15 months after Iraq bloodbath, young veteran takes his life

Source: McClatchy

15 months after Iraq bloodbath, young veteran takes his life
By Cynthia Hubert | Sacramento Bee

On March 7, 2007, Army Spc. Trevor Hogue was inside his barracks in Baghdad, describing his morning on the battlefield.

"I saw things today that I think will mess me up for life," Hogue typed to his mother, Donna, as she sat at her computer thousands of miles away from Iraq, in Granite Bay.

That day the young soldier, whose assignment included driving a Humvee through perhaps the most dangerous ZIP code on the globe, saw his sergeant blown to pieces. He saw the bodies of half of the men in his platoon torn apart. Heads were cut off and limbs severed. It happened 30 yards in front of him, and he had never been so afraid, he told his mom.

"My arms are around you," Donna Hogue wrote. "You'll be alright."

But Hogue never really recovered. Last week, he committed suicide by hanging himself in the backyard of his childhood home. He was 24 years old.

According to the Army, soldiers are killing themselves at the highest rate in nearly three decades, surpassing the civilian suicide rate for the first time since the Vietnam War.

At least 128 U.S. soldiers killed themselves last year, a number that has risen four years in a row. The death toll could be even higher this year. Through April, 91 soldiers had committed suicide.

Hogue's death, because it occurred after he was discharged, is not included in those statistics. But his friends and loved ones believe he was a casualty of war as much as any soldier on active duty.

<SNIP>

Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/69911.html

worship death, worship death....guns, guns, guns...war! WAR! WAR! KILLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL!

I think we are reaping what we sow big time now, and we all know who starts the wars and who profits from them.

Join the army my ass.

:shrug:

the Pro-lifers worship the oposite...death cult I tell ya. The right wing is a study in hypocrisy.

Let's be sure to give credit where credit is due.

My heart goes out to all the troops who have had to endure this lie of a war, and to all the families and loved ones who get back someone that they no longer recognize.

I know that the men of my father's age, men who fought in WWII and who saw horrible horrible things, came back and were able to enter their lives without any apparent disability and go on to marry, raise families, live good lives, and die at nice old ages. A lot of them were heroes, the real kind, who got the big citations, but I never knew anything about this until I read their obituaries.

They all had a good time at the local American Legion post.

What is the difference between those men, who went off to war as little more than kids, and these soldiers who are coming back and committing suicide, or taking out their wives before killing themselves?

What's going on?

It was not uncommon to have a wife and possible a child on the way when you were 18 in the 30's. Adulthood started much earlier. Now, many wouldn't claim to be adults until well into their 20's or even later.

i know this is very loose anecdotal proof, because solid numbers don't exist, but a whole lot of WWI survivors had what would now be called PTSD based on the immense scale of death...

not WWI, and some of them - when I got older, they told stories - had witnessed horrific things many more times than once. I saw my boyfriend's father break into tears as he described entering a concentration camp to liberate it, and another friend's father never told any of his family what he had done in the War until the late 1980s.

The men I knew never had any kind of PSTD symptoms. But, my sample is a very slim one ................

Unless they are very very drunk. My uncle died three years ago. It wasn't until a short time before he died that we found out he'd been at Anzio (fighter escort).

But my mother said that the day he got home, they went to a restaurant, just him and her, and he drank and talked for over four hours solid and then never mentioned any of it again.

Sixty-five years later, we found the neat military listing of his official flights after he died. He was a daylight skip bomber, over Italy, North Africa, as far as Albania. But what I realized, from the vast number of papers, and bulletins, even the way he had four bomber jackets, one in silk which I took, was how deeply involved he was in veterans affairs, and how a part of him had never really come home.

What did come home was attached to a bottle of Scotch. Fortunately, he went into advertising so no one noticed.

With the intercut interviews of the actual Vets the show was about. My wife and I were weeping through almost the whole of every episode.

I've avoided it, because I avoid all those things, but do you think it's worth watching?

I guess you do................. :hug:

No matter how depressed it's going to make you for a while.

the real heroes didn't talk.

I loved one of my Dad's friends, Buddy, and even named a character in one of my books after him. He was just the nicest guy, never married, a kind word for everyone, really nice to kids, an all around good guy.

