WHERE IS THE “WORLD-CLASS COVERAGE?”
by OPOVV, ©2014
(Jun. 9, 2014) — It’s a very strange world they live in, these veterans who eat the bullet, the method of choice to commit suicide. On the outside they’re “back” and “adjusting.” Out-of-the-ordinary behavior is the telltale sign that should bring attention to somebody going over the edge. Here’s the thing: there is no coloration whatsoever between personal relationships and the thoughts of doing away with oneself.
Those loved ones who are “left behind” may think that they’re somehow in the equation of the person who kills himself, and they are, but not in the way they think. These veterans who “check out” are, in their minds, doing those who they care about the ultimate “favor”: other lives would be better off without the veteran around, so they believe.
The aftermath of World War II and the Korean War was, suicide number-wise, minuscule compared to the Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan fiascos. The numbers that we’re dealing with, 22 a day, are truly staggering when you think about how many “I wish I could’ve done something’s” that float around afterwards. Like, when someone is T-boned in Charlotte, NC, or when anyone anywhere else dies in an automobile accident, people say either “Too bad/Such a shame” or “Was the other driver drunk?” and not “I wish I could’ve done something.”
You see, people die all the time. Every day thousands upon thousands of us human beings bite the dust, and we expect that. We expect death, but what we don’t expect is for someone to “do himself in” without discussing it with us first. Here’s an example: I was living with the love of my life and I thought we were happy, and we were, but one day I just packed up and moved out. I didn’t move out because I didn’t love her: I moved out because I did love her: I didn’t want her to be associated with me being dead, by suicide. I thought that I’d move out, kill myself, and she’d be over me and wouldn’t have cared either way, because I was out of her life in the first place. I was doing her a favor. Well, obviously I lived: the need to be with her overcame my Vietnam-induced personal hell-on-earth nightmares.
It’s one thing to have a “nightmare” when you’re a little kid, but in no way, shape or form is it the same animal when you’re an adult, waking up sweating and screaming in the middle of the night with your heart rate pushing 170. The only connection between the two is perhaps they both occurred in a bedroom.
And now our veterans are fighting, not only their own daemons, but the VA corrupt, money-grabbing-rats-fleeing-the-ship as well. Personally, I don’t have a “politically-correct” objection to erecting gallows in the Veterans Administration hospitals’ atriums and actually using them for the purpose for which they were designed. Twenty-two a day: now that’s a number I CAN LIVE WITH.