Death By Suicide!
There have been many tragic stories that have come to light since we started down this road of war 16 years ago…..it is sad that so many Americans have had to die….so many have had to be repaired….and especially all those that just could not cope and took their own lives.
Below is a story by a military wife that had ro deal with the results of a husband’s suicide……
Most military families will tell you that the trajectory of their lives was drastically altered following the attacks that took place 16 years ago, on Sept. 11, 2001. It was no different for my young family. We were stationed in Enid, Okla., and my husband was a Marine Corps instructor pilot, training student pilots to fly T-37 trainer jets. We had two young boys, ages 4 and 6. Oklahoma was supposed to be our last duty station before we transitioned back to civilian life; we planned to leave the Marine Corps and move home to live near our families in Massachusetts. My husband, Maj. John Ruocco, just happened to be home that morning and we were enjoying a cup of coffee together when we noticed “breaking news” on the television. We sat in stunned silence as we watched the second plane hit the second tower. My husband took a deep breath and said, “this is going to change everything for us.” Four years later, three months after he returned from a combat tour in Iraq, my husband died by suicide.
Source: Hope, Help, Heal: Suicide Prevention and the Military | RealClearDefense
Suicide is a battle that we are not winning….all stories need to be told and heard…..maybe somewhere3 we can find a way to heal these troubled souls.
This goes hand-in-hand with that thing I keep banging away at.. mental health needs to be a priority in this country because as the population grows.. and as we continue entering conflicts that bring our soldiers home with mental trauma…. this is going to be a greater problem. Honestly, since the private sector isn’t stimulated enough to engage in a mental health program… maybe the military can begin something through treatment of their own. One can only hope.
I agree…..they have always had this problem and they just throw band-aids at it…..they need to do more….spend some bucks and find a treatment that can work….chuq
Suicide is always a hard life event to deal with, for those who are still living are left, generally, not being able to understand the ‘why’. It is, in the case of those in military families, no less devastating, even if they understand how it can be the only sane, or brave, or defiant choice to be made, after a life of observing the waste of war.
To my mind, it makes clear the only method of stopping such devastation is to work on changing those things in society that cause continual wars. No other method shows any degree of potential success I can see; as long as warriors are necessary, there will be sadness, and the waste of human lives for little or no purpose…
gigoid
Exactly! End useless wars and the problem will be lessened….chuq
Sadly, the idea of ‘ending wars’ (I left out useless, because, by my definition, they’re ALL useless, for anything humans really need… all the reasons for doing so are based upon self-interest, no matter what else may be said…), has been a lesson our species seems incapable of comprehending. They (we, I suppose) always seem to come up with a new excuse, always based on some sort of hierarchy they’ve made up, to ‘go to war’ to protect that self-interest…. I’m not sanguine about our chances of coming up with anything effective at this stage; most people can’t even explain why we have to be at war at all, because it is outside their ‘self-interest’…
Silly fucking creatures, aren’t we?
gigoid
If it were not for the profits then we would not be ass deep in these situations….but then …that’s America! chuq
Money is merely another of those ways to make up a hierarchy, with the ones with the most of it at the top, of course, even if they’re the scum of the earth morally. As long as people insist on any sort of hierarchy, conflict will ensue, for hierarchy doesn’t exist in the natural order of things…. Ah, well, silly buggers, eh?…
g
We have always been silly buggers ever since we jumped out of that first tree……chuq
If we decide to end “useless” wars who decides if a war would be useless or a grand crusade? Although… and I know you also believe this, chuq… but I will echo anyway… when truly is war ever useFUL?
As gigoid just said… we are silly fucking creatures… prisoners of who we are.
I am writing about the lessons learned from Vietnam…it is a chuckle-fest….chuq