Small Wars Journal

Suicide Note

Sat, 01/02/2016 - 6:37pm

Suicide Note

Chaveso Cook

The radio chirped and a panicked voice came over the net.  “Cold Steel 6, Cold Steel 6 this is SGT Grant down at the motorpool, Sir.”  My CO respond, “Cold Steel 6 here.”  “Sir, uh, you better get down here ASAP, Sir.  SPC Jones[i]… he, uh, he just freakin’ shot himself in the chest and we’re out here trying to revive him. We just pulled him from behind a barricade in his shop… how copy, over?” I heard the CO’s chair abruptly thump the back wall of his office as it rolled away when he jumped upright. He bolted out of the door.  

It was two days before Christmas in 2006 and I was a battery executive officer in Iraq.  We were nine months into our deployment.  Conducting a Counter-Rocket, Artillery and Mortar mission (C-RAM), not only had we not lost anyone during our deployment but we had also saved many lives on and around our base.  It was supposed to be an easy deployment.

Jones was one of our commo guys.  A puzzling fellow, he kept to himself most of the time.  He would take any challenger on a chessboard and liked talking about astrology.  It was his first deployment.  He just made Specialist before our trip to Iraq and was only 21. We never really had any trouble with him outside of what we considered ‘distractors’; lack of? personal hygiene, oversleeping and a penchant for lateness.  That morning Jones was late again. 

His NCO had grown tired of Jones’ tardiness; he had a stack of counseling statements, had run through a number of corrective training measures and felt it was time to step up the punishment.  We woke him up, brought him in, and counseled him that morning.  We included a plan of action – a summarized Article 15.  Jones was very distraught and stormed out.  He went to his commo office in our motorpool across the base, penned a suicide note via email, barricaded the door, loaded his issued 9mm, turned it toward his heart and squeezed the trigger.  The nearby mechanics heard a shot followed by the hollow clang of an empty shell and the metallic thud of his weapon hitting the concrete.  Our mechanics acted swiftly, busting the door down and dragging his limp body out.  The first-aid they provided did not help.  

The face of Army suicide looks very much like SPC Jones.  Those who attempt it are generally junior enlisted soldiers who are single, white and male.  The events generally involve a firearm as opposed to an overdose, hanging or a cutting incident.  Historically, suicide in the military has been lower than that of the civilian population.  In 2004 that changed, however, and the Army rate has slightly exceeded the US population rates in recent years.[ii]  The greatest increase in military suicides has happened in the Army and Marine Corps, which have shouldered the greatest burden of ground combat.[iii]

Our resiliency training and Ask-Care-Escort (ACE) cards are helping by giving us a few tools, but they are simply not enough.  We need a larger discussion about reframing crises and contributing factors to facilitate post-traumatic growth (PTG).  PTG is not just about being the tennis ball and bouncing back versus being the egg that cracks.  It is about learning from your experiences in a way that builds strength, hardiness and new learning.  PTG is a reminder that “permanent disorder is not the inevitable outcome of trauma.”[iv]  Understanding and teaching ways to develop PTG as opposed to just resilience would not only help to lower causal factors leading to suicide, it could also help those of us that have to endure that after-effects when suicides do happen.

Moving toward PTG will require a greater understanding of the initiators of suicidal ideation.  Suicide attempts materialize from a confluence of many factors.  Compounding stress, financial issues, depression, weight/body concerns, and relationship difficulties are but of few.  Co-morbidity with PTSD, alcohol and drug abuse, and other behavioral health issues add to its complexity.  These contributing causes are all confounded by the stigma our formations have against seeking help.  Data from OEF and OIF tell us that a large percentage of those who would actually benefit from behavioral health treatment often do not pursue care due to a perception of potential peer disapproval.[v]  Having a little PTSD is almost seen as a mandatory insert added in one’s already stacked medical records; in a warrior’s military there is only time to ‘suck it up and drive on’.  Soldiers assume that everyone else is taking it all in stride, which creates a false sense of comfort with brokenness.  Those identified as having a true behavioral health issue may even adopt negative stereotypes, creating what some call a self-stigma.[vi] These trends all indicate that those who most need behavioral health care are traditionally the least likely to pursue it.  We need to curb these trends before we can ever grow from the inevitable traumatic events that occurred in Iraq and Afghanistan and will occur in other tours.  It all starts with more discussion.

