Warriors and Suicide

I have the unfortunate luck of being in San Diego as a city mourns the death of one of its greatest heroes. Last week, San Diego Chargers LB Junior Seau tragically took his life after his retirement from the NFL. Watching his family in local newscasts is one of the most heart-wrenching things I’ve witnessed in quite some time. Most have postulated that this was done due to the concussions he sustained during his illustrious career in football. I am neither a psychologist, nor an “expert” on the subject, but due to my own experiences, I’d like to add some insight as to why things like this occur.

About a month ago, a study came out that surmised that 70% of the suicides in the United States are done by veterans. I know that this makes sense, because there was a day I almost became one of those statistics. Were it not for the luck of having a dear friend who serves as my guardian angel, my much less noteworthy eulogy would have been in a newspaper about 12 years ago. Knowing how blessed my life is, I look back and understand how these things come about for so many, as well as the thousands upon thousands of us that deal with this on a regular basis.

As noted on my blog description, I spent five years in the Marine Corps with four of those years spent in combat expeditions. The moment you feel your mortality and duress of being in a jarring situation, you learn quite quickly that the fear of being seriously injured or killed serves you no purpose in battle, and those feelings are locked away to prevent you from feeling vulnerable. Much like sports, the chances of your success depend not only on your ability to act in the face of death, but also by the work with those that go into battle with you. For all of the experts in the subject, very few know first hand what it’s like the first time a bullet comes in your direction and you have milliseconds to make a decision that will determine your life or death. Those of us who are lucky to come back alive live with that demon long after the battlefield is left. It is a choice most of us volunteered to make, but stories are just stories until it looks you dead in the eye. This, however, is the indelible mark of one who chooses to be a warrior.

Warriors of all kinds are made up of a specific kind of person. Once you have been trained to focus on the battle and less on your safety, this becomes ingrained in your soul the moment you experience what you learned. And this little package never leaves.

From the days I spent in my beloved Corps, I know 11 of my brothers, first hand, who died doing what they knew how to do best. I finally got to visit the grave of my best friend at Fort Rosecrans a month ago, and I can tell you that the loss never goes away. You might learn to accept the costs of being a warrior, but it sits somewhere in your mind each and every day.

When I got out of the military, my free time was dedicated to martial arts. Though the possibility of violence is apparent, I relished it because that is what my soul knew best. In two years I was competing in open martial arts tournaments. Two years after that, I started fighting in MMA matches. A year later, I was also competing in full contact stick fighting matches. It’s what gave me purpose, and I breathed for each moment I could next push my limitations and become the best warrior I knew how to be.

Though it was in an amateur status, between 1999 and 2001, I won three world martial arts championships in both stick fighting and staff fighting. I still look at my medals and feel the solace that I had the day I won them. One of those medals are missing, because I gave it to one of my Marine Corps brothers in a hospital in Baltimore as he was in a coma from pancreatitis. It’s missing, because two years ago he stopped staying in contact with all of us who remained close, and died of a heart attack at the age of 42. He was no more well adjusted than the rest of us, but as he fought for his life and dealt with his wife leaving him while he was in the hospital, a piece of him had already died. He had moved in with a girl who found him convenient, and now all of his belongings are gone from us and his family.

Cpl. Thomas Neal Kemp was a hero. He was great man. He was kind and decent, and always gave of himself to others anything he could, because that what his purpose. But his will to live went away after he tried to open that little box of feelings and emotions he kept locked away the moment someone he loved started to see the flaws from that box instead of what made him who he was. I almost beat him to the front of the line.

I’ve been married more than once, and I have not been the best at letting down my guard. My first wife had brought me to that same place my brother was with not wanting to live anymore. The fights and arguments had gone on for so long that we decided to get divorced. During that time, I got the nasty phone calls and letters from attorneys alleging what a horrible person I was, even when they didn’t contain the truth. But living with that for so long, the truth doesn’t stay with you as much as living with the idea that you are not the hero you used to be. For all the greatness you accomplished in life, you start to see yourself as a shell in the Hall of What Was.

During a year and half of what seemed like an endless string of court appearances and fighting to keep my sanity, I had come to the end of my line. I had finally figured that I was going to cut the brake line on my car and drive off a bridge. The plan made sense to me at the time. If my body was discovered and an investigation done into the cause, the authorities would determine that my brakes had been cut and I lost control of the vehicle that traveled with me to my end. I had the knife in my car that day as I went to work, believing it would be my last.

