How will you remember them after suicide?

How will you remember them after suicide?
Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
July 23, 2013

After they die by their own hands, how will you remember them? Do you remember them by the headline declaring another veteran or active duty serviceman ended their own lives? Do you remember them as one willing to lay down their lives but in so much pain because of that love they no longer wanted to live? When we talk about suicides tied to military service no matter how we think of them, the families and friends do not forget about them as soon as post is closed or the newspaper is put in the recycling bin.

When I was researching Wounded Times for my book on suicides tied to military service I did a lot of crying. Their stories were so sad. Many of them I remembered, especially when I helped some of the grieving families, but I cried more when I had forgotten all about them. Seeing their name again, reading what happened all over again did not compare to the fact their names became a blur.

I had great friends I could talk to when the research got to me. The depression was hard to move on from. It was harder when it was published and no one seemed to even want to know what was in it. Often I'd ask why don't people care? After all, we sure manage to pretend to care when we send them off, welcome them home or stand by the side of the road when one of them is heading to their last resting place but we never seem willing to really stand by their side. How do we do that? How do we just move on as if they never served in our name?

How could I forget them? How could all of us just forget this was happening to so many?

There is a story that came out recently after a suicide. Will Doolittle didn't want to just let the story go. I am glad he wanted to find out more about Jon Hyatt instead of just reporting on the end of his life. People moved on after the original story but as you will read, the family did not.

The Story Behind the Story
On Sunday, we published a story that provided some much needed context to what is a continuing American tragedy.

At the end of June, we published a story about a standoff between a man and police. We reported that the man had taken a shot at the police and was refusing to come out of his home. The next morning police found him dead. He was an Iraq war veteran and had been treated for post traumatic stress disorder and he had committed suicide.
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Face of war: Granville man who took own life recalled by family members
Post Star.com
Will Doolittle
July 20, 2013

No one knows why Jon Hyatt shot himself June 28, but his mother, Lisa McLaughlin, said he had been tormented by things he had seen and done in Iraq.

Hyatt graduated from Granville high school in 2006, joined the Army several months later and deployed to Iraq in 2007. While he was overseas, he told his mother he was training Iraqi troops and not in danger. She found out later he was engaged in combat the whole 14 months he was there.

Early last week, Lisa sat at her living room table, holding a computer tablet and whisking through rows of photographs her son brought back from Iraq — desert sunsets; Iraqi children against whitewashed walls; a large and nasty-looking spider.

Roger McLaughlin, her husband and Jon’s stepfather, sat at the other end of the table, watching her.

“That’s him there,” she would say, as she skimmed past a photograph of Jon. “That’s him there.”

And there he was, wearing camouflage and tinted goggles; holding guns almost as big as he was; standing in the gunner’s hatch of an armored vehicle, gripping the mounted machine gun it was his job to fire.

In one of the events he obsessed over, his vehicle was taking small arms fire and Jon blasted back with the machine gun, Roger McLaughlin said. Jon would agonize later his return fire had been “overkill,” driven by fear.
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