A suicide note I never wrote

Provoked by a fit of insomnia and the magnitude of my troubled thoughts, I called The Veterans Crisis Line at 2 a.m., Wednesday.

That’s the first time I’ve had to do that, and I hope it will be the last, because it drained every ounce of courage I had.  Lately life has been too much for me.

In the past three weeks I have had to contend with my eviction, the death of my grandmother, my position at The Eagle, a 15-credit hour class load, and financial woes stemming from a laundry list of problems.

I spent five years as a United States Marine with two combat deployments and four continents under my boots. I ought to be used to stress and politics, but the camel’s back broke several straws ago.

During my tour of duty, I maintained a callous outlook toward suicide because I saw it in-line with someone who fakes a cold; it’s a thinly masked attempt to avoid duty.  Suicide was taboo from the beginning of boot camp, and I remember recruits looking for an easy-out once they realized the recruiter lied to them. The stock threat was that they’d cut their wrists with cheap issued BIC razors.

Suicidal recruits were often transferred to a special separations platoon for a few long, miserable weeks, and then sent home with a general discharge; failure to adapt.

Most of these “kids” weren’t ready to be yelled at by drill instructors, and the standard reaction is, “Well, then why the hell did you join the Marines?”

As a recruit, I was forced to stand guard and watch these phony suicide cases.

It’s a degrading activity, but it’s necessary.  You don’t prepare someone for combat by having a namby-pamby “feeling acknowledgement” hour, and there were no campfire Kumbayas.  That cultivation carried on as soon as I entered the Fleet Marine Force.

Commanders would harp on the warning signs in hour-long safety stand-down and suicide prevention briefs. We were sat down and forced to view the same 45-slide powerpoint presentations every time a Marine on base killed himself. It was about as compassionate as the government can make any activity, but there was something I always noticed.

When a guy made up his mind, he would walk to a porta-john and suck-start his rifle, but he rarely set off any red flags. Everyone was left baffled as to why he took the easy way out.

This isn’t to say that I didn’t care for my fellow Marines, I had something a lot of Non-Commissioned Officers didn’t; a conscience. But if you vocalized wanting to end it, you were shamed.  That was just part of the culture, as far as I could tell, no matter how principally messed up that idea seems.

Paraphrasing a line from Gustav Hasford; “A glass rifle will shatter if fired.”

As a leader, you can’t rely on that.

If I was struggling, I never mentioned it. The mission was first; troop welfare, second. And so it should be, after all. The pretension of the world’s most deadly and disciplined fighting force carries a larger-than-life John Wayne attitude, along with an aura of being “tougher than chicken lips.”

But I can’t convince myself of the machismo dream anymore.  Maybe it’s the “liberal arts” education that’s softened my will to fight, but most people on campus can’t even relate to how that feels.

I used to be able to rely on the Roman Catholic Church, a faith I was raised in, but a year in Afghanistan and a semester of Western civ dispelled that illusion for me.  I’m not an atheist, but I’ve come to the opinion that if there is a God, he’s a cruel and miserable son-of-a… fill-in-the-blank.

And because that’s my opinion, maybe God has dropped these circumstances in my lap just to spite me; to teach me a lesson.  I was raised to believe that suicide sends you straight to Hell, and if that fiery pit is my fate, so be it.

But if that’s God’s plan for me, he can do his own fricking dirty work. —The Veterans Crisis Line is 1-800-273-8255.