22 a Day: Carter’s Story
Preface: The following is primarily the transcript from a conversation I had with Carter* more than sixteen months before his twin brother committed suicide, and more than eighteen months before he killed himself. His words are his own, and though I have not transcribed every detail, I have preserved his voice.
I met Carter in the fall of 2015. He had recently moved into the house across the street from my friend, George*. When George got around to introducing himself to his new neighbor, Carter mentioned his time in the service. Knowing that I was looking for stories from veterans who had been to Afghanistan, George asked Carter if he would be willing to let me interview him. He happily agreed. Given that the both of us were young and married, I asked George if he’d come along for propriety’s sake. George did me one better, offering to host the interview.
No more than a week later, I was sitting at George’s kitchen table when Carter got things rolling with the crisp cracking of one of my husband’s home brews. It was ten thirty in the morning, but because he worked third shift, the clean winter sunlight that streamed across the kitchen table wasn’t a cue to throw back something caffeinated. Carter took a long pull at the chilled beer while I matched the gesture, slurping at a carafe of coffee that had gone cold during my hour-long drive north. George looked on from his seat across the table.
“Thanks so much for doing this,” I effused, rifling through my notebook for the pages of questions I’d scrawled to guide us through our talk.
Carter shrugged. His arms were crossed over his chest and his cool eyes analyzed me as I fumbled with my voice recorder, which refused to cooperate. I sensed Carter was sniffing me out, wondering whether I was going to waste his time. He tipped the brown glass at a higher angle, placed it down again, and started to talk about how irritated he felt about the lack of respect for flag protocol at his workplace.
It was November 15, and only two days before, Islamic terrorists had carried out a set of coordinated, deadly attacks in Paris that left 130 innocents dead and hundreds more injured. Following the attacks, President Obama had issued a directive that all American flags be lowered to half-staff for a period of three days. At the plant where Carter worked, he explained, no one had heeded the order; the flag hung, as ever, at its full height.
“So last night I sent out an e-mail to the entire company,” Carter said, as an impish grin took over his face. “And let’s just say that the flag was flying properly by the time I left at five o’clock this morning.” He went on to explain that the plant manager, who felt Carter had gone over his head, was still angry about the e-mail. “But I was enraged,” he protested. “Someone needed to do something.” He shook his close-shaved head and drew his beefy shoulders closer to a cauliflower ear. “The procedures for handling the flag are drilled into us in the military. And then you get back, and nobody gives a damn.”
With this, Carter took me far deeper than the questions I’d planned to lead with — things like, “Where did you deploy and when?” Just as my finicky voice recorder decided to engage, I leapt into the meatiest of my questions to catch up with him. “How does it feel,” I asked, “Coming home and being so separate from the American public?”
He barely took a breath before giving his answer. “I don’t like to talk about this stuff too much, but from interacting with other vets, through the VFW and the student veterans group at college, we talk and hear about each other’s experiences, and something that I’ve found in common with these guys is that, when you get back, it almost feels like you’re owed. It’s hard to explain that without coming off as arrogant, but I don’t know how else to say that.”
“So,” George said, “You feel like society owes you?”
Looking only at George, Carter opened up with a torrent of thoughts whose meandering interlocks made a strange kind of sense —a sense that, it seemed, Carter had been trying to make of his thoughts for some time.
“We were reservists,” Carter started, “So all of us in the unit were leaving careers or schools to serve. There were guys who deployed with me,” he said, “who, all of a sudden, their main source of income was gone. They were deployed, but they still had expenses, and they had to cover those and support themselves on barely any money. And you feel for them. You can’t help but put yourself in their shoes, and you’re wondering, ‘What are my countrymen doing for me? What are they doing for my family?’” Still glancing only in George’s direction, Carter continued. “So, with that being said, when you come home, you have your welcome home party and you’re on cloud nine. You have every single emotion going through your mind. My wife and I, we were high school sweethearts, we had only been with each other, and I looked at her and she was totally different, and I was totally different. We had to reestablish from where we’d left off, which felt like looking into a desert horizon. And that’s tough, from what I experienced. But a lot of the people I came home with had gotten divorced while we were overseas. They’d been served papers. So they come home to this gym, surrounded by other people’s families, all happy and hugging and kissing, and they have no one,” he said, emphasizing his last two words. “In my unit, there were at least five people who had no one there for them — either they didn’t have family, or their family was too far away. After everyone with families had left, I waited with those last five until we got them each an expensive taxi to get them on their way. But I thought, ‘Why couldn’t we have five taxis paid for, waiting for them, so they don’t have to be on their own?’ I mean, these are guys who just traveled over a week, staying in shitty places, living out of a bag. They’re excited to get home, and then they have to wait to get there.”
