Travis Twiggs: The Un-Happy One Year Anniversary

The following comes from my friend Lily Casura over at Healing Combat Trauma. It's hard to believe a year has come and gone since the days she was posting about Travis Twiggs. If you want to know the tragedy of Camp Liberty could have been prevented, take the links she has up on Travis and know none of this should have been allowed to happen.

May 14, 2009
Travis Twiggs: The Un-Happy One Year Anniversary of Combat PTSD's Perhaps Most Visible Death
by Lily Casura
Just a brief note to mention, it was one year ago today that Travis Twiggs passed from this earth, by his own hand, the veritable poster boy of combat-based PTSD. It also marks his brother Willard's passing, who left this earth with Travis, apparently by Travis' hand. It's an absolute tragedy, for any number of reasons -- from the family members and friends the Twiggs brothers leave behind -- to the fact that Travis, personally, was making an impact as a Marine who broke the code of silence, so to speak, and spoke openly about his PTSD. Twiggs wrote about his ordeal in the January, 2008 issue of the Marine Corps Gazette, in an article that has been widely circulated, and is still available on the Web.

Travis Twiggs' suffering was something that really stood out to me -- perhaps because of his very willingness to speak openly about his struggles, something Marines.Just.Don't.Do. We actually broke the news of his death on this blog, before the mainstream media had reported on it -- and in fact, the early reports were wrong on the facts but widely repeated, making the damage that much more painful. (He and his brother were reputed to be hardened criminals, for example, which they were not, although they had been -- at the last -- involved in a carjacking, as part of their initially ill-fated but ultimately successful desire to end their lives. In fact, Twiggs was a much-decorated Marine with multiple combat tours behind him, who had recently met the president, and whose Marines (and his family) deeply loved him. His brother, Willard, was well-loved as well. A year later, not a day goes by that people don't find this site out of a search they're doing for Travis or Willard; and in the days after their death, searches for Willard were almost as popular as those for Travis, though Willard was obviously shyer and less well known. And these tragedies were not the only ones the Twiggs family suffered in a very short amount of time: their beloved grandmother also passed away within days of the Twiggs' brothers' deaths. Hard, hard times for the Twiggs' family, and for all those who loved Travis and Willard.
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Travis Twiggs: The Un-Happy One Year Anniversary