Luckily for me, a woman I worked with said “good morning” to me, and was able to read the pain in my eyes as I tried to hide what lived with me. She gave me a hug, and let me know that everything was going to be alright, and she would be there if I needed anything. The divine hand of Providence set upon me that day. I put the knife from my car into the dumpster, and I never looked back. I still talk to her in some fashion every day 12 years later, always thanking her for saving my life. Were it not for her, this story would have been told by a different person, and that story would be a little news blurb that people would say, “What a shame” and forget about soon thereafter.

Though it’s been twelve years, I still deal with that demon in some way every day. Times get tough, and I think about it as though I was thinking of what groceries I needed to pick up at the store. For people like us, this is common.

You need to understand that as you spend your life learning how to put the fear away to do what needs to be done, it doesn’t take much from someone you love or trust to pull that out of you when you let your guard down. Psychiatrists can tell you until they are blue in the face that it’s ok to share your feelings and not be guarded. They can tell you that having flaws makes you no less of a person than anyone else, but for those who live with the soul of a fighter, that will end horribly unless the only people they love and trust don’t exploit that in a moment of anger. I have yet to meet one of those people, and odds are, neither has anyone else. 

So here is some simple advice for those that try to understand why veterans, football players, boxers, and fighters take their life, even if it is looks from the outside that they had everything to live for:

1. Know who they used to be, because what made them the person that stands before you still live with those qualities that run their life.

2. No matter how much you’d like to knock them down a rung to make yourself feel better in a moment of hurt or anger, they never fall just one rung, and odds are they’ll be dead long before they’re supposed to be.

3. Before you decide that one of these heroes is no better than you are, think of what you could have done walking in their shoes. If you know you couldn’t, please think about what made them able to do it and acknowledge it to them.

4. Most importantly, know that these kind of people have a switch in them that isn’t like yours. Despair does horrible things to a warrior, and if you’re going to be involved in their lives somehow, never forget that telling them they’re not a hero anymore and shoving their flaws in their face could cost a wife her husband, a mother her son, a father his daughter, and children their parents.

The world we live in requires all kinds of people, and those that protect your freedom, fight on your behalf, sacrifice their health for your enjoyment, do the amazing things you wish you could do, are a different breed of person. The line between life and death is not something you will know like they do. Respect that if you want them to grow old.

Posted by The Headhunter Chronicles 10 May Permalink

A Path Back To The American Way

     We live in very strange times here in the New World. After 235 years, it seems the American public has forgotten why our nation exists. The reason used to be because enough people were tired of being told what to by the self-titled “Elites.” Somebody finally had the gumption to stand up and say “Enough!” to entrenched established types, willing to fight to the death for the ideal of real freedom. It seems as though every 100 years, some folks who long to return to the European ways of old, and a “transformed” society must come to America for the country’s protection of itself. It took 40 years to recover from the damage of the Progressives after Wilson and Roosevelt, and now we get this horrid cycle all over again.

     It’s not that idealism of a perfect society hasn’t been brewing since the “brilliance” of the hippies of the 1960’s, or since the Bolsheviks started making their way to our shores, or even since Margaret Sanger thought it was her duty to rid the poor and minorities of having more children than she thought was “necessary.” America, however, was still predominately populated by those who believed that work ethic and busting your tail was the ideal way to take care of themselves and their families, and that spirit and ideal was what made this country different from any other on Earth.

     Not once was there an instance of a family in Florida building a make-shift raft and trying to reach the shores of Cuba in the name of freedom. Not once was there a family who risked their lives crossing the border of Mexico stuffed in the engine compartment of a truck for the chance to have a better life. Not once was there a shipping container packed with Americans, yearning to escape government executions to be prosperous in China. The reason is simple: no place on Earth holds greater potential for happiness and exceptionalism than the United States. Whole countries despise us for that very reason. There are complete religious institutions bent on destroying our way of life for giving a bad example to those they wish oppressed. We, however, live in a day where now it is so offensive to point out those that threaten our way of life that we bow to their outcries and submit our liberty in bits and pieces each day, hoping they will just like us, because those who are now in power used to believe the world would be perfect with “flower power.”

     Remember them? The drug-induced, free love activists that spit on young men coming home from Vietnam because they didn’t agree with the elitists’ war in Southeast Asia? Those are the clowns WE put in charge, because some talking heads decided that’s what we needed. Maybe we didn’t vote for them directly, but our apathy let these people slither from under their Utopian rocks and tell us we were horrible people if we didn’t let them have their way. The fighting spirit of our founders, the fighting spirit of John Brown, the fighting spirit of Fredrick Douglass, the fighting spirit of all of those oppressed by one government or another has been re-written or discarded in the name of “peaceful unity.” What the masses have failed to remember, or even learn in the first place, is that in any society, there will always be those who believe that they were endowed to exert their ways upon us, because it was what they believed, and they know better than you.