“And then,” said Carter with a slight crescendo, “You get home. My twin brother and I deployed together. We moved home together after we came back. We were sleeping in the same beds we’d had growing up, and we just looked at each other like, ‘What do we do? Where do we start?’ We’d both been through the same thing, so we asked each other, ‘Who were you when you left? What were your hobbies?’ Essentially, it’s like growing up all over again. Yeah, you know how to walk and talk and crawl and this and that, but your entire identity changes.
Before deploying, I’d been in community college studying corrections. When I came back, I had no desire to do that, just based on things that I’d encountered with the military police, the Afghan Police. I had no interest. For instance, here, if you or I,” he said, continuing to direct his speech at George, “Saw a man hitting a woman, we’d step in and do something. In Afghanistan, if we were to stop that, it would be like ‘What are you doing? That’s not your place.’ And I thought, I don’t want to be a part of something that’s broken. And we know the justice system is broken. So I went to school for nursing. And my brother and I, we drank…a lot,” he added, holding onto the brown bottle so that it swayed just above the table. “That’s pretty normal when you’re coming back, it’s a thing you go through. You basically have to find your own roots. It was good for us because we went straight home, so we could remember that. But you have to look for the loose ends, and tie those up. The first thing we did was go to Verizon and get cell phones, because we’d given those up before we left. And then we got car insurance for our cars that had been parked out back of my old man’s house for…a long time,” he laughed.
“Essentially, when it comes to coming home, it feels like a wasteland. Time’s passing you by, you don’t know what to do. A lot of people slip into depression. A lot of people just give up. And that’s where that sense of entitlement comes from. I’ve given all this for my country, and where are the people trying to help me come back? To get reengaged? The reengagement process, it’s absolutely the most difficult thing. Especially,” he added emphatically, “for someone who has kids. That family has learned, for the last year, to cope and move on without you, and now, all of the sudden, Daddy is back in the picture, and it throws everyone a curve. You have to decide, when do I insert myself into certain situations? You have to piece the things you’ve read in letters or heard about in phone calls back into reality as you’re coming into it. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle, fitting it all together.”
At this point, Carter took a breath and looked my way for the first time in nearly ten minutes. “Don’t hesitate to stop me,” he said. “I could go on forever.”
It was just the pause I needed. “This is all great,” I assured him. “I’d just like to delve deeper into each of those points.”
So delve, we did.
Over the next half hour, I laced my queries with the military acronyms and jargon that were relics of my years working as an Army civilian. I could tell that Carter had decided I was an ally when he started addressing me, rather than George, when he gave his answers.
At least half of my questions were about Afghanistan, so eventually I asked Carter what it was like to deploy there. He likened arriving at Camp Phoenix in July 2010 to traveling back in time to the 1900s, into a dog-eat-dog world of corruption where western social norms do not apply. He had been especially disgusted with the practice of older men using young boys for sex — a practice he witnessed almost daily as he loaded up local Afghans’ jingle trucks so that they could transport Army goods into different parts of the country.
And yet Carter surprised me by professing that, in spite of his cynicism about certain aspects of Afghan culture, he had hope for the country’s future.
All positivity receded when, while talking about the burn pits on his base, Carter provided a dark and symbolic introduction to a bigger concern.
“The smell of the burn pits, it was always with you,” he said. “You couldn’t escape it. And so, you got to the point where you no longer thought about the pits; they were always there. But once you came home, the suffering began.”
