Irma S. Chambers
SUICIDAL SOLDIERS
What did you expect from me, when I came back from this war?
Sometimes, I feel it would have been better for you, had a Chaplin just knocked on our door.
You remember the old me and expected everything to be the same
You refused to see that I came back half insane.
The memories of what I did and saw take control of my mind
I was not able to relax, sleep or unwind
Always feeling like I was on a ship about to sink
I did not get help, afraid what people would think
I didn’t know who I was anymore and god knows that I tried
I’m sorry that I became a homecoming suicide
I don’t expect you to understand why I chose this path
But living became an unbearable wrath
To come back home and see that life went on and no one really cares
Was more traumatic for me and hard to bare
To hear people complain about taxes and traffic drove me nuts
After I saw my buddies die in their own blood and guts
I saw poverty and hate beyond comprehension
We lived in constant fear and unbelievable tension
Never knowing if that cute child would blow us up
Or if that dead animal along the road has a bomb up its butt!!
Yes I killed, that’s what everyone asks
But no one cares that my soul is gone replaced by a mask
Who did you expect to return after a year in hell?
You wanted me to act like nothing had changed and I was well
Now you watch them lower me in the ground
As the bugle mournfully plays no one makes a sound
The tears run freely down your cheeks
As the Chaplin begins to speak:
“Here lies a man that had unspeakable pain
Let not his death be in vain
Let’s honor the man that we all knew
And know in our hearts that he loved us too
We cannot begin to understand the demons he tried to hide
He was a soldier who had a homecoming suicide
Let’s pray for the soul that he lost at war
And that he’s in God’s arms and in pain no more
Soldiers of man are special in god’s eye
They sacrifice all, when they die
For you and for me they give up their body and soul
They experience things that we’ll never know
As we all gather here today, least us not forget the man
Who is now a soldier of god and guarding heavens land.”
©Copyright November 1, 2007 by Irma S. Chambers
Author’s Note: I wrote this after I read an article in the newspaper about how an alarming numbers of soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan are committing suicide. The article broke my heart.
As a gulf war veteran I who served in Saudi Arabia in 91’ it made me think of the one and only traumatic thing I experienced while over there. I was 21 years old, single and assigned to HHC 1st Calvary Division out of Fort Hood, Texas. I was at an FOB called The Coral. I was walking down a path to my tent after a shower when the sky light up and I looked up and saw what looked like a comet in the air, before I knew it the ground shook with a great explosion. The next hour was pure terror for me as the alarms went off and people started running to get their gear on and into the bunkers. I remember being in mop level 4 for several hours, listening to the sound of my heart and breathing through the gas mask. It turned out The Corral was not hit but the towers in Dhahran were. We were less than 2 miles from the towers; a scud hit an apartment building there that killed about a dozen soldiers.
It’s funny, how over a decade later I still freak out on the fourth of July, when I see the fireworks display light up the sky. It made me very compassionate to my husband’s feelings of apprehension this Fourth of July when we watched the firework display six months after he returned from Afghanistan. He experienced several attacks a months while he was deployed.
I still cannot smell diesel fuel without getting an instant vision in my mind of all the convoys I was in while in Saudi, or how when I see a white Toyota pick-up truck and it makes me see 15-20 Bedouins riding in the bed begging us for MREs and bottled water.
I cannot even imagine what our soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan have stored away in the crevices of their memories. The things they have seen and done. They spent a year away from home and their loved ones then are thrust back into society and told to go back to their jobs and to their families as if that year never happened to them.
Unfortunately it’s not that simple. Many come back afraid to get medical treatment for fear of losing their jobs or being labeled and stigmatized as a “head case” if they seek help.
We cannot expect them to return and be who they were when they left. How do we help the thousands of soldiers who are returning from this war who are maimed physically and mentally?
How can we expect them to be the same men and women they were when they return when they have forever been changed?
Their minds, spirits and souls altered by their experiences of war? We expect them to return and fit back into society and go back to work where ever that may be and be like everyone else complaining about taxes and how bad traffic was.
Can you imagine how petty all that is to a soldier, who may have taken a life over there and must live with that for the rest of their lives?
How everyday things we take for granted may give them anxiety and grief, being stuck in traffic may cause paranoid thoughts as they remember an ambush they were in: A child on the side of the road, a memory of a child who set off a bomb. The backfire of an old truck may cause a violent reaction from a soldier who was under fire.
This war is returning more dead soldiers than those sent back in a pine box. They are the living dead. They are a shell of their former selves. How do we save them? I don’t know?