     This is not a piece about Barack Obama, because he didn’t do this by himself, nor did he first come up with these ideas. This is about generations that forsake the words of their families and their past in an attempt to spit in the face of history and humanity so they can say they knew better than their parents. 

     But believe it or not, there is a way to fix this disaster. There are pillars of strength and the divine hand of Providence still waiting to be grasped once again with pride, honor, and dignity to the human existence. This, however, needs you to  have conviction in the inevitable. Mankind will always yearn to be free and to have the stories of their lives told to keep them immortal. Ready?

Health Care:

     As those with robes on high clash with those perched in offices on high, We The People can exert the greatest power of all: Common sense by the masses, instead of for the masses. If there is such a great crisis in health care, it can be easily fixed. The rule of law sets thousands of restrictions on how we receive health care. Change them. It doesn’t take much to realize that if we simply allowed people to pay for coverage for anybody, not only would there be no crisis, but we can eliminate Medicaid and Medicare in the process.

     Think about it: if we lifted the restriction of who we could pay for to be insured, we could put our parents on our policies when they get to their golden years. If we took away the restrictions of only being able to carry spouses and immediate children, we could cover our friends when they lose their jobs. Domestic partners: covered. How about those loudmouths like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates? If they think they REALLY make too much money, they could add the poor to their policies, and guarantee they have coverage. When we are given the choices, we are always the most charitable by nature. I would not mind helping a few in need if I am allowed to help. So would others. It’s the sense of community that gets whispered in newspapers of years gone by. It’s the g-d given right of every human being to help as many as they wish to help. The problem is that we gave that right away to a bunch of control-freaks so that they can turn around and tell us we don’t give enough. Take back the rules, and you can take back what it means to “love thy neighbor.”

The Economy:

     Stop with the tax-payer funded welfare system, and let Americans help each other up. Take away the restrictions to start over again, and I guarantee that there will be enough people to help the down-trodden start a lawn care business, a barber shop, a garage, a community bank, a farm, a new sense of hope they can hold and shape in their own hands. We built the strongest economic nation in the world on those principles. We didn’t screw up the last 200 years, like the politicians and news harpies are telling us. They screwed up because they don’t have an honest heart. There are evil people in this world. You can’t make them go away. What you can do is not give them the authority to think on your behalf, mortgaging away our future generations’ chance at success because some self-righteous professor told his sheep that the future had to be filled with rainbows, unicorns, and communes. They are not the majority, and damned if I ever decided to fight for our rights under the Constitution of These United States so that some hippies with no backbone or respect for their fellow man can tell us we were wrong the whole time. You don’t like capitalism? Go join those countries that don’t practice the process and see how well that works out for you. Even Communist China is more capitalist than America. I never thought I would live to see the day where an entire nation would be shamed into giving up what makes us great by a philosophy that deems it acceptable to kill off the masses if they don’t bow down to the Party. But guess what, America? That day is here. Shame on us for letting that happen, and stealing the hope of our children in the name of conformity.

A Sense of American Exceptionalism:

The rest of the world hates this part. Not because they’re better, but because they cannot come up with a reasonable argument to dispute it. The world is now run on the internet. Guess who came up with that idea? Gotlieb Benz invented the first automobile, but guess who invented mass production to make it available all over the world? Movies? Us. Radio stations? Us. Jeans? Us. This list can go on forever, but I think you get the point. We were conceived in innovation, and we do it better than anyone else on earth.

Even though we have a president that bows to the rest of the world, apologizes to terrorists who try to kill us for our way of life, and has called each and every one of us arrogant and lazy, we still find a way to make this country the best place in the world to live. Other countries might have better history, better food, or better scenery, but no one gives the individual a better opportunity to have a life of happiness and success. Through racial tensions, class warfare, and false demagoguery, We The People still find a way to live life to the fullest and smile in the face of adversity.

Never forget how good we have it. Realize we can make it better yet. Love your neighbor, do good deeds for the sake of goodness, and most of all, remember the strength you have in yourself to make the lives of our children and grandchildren an even better story than our own.

The philosopher Voltaire once wrote, “Every man is guilty of the good they have not yet done.” This is why our work is never done to make our world a better place, and that starts in your home, on your street, in your neighborhood, in our America.

Be strong in the face of adversity, and the divine hand of Providence will, once again, shine over this great land. May each and every one of us continue to be blessed.

Posted by The Headhunter Chronicles 19 April Permalink