I found out from his sister, after he died, that he'd been taken prisoner by the Japanese twice, and had escaped TWICE. Got caught both times, and, alas, a third time, when the tortured him. But, he came home at the end of the war.

And never mentioned it to anyone except his American Legion buddies and his sister............

my father included, were all in their late teens when they went off to fight WWII in the early 1940s. None of them was married, and they sure didn't have kids. They were all single, and took on the trappings of adulthood - marriage, fatherhood, work - after they returned at the end of the war.

They were kids, just like these kids are kids. So, that doesn't work. But, I think you're on to something in terms of kids maturing far later today than they did back then.

It might be as simple as that, yes.........

I'm just referring to the fact that once you graduated from high school you were considered an adult. Nowadays, that is not the case.

He enlisted the Tuesday after Pearl Harbor because he thought the line would be too long on Monday. They wouldn't let him be pilot because he was so elderly. So he became a bombardier.

what could make it different is the muddled mission objective, and the fact that they are fighting an "enemy" that wears no uniform, has no conventional military structure, is invisible in civilian crowds, and strikes anywhere at anytime...

the iraq war is about going in and slaughtering anyone, men, women, children or like in falleigha (sp) they made the families leave and kept all males over 18 and slaughtered or captured most of them - they are being force to commit atrocities

this is like Vietnam - no ryhme or reason for us to really be there

They know the war is endless and multiple tours of duty and it is about power, control and oil - iraq never attacked us or the world - hilter attacked people outside the boundary of his country

the eternal sensation of trying to walk on water. That would drive anyone insane, for sure.

In WWII, the enemies were identifiable and real, and their defeat meant it was over and we would win. So, that's a very huge difference.

Kurt Vonnegut's best friend was from my home town, and he returned after WWII to marry, go to college and law school, and practice law in our little town. Vonnegut used to come visit Mr. O'Hare from time to time; in fact, it was Mrs. O'Hare who pointed out to Vonnegut that they had been little more than children when they were caught in the bombing of Dresden. That's how he came to write about it.

But, Mr. O'Hare, like his compatriots who I knew, never lived anything but an exemplary life.

I think it was the clear objectives and the fact that we truly were the good guy going after the bad guys.

These kids are being sent to slaughter people who are innocent of anything, and, at the same time, they're subject to attack at any moment by the guerillas defending their country.

Yeah, it makes sense now.

Thanks to all for the help in starting to answer my question ....................

And the obvious lack of resolution to it. In WWII we knew that once we or the Russians got to Hitler it was over, and people would be going home. There is no V-Day to be fighting for anymore. An ideology is never going to surrender. The "leaders" of Al Qaida won't decide to sue for peace someday. We could Hiroshima/Nagasaki every inch of the middle east and there would still be no resolution.

We must always be at war with Eastasia.

these people are coming back to an
unreported DEPRESSION for the lower-
middle class.

Foreclosures.
Bankruptcy.
Failure.

I don't wonder about the suicide rate.

Not at all.

Damn. Of course. I overlooked the obvious, didn't I?

Thank you. You nailed it...........

:thumbsup:

My son's close friend came back and committed suicide. He was due to go on another tour. But his family has a thriving business as electricians. He was assured a spot in that business, and a good future.

There will always be a hole in that family with this boy's death. He was twenty-two.

I'm sorry for loss.

:hug:

And WWII was an effort put forth by the entire nation, everyone sacrificed, there were no new cars for the length of the war, food, gas and tires were rationed among other things. Scrap metal drives, Victory Gardens, Victory Bonds, Rosie the Riveter, etc, etc..

I grew up reading magazines from the WWII era, National Geographic in particular, and every single issue had at least one and usually more articles about the war, with combat photography, maps of battle zones and a hell of a lot more.

Today it's very easy for the average civilian to forget that there is even any war going on.

These soldiers and Marines feel very much cut off from civilian society, they are living a different reality entirely and that was absolutely not the case in WWII.

Even in Vietnam, civilians back home were aware to some extent of what was going on, that is almost completely untrue today, it's all hidden away, like something of which we are ashamed.

