They survived combat, but can't survive coming back home

They survived combat, but can't survive coming back home. This is not sending out alarm bells across the country? Throughout the military? Throughout the Veterans Administration? Sgt. Adrian Simmons did what he was supposed to do and asked for help. He was "sent to" Fort Bragg's Family Advocacy but it wasn't enough to help him want to live.

We need to know why.

Family says soldier killed himself at Hoke home

A staff report

Nichole Simmons said her husband had been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder for more than a year.

RAEFORD - An 82nd Airborne Division paratrooper found dead from a single gunshot wound committed suicide, his family said Saturday.

Authorities on Friday reported they were investigating the death of Sgt. Adrian A. Simmons, 26, but they provided few details.

His wife, Nichole, who is 24, said she found her husband's body Wednesday morning in the garage of their home in Hoke County. He was supposed to have gone to work that day, she said.

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Family says soldier killed himself at Hoke home

In combat, they face the worst that man can do to man. Bullets, bombs, young and old die, friends die and bodies are broken. Homes are destroyed. While all of this is going on, they fight to stay alive. They fight to keep their friends alive. So how is it when they are back home, supposedly out of danger, they cannot spend one more day on this earth and take their own lives?

They value life or they wouldn't join the military. While some in this country want to dismiss the fact they serve to protect, that is exactly what they are doing. Police have to train to shoot criminals but they don't want to be forced to decide who lives or dies even though they are prepared to do what has to be done. Soldiers are the same. They train to shoot and use other weapons. They don't want to do it but are prepared when forced into pulling the trigger.

When someone tried to boil this all down to a political debate, to them, it doesn't matter what side on of their own happen to be on. They don't care about the right or wrong of being there when one of their own is in danger. They fight for each other, right along side of someone they care about and yes, even for total strangers from another unit. Life matters to them.

They know what grief is when one of their own dies. They mourn. The last thing they want to do is leave their families grieving for them. So they try. They try to find reasons to be happy again. They try to "get over" all they went through. They try and keep trying. They go to the doctors and they take the pills that are supposed to take away their pain and when those pills numb them, they cannot feel anything good while those pills do their jobs.

Families are left clueless. They rejoice when their warrior comes back home. After all the worry during the deployment, they relax. No more fears of him or her getting killed over there. No more fears of them getting wounded. No more struggles of having to do things without them. Life is back to normal when they are back home. But they don't see there is more to worry about.

The fear they should have is that the pain of what they came home from is as real as when they had to face the enemy. The deaths and woundings they witnessed are in their minds so strongly it has all penetrated their soul and it eats away at them like an infection spreading to every part of their lives.

They want to go back to the way they were before as much as their families expect them to. That doesn't always happen. Days go by as they try to push it back, forget it, move on and smile again. In those days they look at their families and friends and know what is expected of them. They can't do it. They can't just forget and move on. They can't undo and hit the reset button on their minds.

Every event in a human's life goes into who they are today. How they think, how they feel and how they respond to life has been built on everything that has happened in their lives to that point. For a combat veteran, it includes a long list of events piled onto other events and then they come back home to where everything was "normal" except them. They can't see how "normal" it is for then to grieve and be changed by their experiences. So they ignore it at first. Then they fight it. They deny it. They try to drown it with alcohol.

With nothing working, they get angry with themselves, then with everyone else.

When they finally come to terms with the fact they need help and the DOD or the VA hands them pills to numb it away, that supports their own thoughts they are not supposed to feel anything at all.

When will they get the help they need to heal? How many others have to come home after surviving all they went through, only to die by their own hands? How many other families will be left behind wondering what could have been done to defeat the enemy inside the warrior's soul?

In February I attended a wedding for a National Guardsman. We talked during the after rehearsal dinner. He said he was fine and looking forward to spending the rest of his life with his new wife. It was a beautiful wedding and he seemed so happy. A couple of months ago I received a phone call they had separated. He showed all the signs of PTSD and his new wife was not prepared to cope with the changes in him. He had done a good job of covering up his pain when he came home. He was in denial he needed help because he was too busy trying to pretend everything was fine.

She tried to understand. She tried to help, but as with everyone else, there were limits to what she was willing and able to do. They are getting divorced. The life she was looking at was not what she planned for and coming home was not what he expected.

There are so many stories out there you'll never hear about. Families and friends pay the price of combat veterans not getting help. Strangers do when a few of them commit crimes and police have to face taking out a veteran with a gun in his hands not wanting to live anymore. Those stories we'll read when they are splashed across the top fold of our local newspapers but countless more stories are kept secret.

We'll read the numbers of suicides in the military along with "death under investigation" or "suspected suicide" but we'll never really know what the true numbers are. We'll read numbers released from the VA but again, we'll never know the true numbers. Even with all the reports there are so many more in between the DOD and the VA. The DOD doesn't track them anymore after discharge and the VA won't track them until they are in the system. If they commit suicide during the time no one claims any connection to them, no one knows who they are and they are not counted.

So we'll keep reading more and more stories like this one and think we know the truth, but we will never really know what the truth is and what the true price of war is. The families are the only ones counting all of them when they are back home.