Posted on 09/21/2015 7:18:06 AM PDT by huldah1776
After the sixth suicide in his old battalion, Manny Bojorquez sank onto his bed. With a half-empty bottle of Jim Beam beside him and a pistol in his hand, he began to cry.
He had gone to Afghanistan at 19 as a machine-gunner in the Marine Corps. In the 18 months since leaving the military, he had grown long hair and a bushy mustache. It was 2012. He was working part time in a store selling baseball caps and going to community college while living with his parents in the suburbs of Phoenix. He rarely mentioned the war to friends and family, and he never mentioned his nightmares.
He thought he was getting used to suicides in his old infantry unit, but the latest one had hit him like a brick: Joshua Markel, a mentor from his fire team, who had seemed unshakable. In Afghanistan, Corporal Markel volunteered for extra patrols and joked during firefights. Back home Mr. Markel appeared solid: a job with a sheriff’s office, a new truck, a wife and time to hunt deer with his father. But that week, while watching football on TV with friends, he had wordlessly gone into his room, picked up a pistol and killed himself. He was 25.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Well thanks for those hugs. I'll tell my 86 year old wife of your intent! Overseas we served together. It was an assignment to serve continuously for the duration and 6 months. I was on the younger side but some guys were there for years. After Europe we were awaiting continuing in the Pacific but good old Harry dropped the bomb to end it and come home.
I’m well...just being a mom. My son is too, for the most part..he says God, a sense of humor and staying in touch with his buddies keeps him sane. My lament isn’t so much for him, but the bureaucracy and real incompetence at the VA is shameful.
Regardless, it’s an interesting article despite coming from the NYT!
Give him a hug for me.
“The prior generations faced the same horrors as do these men and lived with it, so we have to identify what is the glaring difference.”
Prior generations had decent rules of combat .
Today these guys are under constant threat from the higher ranks for protecting themselves .
This is exactly why so many are coming home under such stress
I suspect we’re just a weaker culture these days. We’re led to believe that it’s our right to be safe and comfortable and appreciated. War is none of those things. So the contrast between the adrenalin-pumped battlefield and the cozy world of Wal-Mart and soccer games is much more pronounced. And I wonder how many troops return home wondering how in the heck all that bad stuff could have happened to them? Where do they go to get THAT answer, with God out of the picture?
I knew someone years ago who had at one time owned a successful business and had a wife and family and had even been a founder of a small church. He lost all that because he couldn’t leave alcohol alone and wound up working for every little business that would give him any kind of a job, never lasting long at any of them. He told me once that he came home to his apartment where he lived alone one day and went to the closet and picked up his twelve guage which he kept loaded, put the barrel to his head and pulled the trigger, he heard the firing pin snap on an empty chamber and threw the gun across the room by reflex as he realized what he had just done. He KNEW he had loaded the gun and there was no way he had unloaded it. Then he remembered that he had given a spare door key to a friend in case of emergency. He picked up the phone and called the guy and asked him if he had been in his apartment. He said the other fellow replied with a question, “What’s the matter, your shotgun didn’t go off?”
My older brother used to talk about someone he knew who told a story about deciding to kill himself. The man said he took a drink or two to calm his nerves while he thought about how to do it and decided to hang himself. He said he
figured that he could go into his attic, hang a noose from the ridgeboard at the peak of the roof and step off the joists onto the sheetrock ceiling which would of course shatter resulting in his death of a broken neck if he had the drop calculated correctly. By the time he thought it through he was apparently getting a little drunk and when he imagined his wife coming home and finding his body hanging down through a hole in the ceiling it struck him funny and he started laughing and he said he changed his mind and never really got to that point again.
In the one case alcohol cost the man everything except his life and that only because someone unloaded his gun, in the other it would seem that alcohol may have been the only thing that stopped him from suicide.
I have read that people are most likely to kill themselves soon after arising in the morning, I still remember a neighbor about half a mile from us who got up early one morning, stepped outside, stood next to the old house and put a shotgun to his head and pulled the trigger. I think I was twelve at the time. I have known a number of others over my seventy one years who have done something similar.
If anyone is contemplating suicide they should never do anything without talking to someone on a veteran hotline first. You never know what is around the river bend. So many times going somewhere I for the first time I turn around thinking I have gone too far but if I had just gone a little farther I would have reached my destination (my car does u-turns by itself now). For me, I had no one and no one knew. It was half my lifetime ago. Finding them is crucial.
Another thing that I found with symptoms of suicide is one friend will see one and someone else another, etc., but putting the puzzle pieces together takes communication. We lack the small town everybody knows your name community.
If anyone here knows of a vet who needs help, this is an amazing organization. They haven’t lost a vet yet: http://ptsdusa.org/camp-hope/
Good find. If you use FB you could share with other groups, especially Stop Soldier Suicide.
.......well, I “think” you and I are essentially saying the same thing.
I’m sure not saying don’t try. I just think our government has proven without a doubt that it cannot count to 3 on anything much less stop suicide in the military.
I think privately funded support of some kind is what is needed.
......excellent and most prescient thoughts! Thanks!
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