{"id":61914,"date":"2015-09-20T09:53:51","date_gmt":"2015-09-20T13:53:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=61914"},"modified":"2015-09-20T09:54:09","modified_gmt":"2015-09-20T13:54:09","slug":"military-suicide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=61914","title":{"rendered":"Military suicide"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chief Tango sends us a link to the New York Times<\/a> which discusses what one group of Marines did in reaction to a number of suicides among their mates when they came back from war. <\/p>\n

\u201cReal talk, guys, let\u2019s make a pact, right here,\u201d Travis Wilkerson said. \u201cI don\u2019t want to go to any more funerals. Let\u2019s promise to reach out and talk. Get your phones out, put my number in. Call me day or night. I\u2019m not doing this again.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’ve been saying for years that the answer to the scourge of suicides among veterans is inside each of us, there are no silver bullets, so to speak. No amount of lectures in our units for quarterly sensitivity training check marks on your company records, the VA is going to try to counsel veterans and they’ll pump you full of drugs that may or may not help. But the real answer is in our hearts.<\/p>\n

He sat down with a therapist, a young woman. After listening for a few minutes, she told him that she knew he was hurting, but that he would just have to get over the deaths of his friends. He should treat it, he recalled her saying, \u201clike a bad breakup with a girl.\u201d<\/p>\n

The comment caught him like a hook. Guys he knew had been blown to pieces and burned to death. One came home with shrapnel in his face from a friend\u2019s skull. Now they were killing themselves at an alarming rate. And the therapist wanted him to get over it like a breakup?<\/p>\n

Mr. Bojorquez shot out of his seat and began yelling. \u201cWhat are you talking about?\u201d he said. \u201cThis isn\u2019t something you just get over.\u201d<\/p>\n

He had tried getting help at the V.A. once before, right after Mr. Markel\u2019s funeral, and had walked out when he realized the counselor had not read his file. Now he was angry that he had returned. With each visit, it appeared to him that the professionals trained to make sense of what he was feeling understood it less than he did.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

No one understands what we’ve experienced as well as another veteran, irrespective of the war that they served in. That’s why in our little community here at TAH, we have veterans of the Korean War, the Vietnam War, veterans of the Beirut bombing, Grenada, Panama, Desert Storm, and the current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Being a combat veteran is always the same. <\/p>\n

I learned that after my service when I read every first-person account I could find about the Civil War. I get in email exchanges with some of you folks when you reach out for a chat. I can’t tell you how many emails I get from lurkers who thank me for the blog because we’ve talked them back from the ledge without even realizing that’s what we were doing. I guess understanding that veterans aren’t alone in their experiences is the One Big Thing That Counts;<\/p>\n

After swearing off the V.A., Manny Bojorquez turned increasingly to friends for support. Late-night calls and texts with guys from the battalion seemed to help more than therapy ever did.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I guess that’s why these Medal of Honor recipients got together to make this video, because they understand that;<\/p>\n

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Chief Tango sends us a link to the New York Times which discusses what one group … Military suicide<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[118],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61914","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-veterans-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61914","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=61914"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61914\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=61914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=61914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=61914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}