“And trying to file a claim with the VA,” he pressed on, sounding exasperated, “Is absurd. There were times when I was depressed, and I wanted to talk to my wife, but I didn’t want her to think I was weak, to look at me and think, ‘Are you falling apart?’ I’ve shared some things with her, but I’ve never even sat down and had this type of conversation with her. So I decided to go to the VA. I was in college, drinking a lot, and I had a lot of mixed feelings about being home. And, you know, drinking is normal in college, but not when it gets to a certain point, when you’re drinking by yourself, when it’s intentional. Or when you’re thinking, ‘Hey, I’m going to wake up and drink a fifth until I’m silly, and then I’ll feel better.’ At least until you sober up and find your problems are still right where you left them. So I went to the VA, and they gave me a manic depressive diagnosis, along with a bunch of prescriptions. But I wanted to sit down and actually talk with someone, and they said they’d give me a referral and get me in to see someone in a few weeks. So I said, ‘What if I needed psychological help? Like, right now?’ They said, ‘Do you need to go to the emergency room?’ And I said, ‘No, I’m not going to kill myself, but depression can consume me at any point.’”
I gnawed my cheeks as Carter continued.
“All the shitty things I’d heard about the VA, I started to understand them then. No wonder the suicide rate is so high!” he exclaimed. “They’re not helping people when they need it. Because I didn’t come in with razor blades, or say I’d put a gun to my head, or say, you know, ‘I could just hang myself and it would be so easy and I’d be done with it’ — I’m not saying those kinds of things to you at this moment, so you’re saying, ‘Well, we’ll just get back to you in a couple of weeks.’ No,” he said, with a hard shake of his head. “I’m here now. I drove here of my own accord and for someone like me who doesn’t even like to share those kinds of things and would rather just keep them inside, it wasn’t doing me any good. It was just building more frustration and anger. It got to the point where the littlest things would…”
Here, Carter trailed off. He closed his eyes for a moment, and composed himself. “Think about this: somebody could get into a car accident and have PTSD because something tragic happened in a split moment, and their body wasn’t prepared for it. That is the same thing when you get into that C-130 and you’re flying over Afghanistan, not knowing what’s going to happen — is someone going to shoot at that big old aircraft flying through the air? Do you hear a ting? What’s going on? Is that the motor? And then you land, you think, ‘Phew, safe.’ You get out, you run across the stretch of concrete and get all your stuff — your rucksack, your duffel —and it’s like half a mile down the longest concrete walk in incredible heat, so the walk feels like days. You get to the end, you don’t know where to go, where you’re at. You’re trapped…and you’re excited, all these things at once. And then, you have a huge crash. It might be that night. It might be a week later. But it doesn’t matter where you come from, how you’re raised, what type of man you are — or woman — , you’re gonna break. You’re gonna break. You will break down. You hear it all the time. We lived in B-Huts, these wooden shacks that were split off into four rooms. They had walls, but you could look over them, you could overhear conversations. There was no privacy. So you’ll just be laying there and you’ll hear people crying. It’s like, ‘Man, when’s that gonna hit me?’ And then, all of a sudden, it does hit you. You’ll have some people who will come over and say, ‘It’s okay, man, it happens. It doesn’t make you any weaker.’ But then, you know, you might not even hear the mortar hit, but the sirens go off and you wonder, if that mortar was just two degrees off, would it hit me?”
Without a pause, Carter exchanged topics. It’s a slick maneuver I’ve seen accomplished with finesse many a time; before things get too heavy, you redirect towards the closest tangent.
“So, when you come in to the B-Hut, it’s torn up. The last company through didn’t care. They’re like, ‘I’m going home!’ And everything in there is salvaged. You might be able to find a nice bunk, but never a good mattress. You might find a computer chair that maybe had a part missing — a leg broke off, but somebody put a piece of wood on there and pieced it together with tape. And, hey, that was a chair!” he cried.
Carter spent the next five minutes expounding on the joy he found in salvaging things from units on their way out of country, and in renovating his B-Hut. “Basically, you just make it comfortable, which is fun at first. It’s like, ‘I’m surviving,’” he explained.
