After Combat, Victims of an Inner War

This hasn't gotten any easier over the years. I've been at this for so long now that it should be easy to just post these stories and move on. It should be, but I doubt it will ever stop hurting. If anything, the pain in my soul of having to still be reading about the suffering of our troops, our veterans and their families, cuts even deeper. We do a great job sending them off to risk their lives for us, but after that, well, they're someone else's problem. They're all stuck in a political game right in the middle of the Right ranting that other people are "Bush bashing" and the Left screaming about how they all need to just come home. Is anyone screaming about them? Is anyone willing to stuff politics, their own ideology, their own power trip, long enough to notice what is happening to them?

I have to read the emails from both sides and most of it has nothing to do with anything we can do anything about today. They have nothing to do with the troops suffering from PTSD, being pushed into such a deep depression that they lose all hope, or what they come home with haunting them. Cable news is useless when they could be reporting on what has been happening all along, but they don't want to bother. People, well they want to be entertained so very few will bother to read this article beyond the first page, if they read it at all. They get their news from their TV sets so if the broadcasts don't bother to tell them, they will never know and the troops, well, they'll just keep paying the price.

Clinton Gill
Sgt. Jacob Blaylock, seated left, one of four in his Guard unit to commit suicide, at the grave of Sgt. Brandon Wallace.

Suicide's Rising Toll
After Combat, Victims of an Inner War

By ERICA GOODE
Published: August 1, 2009
Sgt. Jacob Blaylock flipped on the video camera he had set up in a trailer at the Tallil military base, southeast of Baghdad.


He lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, blew the smoke upward.

“Hey, it’s Jackie,” he said. “It’s the 20th of April. We go home in six days. I lost two good friends on the 14th. I’m having a hard time dealing with it.”

For almost a year, the soldiers of the 1451st Transportation Company had been escorting trucks full of gasoline, building materials and other supplies along Iraq’s dark, dangerous highways. There had been injuries, but no one had died.

Their luck evaporated less than two weeks before they were to return home, in the spring of 2007. A scout truck driving at the front of a convoy late at night hit a homemade bomb buried in the asphalt. Two soldiers, Sgt. Brandon Wallace and Sgt. Joshua Schmit, were killed.

The deaths stunned the unit, part of the North Carolina National Guard. The two men were popular and respected — “big personalities,” as one soldier put it. Sergeant Blaylock, who was close to both men, seemed especially shaken. Sometime earlier, feeling the strain of riding the gunner position in the exposed front truck, he had switched places with Sergeant Wallace, moving to a Humvee at the rear.

“It was supposed to be me,” he would tell people later.

The losses followed the men and women of the 1451st home as they dispersed to North Carolina and Tennessee, New York and Oklahoma, reuniting with their families and returning to their jobs.

Sergeant Blaylock went back to Houston, where he tried to pick up the pieces of his life and shape them into a whole. But grief and guilt trailed him, combining with other stresses: financial troubles, disputes with his estranged wife over their young daughter, the absence of the tight group of friends who had helped him make it through 12 months of war.

On Dec. 9, 2007, Sergeant Blaylock, heavily intoxicated, lifted a 9-millimeter handgun to his head during an argument with his girlfriend and pulled the trigger. He was 26.
read more here
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/us/02suicide.html?_r=1&hp

Sgt. Jacob Blaylock won't be counted

Battle on the homefront

December 23, 2007
By Jon Seidel Post-Tribune staff writer


Sgt. Jacob Blaylock won't be counted among the casualties of the Iraq war.
But he, like many soldiers, was haunted by its ghosts.

Blaylock, 26, was a fun-loving man when he went to Iraq, his family said. In photographs, he tends to be the one giving a thumbs-up to the camera.

When he came home from war, though, his family said he wanted a beer, he wanted a cigarette, and he never wanted to go back to battle.

Blaylock, who grew up in Calumet City, shot himself this month. He left a note behind in his glove box for his family.

"I'm sorry I let everybody down," Blaylock wrote.

Blaylock was living in Houston, but his father, Ricky Blaylock, lives in Lowell.

Ricky Blaylock said his son's depression medication, from doctors who were treating his son for post-traumatic stress disorder, arrived the day after the suicide.
go here for the rest
http://www.post-trib.com/news/710044,soldier.article

Main Entry: ca·su·al·ty
Function: noun
Pronunciation: 'ka-zh&l-te, 'kazh-w&l-, 'ka-zh&-w&l-
Inflected Form(s): plural -ties
1 archaic : CHANCE , FORTUNE (losses)
2 : serious or fatal accident : DISASTER
3 a : a military person lost through death, wounds, injury, sickness, internment, or capture or through being missing in action b : a person or thing injured, lost, or destroyed : VICTIM (the ex-senator was a casualty of the last election)
http://reference.aol.com/dictionary?dword=casualty

"I'm sorry I let everybody down," Blaylock wrote. Yet the truth is, he didn't let anyone down but we let him down. We allowed him to be yet one more of the uncounted. Can we be so blind that we allow his life, along with all the others wounded, end by an enemy just as real as the one they were deployed to fight? This enemy follows them home. How can they not be counted when they die as a result of this wound? I've asked this question thousands of times of the years. How can they not be counted as wounded at all? Do you see their numbers included in on any news reports of the casualty counts? We're lucky if we even see a close representation of the real counts, the true picture of the prices they pay.

We allowed him to have to wait for medication and therapy too long. We did not have it ready for him when he needed it any more than we had it ready in the 80's or the 90's when Vietnam veterans needed it or others from other wars. Before Vietnam ended we had he excuse of lack of knowledge but that excuse was obliterated when the world paid attention and every nation was conducting studies. We didn't have the excuse in 2001 or 2002 or 2003 or any other year of these occupations. What are we claiming we are still waiting to learn? What is it that we think we still have yet to learn about this wound documented throughout the centuries? Is there anything new to learn about the cause or the devastating results? No. The only thing we have yet to learn is what is the most effective treatment to fight it.

We know early intervention works the best but we don't practice it. If we did, none of them would have to wait for therapy and medication to begin. We know we cannot prevent it but we don't acknowledge it when wars are being planned and the projected casualty figures are taken into account. We ignore all of this at our own peril by setting up failure upon failure. Failure to take care of them increases the likelihood of suicides, criminal activity, drug and alcohol abuse, divorce, homelessness and residual casualties in their children. We set up society as a whole for failure when we will have to support the survivors in the end because we refused to take care of them when it was the most promising to help them recover. We fail them all the way around.

So another warrior takes his own life waiting to have his wounds treated. Another soldier dies and his name is recorded no where. Another family left behind wondering why this "grateful nation" was not so grateful for the service their son was willing to provide and let him die. kc