Winston Ross wrote an eye-opening article in The Daily Beast about the human cost of America’s wars on the troops and their families:
The list of suicides, murders and other violence at this base is staggering:Back when Jonathan Gilbert was still in middle school, he attended his cousin’s graduation ceremony from the U.S. Army’s basic training, watching men in neatly pressed uniforms marching, saluting one another, and smiling.
“That was it for him,” Gilbert’s mother, Karrie Champion, tells The Daily Beast. “He knew what he wanted to do. He enlisted before he was out of high school.”
The boy had no idea what he was getting into—that he’d wind up in Iraq, driving a Stryker, watching the unit in the caravan ahead of him roll off a bridge and land upside down. Two soldiers were killed, one of them decapitated. Nineteen-year-old Jonathan helped clean up the body parts.
This event and his upcoming redeployment, Gilbert’s mom believes, is what led her son to kill himself on July 28 at the age of 21, forcing a pistol to his head and pulling the trigger after a violent struggle with a fellow soldier who apparently tried to stop him. It was the 11th “suspicious death” (the Army has yet to officially declare any of them suicides) of a soldier stationed at Joint Base Lewis-McChord this year. Assuming they’re all ruled suicides, that tops the previous record set the year before, of nine. The year before that, there were nine suicides, too.
Champion, along with a growing legion of modern-day war veterans and their families, says it’s long past time the Army took notice of a tragic, preventable epidemic—one that seems especially acute at Lewis-McChord.
The jarring incidents include one of the soldiers Carter served with: Sheldon Plummer, sentenced to 14 years in prison last August for murdering his wife and stuffing her body into a storage crate after his return from a third deployment in Iraq. Another incident involved an Iraq and Afghanistan soldier who allegedly set fire to his wife, and yet another soldier was convicted of waterboarding his own daughter because she didn’t know her ABCs. The Afghan kill team, which came to symbolize wanton military violence after a three-month killing spree perpetrated against innocent Afghan civilians, was from Lewis-McChord too.
But what Champion and Carter are focused on now are all those presumed suicides—among them, the recent death of an Army ranger whose wife says he killed himself to avoid a ninth deployment.
A statement by Ashley Joppa-Hagemann about how the war drove her husband to committed suicide, provides a clue to how to understand epidemic of PTSD and suicides: “He said the things he had seen and done, no God would have forgiven him.”
In a recent conversation with a friend who is a brilliant scholar, activist and theologian, we discussed how the PTSD afflicting many GIs is actually a sign of their humanity, and hope. When good people do evil things as part of a group, the spiritual and moral contradiction can become too great a burden to bear, especially when there is no room in their organization to question or criticize the morality of what they have done. Unfortunately, it seems that most PTSD ‘treatment’ is oriented to helping troops adjust and cope, but does not challenge the morality and legality of their mission. It is precisely in the moral conflict experienced by many of the troops with PTSD that we might help them to redeem their humanity. Prevent suicides by ending the wars and the military cult of violence.
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