And for a time, salvaging was enough. As he recalled his adventures in scavenging, Carter’s rapid speech was filled with enthusiasm. He told us about how he used a handsaw and four-by-fours to lift his bed, built himself a desk beneath it from a sheet of plywood, and rigged a mount for his television with 550 cord and eye bolts. He even found a way to keep his cases of bottled Russian water cold by positioning them across from fans blowing air across ice from the dining facility — a trick he’d learned from an older relative who used to own properties in Arizona.
Eventually, though, Carter ran into problems: first and foremost, that the tiny parts he needed for more complicated projects —things like hinges and nails — were in low supply in Afghanistan, where the locals build with what they have: mud, and the pieces of construction material left by foreign occupiers of old. Sometimes, Carter could get what he needed by performing illicit “drug deals,” giving the civilian contractors at Fluor a few hours of labor in exchange for the hardware he needed to build his latest project.
Before long, the initial joy of renovating the B-Hut receded, and that’s when the fear took an even firmer hold, sparked increasingly by the utter foreignness of the Afghan culture.
“Over there, having an AK-47 is like having a pocket knife,” Carter said. “And they know we can’t use our weapons because of the rules of engagement, so they aren’t afraid of us. They call our guns ‘boom sticks,’” he said. “And talking to a local is like talking to someone who’s seven,” Carter said, explaining that, not only is the language barrier, even between locals and interpreters, immense, but that the typical Afghan’s grasp of grammar is remote at best. “These are people who haven’t even seen a toothbrush,” he laughed. “I’m not kidding. You give them one, they try to use it in their hair or their beard. Forget about telling them they need to change them out every month.”
“Here’s another thing,” Carter added. “What would you normally do with a three-year-old in the U.S.? Walk up to them, say, ‘Oh, you’re so cute!’ In Afghanistan,” he scoffed, “With a three-year-old, you walk up to them and take the chance — are you going to try to shoot me? Stab me? They do a lot of things you would not normally see from a three-year-old. So then, where does your trust lie?” He paused. “It’s like, what do you do in a situation where you’re uncomfortable? You’re going to try to relate to something that makes you feel better. You see a group of kids and think, ‘Ahh, they’ve gotta be harmless.’” Making the jarring noise of a shot clock buzzer, Carter said, “ENH! Wrong answer. The only people you can rely on are the ones right next to you, who were broken down and built back up the same way you were.”
Again, Carter swung away from his current point, and got to talking about decompression and coming home. “You’re over there in Kazakhstan, waiting to come home, and you’re thinking, ‘When I come home, I’m gonna get this done, and this, and this,’ and then you get home and you just wanna sit. You’re looking around, and you’re thinking about the mortar that went off fifty feet away, and you’re running to your B-Hut and getting your things and taking shelter in a bunker and then five minutes later, I don’t care if they give me the all clear, I’m running down to the other side across the base to find where my brother is to make sure he’s good. And I held my brother’s hand,” he said, his voice forceful, almost daring George or me to question this simple gesture of humanness. “I’ve never said it to anybody, but I held my brother’s hand, and that’s only when I could find him. There were some times when he would be at the gym a block down, and if something happened, he’d get his equipment and go to the bunker that was closest to him, but we always knew, if we’re in the vicinity, there was this bunker we’d always go to. So I would go to that bunker, and if he wasn’t there, I’d sit there and wait for him.”
Returning to his original thought, Carter plowed on. “The integration process needs to be smooth. You can’t just come back, go through decompression, get to your mobilization station, go through psychological evaluations. Like, that’s not the time I want to deal with that. Of course I’m going to tell you that I’m perfectly fine because you’re not going to hold me from going home tomorrow. So I’m gonna tell you what you need to hear. I am not gonna tell you that I might’ve had suicidal thoughts or maybe my hearing might be messed up in my right ear or maybe I lost some vision in my left eye and maybe I do have a hard time running or breathing. I am not gonna tell you that because you’re standing between me and home.”
