMMENT: Major Hanafin noted the above poster as he sat in the Dental Clinic at the Dayton VAMC awaiting treatment. He noted that he seemed to be the only one to pay any attention to the sign.

Even the Pentagon has gotten into the act with posters, comic books, and even video simulations. But “The Surge” in self-inflicted deaths continues, with our military reporting 350 suicides of active duty personnel in 2009, compared to 340 combat deaths in Afghanistan, and 160 in Iraq during the same year – the highest active duty military suicide numbers since records began to be kept in 1980. And for every death, at least five serving personnel are hospitalized for attempting to take their life, according to the military’s own studies.

But these statistics do not include the far larger number of post-active duty veterans who kill themselves after discharge, or, like Jon Michael Turner, who make the attempt. (Vietnam veteran suicides number easily in the tens of thousands.)

A CBS study put the current suicide rate among male veterans aged 20 to 24 at four times the national average.

According to CNN, total combat deaths since 2001 (8+ years) in Afghanistan are now 1,016; since 2003 (7 years) in Iraq 4,390 – totaling 5,406 as of March 21, 2010. However the Veteran’s Administration estimates that 6,400 veterans take their own lives each year – an ever growing proportion of them from the recent Mid-East wars – with this figure widely disputed as being way too low. Multiply 6,400 by seven or eight years to compare the numbers of our young soldiers that are now killing themselves, to those being killed in our wars and occupations.

The last word belongs to Jon Michael Turner, from “Taught How To Love”:

I’m sick of carrying this pain

everywhere I go. I’m sick of being

thanked for my service. I’d rather

have society thank the people that

don’t believe in war, or thank

the people that get arrested for

an act of civil disobedience, or

thank the people that resist.

________

To buy “Eat the Apple,” contact Jon M. Turner, Seven Star Press, 4 Howard Street Suite 12, Burlington, VT 05401; E-mail: JT@greendoorstudio.net

See also: www.IVAW.org (Iraq Veterans Against the War)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nadya Williams is a free-lance journalist and a former study-tour coordinator for Global Exchange, a San Francisco-based human rights and peace non-profit.  She is an active associate member of Veterans for Peace, San Francisco chapter, and is on the national board of the New York-based Vietnam Agent Orange Relief and Responsibility Campaign.

OTHER RESOURCES OF INTEREST TO THOSE YOUNG VETS WHO QUESTION THEIR ROLE IN QUESTIONABLE WAR(S) OUR ENTIRE NATION ARE NOT COMMITTED TO:

Warrior Writers Workshops now forming: http://www.warriorwriters.org/involved.html

Student Veterans of America (SVA) now forming: http://www.studentveterans.org/pressroom/

VETERANS TODAY EDITORIAL COMMENT: Although these groups do not focus on opposition to the wars, they do allow open discussion of diverse views regardless if you are a member of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), Veterans of Modern Warfare (VMW), Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW), or Veterans for Peace (VFP)

Robert L. Hanafin

Readers are more than welcome to use the articles I’ve posted on Veterans Today, I’ve had to take a break from VT as Veterans Issues and Peace Activism Editor and staff writer due to personal medical reasons in our military family that take away too much time needed to properly express future stories or respond to readers in a timely manner.

My association with VT since its founding in 2004 has been a very rewarding experience for me.

Retired from both the Air Force and Civil Service. Went in the regular Army at 17 during Vietnam (1968), stayed in the Army Reserve to complete my eight year commitment in 1976. Served in Air Defense Artillery, and a Mechanized Infantry Division (4MID) at Fort Carson, Co. Used the GI Bill to go to college, worked full time at the VA, and non-scholarship Air Force 2-Year ROTC program for prior service military. Commissioned in the Air Force in 1977. Served as a Military Intelligence Officer from 1977 to 1994. Upon retirement I entered retail drugstore management training with Safeway Drugs Stores in California. Retail Sales Management was not my cup of tea, so I applied my former U.S. Civil Service status with the VA to get my foot in the door at the Justice Department, and later Department of the Navy retiring with disability from the Civil Service in 2000.

I’ve been with Veterans Today since the site originated. I’m now on the Editorial Board. I was also on the Editorial Board of Our Troops News Ladder another progressive leaning Veterans and Military Family news clearing house.

I remain married for over 45 years. I am both a Vietnam Era and Gulf War Veteran. I served on Okinawa and Fort Carson, Colorado during Vietnam and in the Office of the Air Force Inspector General at Norton AFB, CA during Desert Storm. I retired from the Air Force in 1994 having worked on the Air Staff and Defense Intelligence Agency at the Pentagon.