Jeremy Sears Last Moments With Another Veteran

Jeremy Sears Last Words, "Nowhere Important but thanks for asking." The question came from another Iraq veteran standing near him at the shooting range. Chris Naganuma knew pain when he saw it since he saw it in himself.

When you read this story about the battles veterans have to fight back home, it is easy to be angry. Easy to wonder what is wrong with the government when all of this is happening to them. If you just started paying attention, then your anger is justified. If you've paid attention all along then you would wonder when your head stops exploding whenever you read stories like this. All of it has been going on for decades.

Long before most serving today were even born, it was all happening. The pills instead of therapy. The backlog of claims. The overburned VA workers wondering how they can fit in a veteran in need of care before it is too late. And Congress, well, I don't have anything nice to say about them in the 113th anymore than I had anything nice to say about the 112th, 111th, 110th or any of them going back to 1946 when the first Veterans Affairs Committee was seated and it happened to WWI and WWII veterans long before I was born.

You wouldn't know because it hasn't been personal to you. Safe bet that you didn't know any of these older veterans. If you had, then you'd know none of this is new. That is the most deplorable fact of all. None of it is new and none of it should have ever happened.

The last moments of Jeremy Sears
In a twist of fate, another combat veteran is with him at the end
UT San Diego
By Jeanette Steele
OCT. 25, 2014

Chris Naganuma was at the Oceanside shooting range when 35-year-old former Camp Pendleton infantryman Jeremy Sears killed himself. Here, Naganuma attends his memorial at Miramar National Cemetery.
K.C. Alfred / UT San Diego

Chris Naganuma had the sense that something was wrong from the start.

He and his mother went to Oceanside’s Iron Sights indoor gun range for a simple practice session.

In the lane next to him, a guy in a backward baseball cap was shooting haphazardly. Even at only 10 feet away, he could barely hit the target’s inner circle.

Naganuma, a 28-year-old Army veteran, sized up his neighbor as a fellow vet. T-shirt, jeans, flip-flops. The man wore a black metal bracelet, a “hero bracelet” bearing the name of someone killed in action.

Naganuma wears two himself.

“First thing I asked him was, ‘Hey man, where did you deploy to, and how are you doing?’”

“He stopped for a second. Looked up at me,” Naganuma recounts.

“And the only thing he said was, ‘Nowhere important, man. But thanks for asking.’”

The weekend before Sears died, he first opened up to his wife about possibly having “survivor’s guilt” — sometimes seen as a symptom of PTSD.
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