And then, Carter brought up what he called a “wild and crazy idea” that he and several other veterans had come up with while working to renovate homes for veterans and their families. “Why can’t anyone who’s coming back from the service have their significant other and their children meet them at a resort? It doesn’t even have to be Orlando. Make it a nice plot of land that has maybe some hills where you can go for a walk with your family, a place that has pool access, maybe a game room, and then, let that service member — that soldier or Marine or sailor — seek the help when they’re ready. Let them see their family, let them deal with their problems in a controlled environment, not in a house where you’re trying to figure out what’s going on and you snap. At this resort, you could walk down a hill to get some counseling instead of getting into your car, going down to the VA and dealing with people who say, ‘Okay, we’ll get you in in two weeks.’ You have it all right there — a one-stop-shop where you can deal with it now, fix it.”
“And while you’re at it, get them a dog,” George said, looking down at his own beloved pup.
“We had dogs,” Carter said. “The chaplains got them, and they’d go around visiting the soldiers. A dog? A dog could change your whole week,” he added with a sincere smile.
“But as far as integration, it needs to be controlled. Because when you get home and you’re going through demobilization, you don’t care. You don’t care, and then you’re going to regret it because when you’re going through all your problems, you’re going to say, ‘Man, I didn’t say anything earlier because I wanted to get home.’ You’re rushing to something that you don’t even realize you’re going to encounter. You’re amped up, like, ‘I’m home! I did it! I just wanna get to my house and pick up where I left off.’ It just doesn’t happen that way. As much as you want it to, it just doesn’t. I don’t care if you go over there and you’re…you know, your whole platoon gets blown apart or you get two purple hearts or whatever the case may be. You’re gonna come home and you’re not gonna remember where you left off and you’re just gonna be lost, and you need that time to integrate. If your family’s at this resort with you, and they’re like, ‘Hey, go to counseling. Just go down there real quick and I’m gonna take the kids to the pool,’ then the kids are in the pool, the kids are having fun. They aren’t in a house where Daddy’s freaking out or Mommy’s freaking out and the kids are seeing this, and it just becomes a fiasco. I’ve seen really bad things happen and heard really bad things happen over an uncontrolled environment, you know? And it’s because they’re in a whole different state.”
“And the civilians they come home to, they can’t comprehend it,” George, a civilian, said.
“We don’t even see it,” I, another civilian, added.
For the last portion of our interview, Carter brought things full circle by coming back around to his earlier remarks about feeling entitled. “You build up a sourness through all these bad experiences,” he said. “It’s like…I’m not asking for this; I earned it. I’m not on the unemployment line saying, ‘I didn’t get a job this week. Give me some money.’ No. I went over and did what you asked me to do. I served honorably. I have my honorable discharge and my DD-214. A person with those should get what they need, at the time they need it. Because if you turn somebody away, that’s a life that could be ending that day. That person’s coming to you because they need help now, and, like I was saying earlier, that person, if they’re anything like me, they’re hit or miss. I’ll have a moment that I’m — not really anymore, but when I first got home — that I’m like, ‘I just really need to go.’ And my dad would come pick me up and we’d start the drive to the VA, and then I’d say, ‘No, turn around, I’m good.’ And he’d say, ‘No, we’re going.’ And then it’s like, you get your referral — ‘Oh, we’ll get you back in a week,’ or maybe it’s two weeks. It’s like, you can’t give me a sure answer? I’m coming to you because I have a problem. I don’t know what that problem is, I don’t know how severe it is. I know that I’m not any harm to myself or the people around me, but I know it could lead into something worse, and you’re just forcing me to put it on the back burner. And if I put it on the back burner and something bad happens, you know, everyone’s going to look at me like a horrible person when I came to you and asked for help.”