The difference is the nature of the wars.

During WWI and WWII, a soldier could go back into the "rear areas" and be perfectly safe. They could have some R&R, and recover from the traumas they experienced on the front lines.

In Vietnam and now Iraq, there are no "rear areas". War against insurgents means your rear areas are just as dangerous as the front lines. Our soldiers do not get any rest in theater. There's no time to recuperate, to process the horrors they've experienced. They just build and build until the solder rotates out, or they break.

In Vietnam, as bad as it was, once a soldier finished his one-year TOD, he was home. Now, they can be sent back for three, four, even five TODs. They can get stop-lossed over there even of their enlistment is up. They are a basically slave force being thrown repeatedly into a meat grinder.

I had an uncle who was in Italy during some of the worst fighting of WWII. He saw horrible things. At some point he disappeared and was not heard from again for over a year. He turned up in an asylum in France... he did not know his name for the longest time. Afterwards he returned home to a normal life with his wife and son. He was a very quiet peaceful man, and he struggled with depression for the rest of his life. He had electroshock therapy during the fifties.

Most people outside the family did not know his story except that he was a veteran, and he never talked about the war. In those days he was called "shell shocked" - no PTSD diagnosis. But I believe he suffered from the traumatic effects of being in the war long after the war.

I know a couple of vietnam vets who still struggle with having killed people 40 years ago.

Some people come through things that just crush others. There's no way to knowing who can handle what. I know that I saw my friend's fathers fall apart - these strong men I'd known all my life - when they started talking about their war experiences. It was quite jarring to see them break down and sob, almost fifty years later.

It never ends, does it?

There were men in my little town who didn't make it home in good shape. I didn't mean to imply that all the men I knew, the WWII veterans, had come through unscathed.

One man, it was rumored that he'd been a bombardier that flew a lot of missions and on one particularly harrowing flight, there was a fly caught in his small space. That poor man walked around our town, silent, swiping at the air, always swiping at that fly that only he could see.

Another man who had seen a lot of infantry combat, hand-to-hand, seemed all right most of the time, but there were days when he was found saying Mass at the parking meters, crying uncontrollably. People learned to let him be, to let him finish the Mass, and then they would help him home.

People were kind, and I love that memory, but those poor men, like your uncle. I am so sorry .............................

I have worried for a long time that some techniques used for PTSD may make symptoms worse rather than better by causing people to focus on the memories and how horrible they were, thus strengthening them.

There is some research to this effect. Most people don't realize that "trauma therapy" is in many cases being run and delivered by the same people who created the recovered memory and satanic ritual abuse debacles in the 1980's and 1990's. These are the "trauma specialists" in many cases. They have moved on from sexual abuse victims to veterans, and they are working from seriously flawed ideas about what is good for people in treating trauma symptoms.

Lots of veterans are being taught to look for "buried" memories of trauma and are taken through the same garbage techniques that turned a generation of women into permanent victims. And even when "repressed memories" aren't involved, the way the therapist teaches the client to deal with actual, horrific memories may actually harm rather than help. There is emerging research that urging people to review and re-experience the memories in therapy sessions actually strengthens the memory pathways and makes people MORE distressed than they would have been without therapy.

A recent study showed that people funnelled to trauma therapists after a disaster actually had MORE PTSD symptoms a year later than people with similar experiences who did not receive such "help."

I wonder if this young man was in "treatment" with a trauma ghoul.

"trauma ghouls" - a great appellation - are working for and with the VA?

I'd never heard of this before, and it's absolutely horrifying, but, you know, like you, it makes me wonder..............

The government back then actually took care of the vets when they returned home. It saw to it that they could get jobs, have homes, education, the works.

Second, the soldiers in WWII had the satisfaction of knowing that they fought for a worthy cause. That fact alone has to be a source of considerable comfort when the memories of the war come crashing through. Fighting in a place like Iraq, where you don't know who's friend and who's foe, when you see so much death and pain and misery, and some part of you knows that it's all based on lies, that has to fuck with the head.