As I visited Jones’ gray body in the CASH I wondered if we did all we could.  I wondered if I was a contributor to the lifelessness before me.  Did I see the warning signs?  Was I looking in the right places?  I knew that we needed to do a better job of helping him reframe the issues he was having.  Hopefully we do not have to have a higher suicide rate to transform our perceptions of mental health and what we teach with regard to how we react when trauma inevitably occurs.

End Notes

[i] Names in this story have been changed.

[ii] Department of the Army, Health Promotion, Risk Reduction, and Suicide Prevention, (Washington, DC: 2010), 14.

[iii] Ibid., 16.

[iv] Sweeney, P., Matthews, M. & Lester, P., Leadership in Dangerous Situations: A Handbook for the Armed Forces, Emergency Services, and First Responders, (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2011), 63.

[v] Hoge, C.W., et al., “Combat Duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, Mental Health Problems and Barriers to Care,” US Army Medical Department Journal, 2008, 7.

[vi] Rusch, N., et al., “Implicit Self-Stigma in People with Mental Illness,” Journal of Nervous Mental Disorders, 2010, 198(2), 151.

 

Comments

sharase

Mon, 11/21/2022 - 11:11pm

I appreciate your response because I struggle with the same issue of not comprehending mistakes like those mentioned subway surfers above. Fortunately, you provided me with an answer to that query. 

truthsayer160

Mon, 01/04/2016 - 2:20pm

In reply to by skepticalsoldier82

1) People had tougher deployments, no doubt about that. I didn't see that this article was saying that the author's experience was worse than anyone else's due to the subject matter. I agree that he admitted it was light, especially around the surge timeframe. Seems to me the SPC still killed himself though, regardless of his hygiene. Wouldn't wish that on any kinda unit at any timeframe.

2) How can you know the nature of the relationship he might've had with the soldier? Maybe they were fobbits in that Cram job and he lives next to the soldier. I've dealt with 2 suicides in my unit and another 2 that were serious attempts and I wasn't their direct line supervisor but I was close to 'em and it affected all us significantly. Surely you been close to or involved with soldiers when you weren't a green tabber.

good points in your 3rd note. Can't argue with that logic. Good chat

skepticalsoldier82

Mon, 01/04/2016 - 4:20am

In reply to by truthsayer160

Since you asked...

1. The author is (in the anecdote, at least) on a C-RAM assignment, which he even admits is about as light a deployment as one can get in 2006. Ask anyone who was patrolling Baqubah or Baghdad or Ramadi or Tal Afar around that time if their biggest concern was PFCs with poor hygiene.

2. The author is (again, in the anecdote) an Executive Officer, not a green tab position. Even if he wanted to be in an active leadership role, the 1SG and CO are the ones calling the shots, which makes the hand-wringing over not having done enough seem a bit maudlin.

3. If you really want to go there, the entire premise suffers from a major reverse causality issue that even the 2010 Health Promotion, Risk Reduction, and Suicide Prevention report acknowledges. There is a huge self-selection bias in a study that compares military personnel in a volunteer system to the public at large. Put simply, the problem may not be that being in the Army makes your young white male Soldiers more prone to suicide, but that the Army has more suicides because it employs a disproportionate number of young white men. Other jobs whose employment data skews white and male (such as loggers and fishermen) also saw a spike in suicide rates in the same time frame.

truthsayer160

Mon, 01/04/2016 - 1:19am

I don't know but maybe it seems that the first comment by skepticalsoldier82 is more of a character attack than an actual critique. Makes me wonder if they read the spot, as in my skull though it may not be the bees knees of a Pulitzer Prize winner it pertains to suicide, resilience and post-traumatic growth as opposed to knowledge of combat. Wondering how one would know enough from the given content to judge the author's combat or leadership experience... heck the editors found it worthy of publishing. Sad to see the message about an obviously tough situation, suicide, get mud thrown on it like that.

I wish we did a better job preventing suicide in the military, but I'm not smart enough to create the solution. We do need to talk more about it though.

skepticalsoldier82

Sun, 01/03/2016 - 2:00pm

I would have thought that a masters from Columbia would involve a few writing courses, but the quality of this article indicates otherwise. The framing anecdote adds little to what is really a cursory academic footnote. One would hope the author would learn more about writing (and Soldiers, and leadership, and probably combat) before trying his hand at mil-blogging again.