I don't know what I'll accomplish here because I can barely see through my tears but I have to write something while the feelings are at the surface.  The focus of the news in the last few days has left me with the feeling that there is a red hot poker jabbing at a wound I thought was mostly scarred over.  I was kind of on a news/OS hiatus because I had some bigger fish to fry here.  But still the news filtered in to me and by last night, I was paying attention again.  I watched the downloaded NBC Nightly News from Friday which contained an (all too short) story about military suicides.  I found myself yelling at the tv.  What the fuck?!?  Why is this the sexy story of the day now?  Kudos to the reporters who are bringing this to the top of the list right now but where the have the stories been all along?  I lost my husband to suicide 14 years ago on the 28th.  He will never count among the ranks of war casualties because  it happened after he was released.  A month or so after he put a shotgun in his mouth, I got some sort of certificate of thanks from the army for his service.  I angrily scrawled my reply in red marker over the certificate and sent it back.  I asked they how they could dare to thank someone for flailing blindly through the miserable life they gave him.  How could they dismiss his pleas and ignore his pain?  How could a piece of paper qualify as fair trade for a life?  My hands shake as I write this and my face is raw from the tears that won't stop.

My husband joined the military because the life he had been given left him with few other options.  A few weeks in, he realized what a horrible mistake he had made and spent the next several years trying to get out.  Everyone (including me, at first) dismissed it as the usual difficulty with basic training which is no picnic by anyone's standards.  But he was forced to put up a shield to cover up the fact that he was being taken farther and farther from his dreams and his soul.  He was sent to Saudi Arabia for the first Gulf war.  We all watched the news reports about how well it was going.  No injuries, supreme firepower over our "enemies".  About 6 feet away from where I currently sit is a box full of his pain in all the letters he wrote me from there.  He came back changed.  I was young and so sheltered that I didn't really understand what he had been through.  He had no proper vocabulary to explain.  One day, in one split second, I knew.  We went over to my aunt and uncle's house for something where he was greeted by my young male cousin asking him if he had killed anyone in the war.  There was a silence that lasted a nanosecond or perhaps a year and in that time I saw in his eyes a look of pure fear.  I wanted to help him.  He wouldn't talk.  He couldn't talk.  We carried on.  We moved away from family and support where we were on our own and relying on the army for everything.  One of our neighbors in the slum housing outside post killed his wife.  Another guy went from a shy quiet husband to an abusive alcoholic with a pregnant wife who was left in the dust.  And I didn't see it happening to me.  I was in the slow spiral with him.  We clung to each other.  We loved each other and that was all we had.  In a period of clarity, we decided to secretly go see the chaplain on post.  That was the only option we knew of for anything resembling psychological care.  It had to be secret because his commanding officers were already belittling him daily for his obvious difficulties.  Somewhere, I still have both the letters we had to write to the chaplain and the form we got as a grand brush-off.  I'm not sure there was another shared low point in our life together that affected us as deeply as that.  We went  home as asked what next.  We were trapped.  We carried on on autopilot.  He didn't drink heavily, he didn't do drugs, he just got lost.  I didn't know what to do.  I tried to get him to talk and then he would go on hunting trips.  There were lots of long, unexplained "drives".  I just remembered those.  I had forgotten.  Oh shit, I just miss him so much.  

On the morning of February 28th, 1995, he left me a note, a recorded message, and then drove off to his favorite place where two rivers converged.  Somewhere around 10:30 in the morning, he blew his head off with a shotgun.  I had found the note and got there to hear the blast.  I was paralyzed.  I think part of me has remained paralyzed for a long time.  I thought I dealt with it all but the last few days have proven otherwise.   It's been many years and I have a good life now but I will always love him and always wish I could have saved him.  

I know my story is in no way unique or even close to extraordinary.  I know there are countless families feeling the nerves worn raw by the cheese grater of war.  I think that today I am feeling the pain of them all.  I have only one question for the military.  WHY?  And there is no answer that is good enough to explain away all the lost lives.