If you have been reading this blog, you know that I have been teaching Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. We started looking at what makes one a leader this week. I asked them to identify one person that they perceived to be a leader and be able to give five traits or characteristics that make that person a leader. They identified people like their parents or a sibling or the President. Then we looked at the Marine Corps 14 Leadership Traits (seriously, yes, I work predominantly with Marines and in 22 years of teaching and seeing people go into the military, the Marines do something right...they create leaders). The students were give an article from Yahoo! News titled "Vet who saved many in Iraq couldn't escape demons" (http://news.yahoo.com/vet-saved-many-iraq-couldnt-escape-demons-190136480.html). The article details the service of Army Captain Pete Linnerooth and his transition back to civilian life. Capt. Linnerooth was deployed to Iraq in 2007 as a psychologist. He was noted as "The Wizard" by those who he worked with because he was able to counsel soldiers during some of the most brutal fighting of the OIF campaign. The article opens with praises for Capt. Linnerooth's ability to sooth, counsel, comfort, and console those who were in states of shock, grief, nightmares, insomnia; who were hit with the smell of blood, death, burns, screams. He was a professional all forms of the definition in a place that wasn't human by any means. He was a family man that carried his daughter's baby shoes on his ruck sack for good luck. Capt. Linnerooth three things that worked for him during his time in Iraq..."an instant rapport with soldiers, an empathetic manner, a big heart." This was the magic that was Capt. Linnerooth. He worked 70 plus hours in a week, day and night, sometimes in a make shift office and others in the field along side the soldiers in the thick of the battle. Capt. Linnerooth, a few months short of his 15 month deployment, he left Iraq because he had come to the realization that he had heard and seen enough horror, death, and could no longer be beneficial to his fellow soldiers in the capacity of a therapist.
He returned to the United States and began to transition to civilian life. He became a college professor, then a counselor for veterans, wrote about professional burnout, and worried about how little he felt he had done in relation to helping the troops and the veteran suicide rate. Capt. Linnerooth personally dealt with PTSD, depression, anger, despair, drugs, and a failed marriage. He struggled with all the demons that have brought about the creation of The Fight Continues. On January 2, 2013, Captain Linnerooth shot himself with his own gun at age 42. One buddy stated that he was "the guy who could help everybody - everybody but himself." What started out as a simple Yahoo! News article to supplement the teaching of The Things They Carried, turned into not just an ahaa moment for me in the understanding of the suicide death of a young lady this fall that I love like a daughter but led me on a quest to learn more about Captain Pete Linnerooth. What set me on my quest was two statements that were made in the article. The first was when Brock McNabb (Linnerooth's best buddy and was deployed with in him to Iraq) stated "For the record, Pete Linnerooth did not want to die." ... "He just wanted the pain to end. Big difference." This simple statement sheds a great deal of light on what the thought process is when someone gets to the point where they either have a gun to their head or a noose around their neck or a bottle of pills in their mouths. For me, I feel that I have gained the understanding there is a level of desperate need to stop the pain, perceived or real; to stop the images, the sounds, the repeating statements that pull them down. It is a big difference in just wanting the pain to end rather than to die. The other statement was that of Linnerooth himself when he stated to McNabb "Maybe we're all meant for just one great deed and we're done." What was Linnerooth's great deed? Was it that of the countless soldiers that he counseled while in Iraq or on his return to civilian life? Was it that he was a constant voice that criticized the military for their lack of recognition of mental health issues related to our GWOT Veterans? Was that he couldn't recognize that he had done so much already but because the suicide rate continued to skyrocket in regards to our GWOT Veterans that he perceived that he had not done enough?
Two weeks after Linnerooth's suicide (one of the first to be recorded for the year 2013), The Pentagon released the suicide numbers for 2012. Military suicides had reached a record number in 2012 with 349. This number is greater than the number of combat deaths in Afghanistan alone for the year. It has to scream something to our society when Time magazine online has a specific section labeled Military Mental Health. It has to scream something when a Colonel states that "the last decade plus of war has taught many valuable lessons...lessons...known only after the fact. (That) we have to be vigilant to the signs that they (caregivers) have taken on too much of everyone else's burdens, and need help themselves."
Since Christmas 2012, I have met a number of individuals through The Fight Continues that have been at that crossroad of suicide or life, death or pain, and there are a number of us that are blessed that those individuals have chosen life even though their demons will continue to haunt them and cause them pain. Over the next few years, our military will be downsizing and our communities will be flooded with GWOT Veterans and their families as they transition back to civilian life. Our neighborhoods, our communities, our churches, our schools, our colleges, our first responders ... must be vigilant in recognizing the signs of combat PTSD and the impact that it already has and will continue to have on our soldiers, their families, their lives, our lives. As a society, these individuals have volunteered to defend our basic ideals and have followed the commands of the decision makers that we as an electorate have placed in office. It is time to step out of our nice little bubble of ignorance and selfishness to recognize that there is a very grave (pun intended) problem that is only going to get deeper.
