I’m not going to get this post right the first time. It’s one I have been meaning to put together
for a while, and after reading a tragic obituary this week I have finally
realized that it is time to put down a few thoughts about the veterans who
served in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and lingering injuries they continue
to suffer after their sacrifice.
More active-duty and reserve soldiers killed
themselves last year than died in combat in Afghanistan. I’ve known this for some time and have
struggled with it.
The article I found was about Dr. Peter J. N. Linnerooth
on a Time magazine blog, and the second paragraph was what caught my attention:
Few who wore the uniform in the nation’s
post-9/11 wars better understood the perverse alchemy that can change the rush
and glory of combat into a darkening cloud of anxiety, depression and
posttraumatic stress. But strikingly, all that understanding — and the
knowledge, education and firsthand experience that nurtured it — didn’t save
Linnerooth.
(There is a link to the article this quote comes from below, and the other sources I’ve drawn from today are linked there as well.)
(There is a link to the article this quote comes from below, and the other sources I’ve drawn from today are linked there as well.)
The article goes on with
quotes from friends, loved ones, and colleagues: “Pete struggled with PTSD and depression
after his deployment to Iraq,” an Army comrade says. “Pete is a good example of
how serving in combat can change someone. Pete was one of us,” he adds. “He’s
the first Army psychologist that I know who killed himself.”
Dr. Linnerooth continued to serve after his
return from the war – he studied the effects of PTSD and depression despite the
fact that he was a victim of it himself.
It played a part in the end of his first marriage, it may have guided
him in a desire to serve his fellow veterans, and possibly was part of his
drive to move on with a new wife and child in the last few years. But despite everything that he understood
about these issues, we’ve lost him too.
During my service, I was never called upon to
perform in these circumstances, although some of my contemporaries were – in Lebanon
and Grenada, which were the conflicts of the time, while others were victims of
emerging geo-political terrorism. And
from time to time, an accident during our drills might cause a serious injury
that changed a young person’s life forever.
But for the most part, even though we knew that there was a connection
to our work and that we might be called to serve, war and loss were far from
our thoughts there in Berlin.
The distance only makes my feelings about
these recent veterans more complex. So I
looked for additional commentary about Dr. Linnerooth’s suicide to try and
understand it better, finding another blog about PTSD – one written by a VA
psychiatrist, Rod Deaton, who works at the VA Medical Center in Indianapolis. His post gave me insight, and again I was
moved by his closing words:
To the family and friends and patients of Dr. Linnerooth: I am so, so saddened. I wish I could have known
him. I wish I could have enjoyed his soul. It is too much to ask a man who has willingly opened his heart
during a time of War to keep opening his heart afterwards without knowing that
someone who respects him, values him, and knows he is “OK” will, nevertheless,
be able to tolerate that he very much does not feel “OK” and will consequently
be able to sit with him, literally and metaphorically, until as much of the
toxic soul poison has been cleansed out as possible.
A final blogger, this time Roger Cohen of the
New York Times, reminds me that as Americans at home, we have not been asked to
give anything extra to support our troops and veterans during these conflicts:
We have sanitized war. It
is kept at a distance, hardly more real than a video game. … When a milestone
is reached — 2,000 dead — attention flickers up.
But otherwise the war seems far away unless you are from a
military family. Pilotless drones do ever more of the killing. The thing about
robotic warfare is you can watch Afghans get vaporized on a screen near Las
Vegas and then drive home for dinner with the kids.
To conclude the post today – I want to see Dr. Linnerooth’s
suicide, and those of so many others, as a call to action. I want to find a way to contribute to helping
these veterans and their families to cope with what they have been
through. I will find some way to make a difference
on their account, and I hope that you, reading this, will also find a way to
take some action.
Notes/sources:
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