The 8000-Mile Sniper Shot
I wrote this post and published it tonight over at the blog of the Marine Infantry Veterans Foundation, a charity organization built by infantry Marines with the goal of taking care of our own. I’d really like more eyes on this post and more people to know about an issue that I’ve been personally touched by, and to learn of a couple of Marines who survived deployments to war, only to come home and take their own lives.
When you leave the military, your mind is usually filled with a range of emotions. There’s joy over your newfound freedom, sadness at leaving brothers behind, and anxiety over the unknown. In June 2010, when I picked up my discharge papers from the Marine Corps, I lived through it and felt them all.
Now two years later, I am close to graduation from The University of Tampa, run asuccessful military satire website, and am lucky to continue working with military veterans. It wasn’t an easy road, and many times I felt alone and helpless.
For a heartbreaking and rising number of veterans, those emotions can lead to a devastating end: suicide.
Navy Cross recipient and former Corporal Jeremiah Workman, who dealt with his own emotional trauma and thoughts of suicide, refers to it as an enemy making an 8000-mile sniper shot.
That’s what happened with Seth Smith, from Kansas City, Missouri. I first met Seth on a training exercise in Okinawa, Japan with 3rd Marine Division. As one of a small handful of infantry Marines in a unit full of different specialties, it was a lonesome time for me.
After seeing Corporal Smith directing forklifts — with his flak jacket set up much like an infantryman — I approached him.
“Are you a grunt?,” I asked.
He responded no, but after further questioning, it turns out that he was attached to my old unit, 3rd Battalion, 3rd Marines, for a deployment to Iraq in 2009. Instead of being an electrician like he was trained, he was put into an infantry squad with Lima Company. He was grunt-enough to me.
We soon became friends.
About six months after I said goodbye and good luck to 28 year-old Corporal Seth Smith as I left the Marine Corps, he was honorably discharged and returned home. The following April, he was dead.
He didn’t give a warning, or leave a note. He was engaged and had a son named Carter.
Please continue reading the whole piece here.
Category: Terror War, War Stories
I do not have the words to describe how reading this grieves me.
Having just retired this past December, I know about the 8,000 mile sniper shot. Fortunately, my wife and family got me through the rough spot. My heart goes out for his fiance and son.
The brotherhood of deployment is impossible to replicate under any circumstances. There’s not a day that goes by when I don’t think about Iraq. There’s a very large void that many warriors can’t seem to ever fill.
I fully agree with the above comments. Do the rough spots ever get smoothed out? I cant say. Not a day goes bye that I don’t think of my deployment family and the good soldiers lost on red river 44 on that September day in 2008.
For each of you who has and will face the demons – you need to know that you are not alone. Ever.
Many, perhaps even most, of us here have faced demons in some form, so we know that even the darkest days can turn into brighter days. We know it because we have proved it to be so.
Just do not ever forget that we are with you, even when we are not physically in the same room with you. Remember us. Remember that we value you, your service, and that you are a worthy member of our community.
A very good friend of mine described that feeling this way:
Sometimes it’s anger and you turn it on yourself. Sometimes it’s just a big, black hole and you can’t see the bottom, but you know you’re falling into it with no idea if you’ll ever find your way out. But you have to do just that, and sometimes you just make the unfortunate choice.
#3 I cant put it a better way not a day goes by I dont still smell the stink of that place