Third, WWII was such a massive undertaking on the part of America that virtually everybody played a part. People back home rationed supplies and grew their own vegetables. The women went to work in the factories building equipment. All of the nation was wrapped up in the war, even those that weren't even there. This war? We civilians are so far removed from it that we really have no idea of what the soldiers are going through. And thus, when they come back, they find a world largely the same as when they left. People back here are the same as when the troops left them, but they come back quite different.

I can only imagine how hard it must be to integrate back into a society that has no idea of what's going on inside of you. Most of these soldiers are just kids. At their age I was trying to find ways to fit in in college. They just fought a war, saw people get killed, maybe killed people themselves, and now they have to do the same things I did at their age, only with a hell of a lot more baggage on their shoulders. Finding oneself when they're young is a challenge for anybody. Much more so for those that have seen so much reality.

explained to me that the military likes to get them really, really young, because those kids will believe whatever you tell them, and they are also unformed enough - their brains haven't yet matured - to comprehend their mortality.

In his words, "they're all ten feet tall and bulletproof."

Another way of saying "cannon fodder."

Imagine the confusion they must experience if they follow the news in any way, and they realize that it was all - as you pointed out - based on lies. They're out there, doing what they're ordered to do, and it's all horrible, and they are trying to deal with the reality that it's bullshit. They're not heroes, they're hired murderers.

How does anyone deal with that kind of conflict, let alone a kid?

I feel so bad for them, for their families, and I think Obama sending them to Afghanistan is a HUGE mistake.

So does my Marine friend, who is currently working as a mercenary, for an organization that is in charge of moving ordnance over there.

It's criminal.........................

Pathetic...

Make them endure horrors no one should have to see even once and send them back year after year to see it again and expect them to be able to leave it all on the battlefield. Sorry, but humans just aren't wired that way.

they don't care. Once you're back home, you're on your own. Try to get help, and get laughed at.

These kids are used and abandoned, like cheap whores.

Why shouldn't they want to die?

But I can understand not being able to handle living with that memory.

and find dead bodies.

It never leaves you. Watching them die, well, I can't even imagine ...........................

ETA in my cabbie days I met one young soldier who told me his whole day in Iraq basically consisted of carrying the dead to trucks and burial sites. I can't even fathom how you shut off your empathy long enough to do it,

http://www.suicidewall.com/SWStats.html

'While doing research for his novel, Suicide Wall, Alexander Paul contacted Point Man International and was given the name of a retired VA doctor, and conducted a phone interview with him. In that interview, the doctor related that his estimate of the number of Vietnam Veteran suicides was 200,000 men, and that the reason the official suicide statistics were so much lower was that in many cases the suicides were documented as accidents, primarily single-car drunk driving accidents and self inflicted gunshot wounds that were not accompanied by a suicide note or statement. According to the doctor, the under reporting of suicides was primarily an act of kindness to the surviving relatives.

If the estimate of over 150,000 veterans of the Vietnam War having committed suicide since returning home is true, the figure would be almost three times the number killed in the war. When these deaths are added to the 50,000 plus Vietnam War casualties, the number approaches the 292,000 American casualties of World War II.'

Is there a magic number we have to reach before this madness ends?

and it will be on obamas head from now on..

I brought up this subject a couple of months ago on salon.com and got absolutely blasted for my daring to suggest that our troops in ANY WAY were responding differently to this war than WWII. People accused me of sipping tea in some high tone hotel and looking down my nose at the maligned serviceman. What I was trying to suggest, apparently clumsily, was what many of you have mentioned: that our response to the servicemen is different, our society's expectation of the maturity of young men is different, and certainly our belief in the war is WAY different.

I'm in the mental health field myself and work in a state mental hospital. Last year, one of my friends left the hospital to work for a government contractor working with PTSD-diagnosed vets which uses a virtual reality setup to make the vet re-experience what they went through in Iraq. I admit it sounds a little bit sadistic ("good morning! Let's go back to the worst morning of your life. Wait, let me pump in the small of burning flesh into the room") but the research on this program is phenomenally good in terms of self report of the men and women after they've gone through the program.

The answer, of course, is to not get ourselves into these hideously damaging foreign adventures. But we can't seem to do that, can we?