Then Carter told a story about an infantryman who had joined his unit after leaving active duty with three combat tours under his belt. When he arrived, “he seemed pretty squared away,” Carter said. “We were the same rank, but he was a lot older. He was a mentor for a few months, and then I never saw him again. We drove out to his house to see him. He was drinking a lot, and then, come to find out — this was, like, three or four months after we did that, when he wasn’t showing up to drill — we got to the point where we couldn’t arrange somebody to babysit anymore, or socially be involved with him. And his wife, she was divorcing him, moving on, taking the kids. And he just snapped. Killed his wife, killed himself. And it might have been one of those situations where, if he just turned around, if he was the person that went and got some help, maybe he could have been fixed. And I don’t even want to say…we’re not a car, you know? We’re not a car; it’s not like, ‘I’m broken and I need to get fixed.’ We just experienced something that we need to get off our chest, or we just need to talk about how to deal with it. You can never forget something. You just learn how to cope with it and how to live with it, and this guy might have lived through something that he can’t forgive himself for, or he just needs to talk to somebody. Or maybe it goes back to what I said before — maybe he just doesn’t know how to talk to his loved ones about it so he’s pushing them away. Maybe if he could have gotten it off his chest, maybe no one’s ever given him the opportunity because our support channels aren’t there. And for somebody that’s sitting here now versus somebody who’s sitting here from Vietnam, I am not complaining. I want to make that one thing clear. It has gotten better, but it’s not a perfect system.”
“A lot of people wonder, is it going to get better, or, like, is it worth going into the military, and it’s just like…” Carter heaved a sigh and shook his head. “I’m not the guy you wanna talk to about that. I love my career, I’m gonna keep going with it. It’s a long-term thing for me. I’ll be at eight years in August. I’ll reenlist, I’ll get retirement by the time I’m 38 years old, and I’ll have a pension to look forward to, because I know I’m not going to have anything to do with social security, so I look at it like, it’s a good tool, but the system is broken. A lot of people write their Congressman, like, ‘Hey, this is not working,’ you know? ‘I’ve gone and gotten help, but no one wants to listen to me. What if this certain thing happens?’ And then it’s like, ‘BOOM!’” Carter said, snapping his fingers. “You’re sent to Kentucky and you’re on psych evaluations. And it’s like, listen, we could have gotten this taken care of weeks ago if you had just sat down and talked to me. I’m not talking about a quick consultation with somebody who wants to hurry up and make their 10:30 coffee break. I want somebody to sit down that I can share this experience with that’s maybe possibly been through the same thing.”
A few minutes later, the interview tapered off. Carter needed to return home and rest before another night of work, which would start, I imagined, with ensuring that the American flag still hung at its proper height.
When I left my interview with Carter, I worried about him, as I worry about any veteran who lays bare their intense personal experiences for my benefit.
The following day, I sent Carter an e-mail and thanked him for his time. Initially, I had added a paragraph asking whether his twin brother, Calvin,* might be interested in an interview. Before sending, I deleted that portion of the e-mail. I figured I could always ask at a later date.
Sixteen months later, it was already too late to make that request. In March of 2017, George relayed the bad news: Carter had informed him that Calvin had killed himself.
Attending Calvin’s funeral, Carter told George, felt in some ways as if he were attending his own. It made some sense; before he ever left the warm safety of the womb for the cold world, he was sharing space with his brother. For the two decades that followed, their lives had been on remarkably similar tracks. Both had been stars in wrestling and football. After high school, the young men joined the Army Reserves together while undertaking coursework in corrections. They had deployed to the same bases at the same times, and they had been there for one another while battling through difficult readjustments to life back at home.
It was only after coming home that their paths diverged. Carter began to study nursing. He got married and had a beautiful baby girl.
At the time of our interview, Carter told me that Calvin was playing football for his university, and still studying corrections. He was even set to interview for several fantastic jobs close to his hometown.
During the time that had passed, Calvin’s course had changed. After receiving an honorable discharge, he started raising chickens, and became the father of a handsome baby boy. Calvin’s publicly-accessible Facebook page is filled with photographs of himself with his son and beautiful fiancee. Each picture bears a wonderfully positive caption about the importance of family in his life. But tumult lingered beneath all that happy optimism, because months after posting those photographs, Calvin willingly departed from his life. He left his family. From that point on, his son had a father; Carter was a twin.
When I heard the news, I felt life impart another of its hairline fractures on my heart. I wanted to reach out to Carter, but the connection that our single interview had allowed seemed both too inconsequential after such a long time without contact, and too intimate for me to feel comfortable disturbing him at this time of terrible sadness.
Instead, I decided to make a different kind of tribute by finally putting Carter’s words, and his struggles, out to a wider audience. I hoped that the things Carter had to say might help more civilians like myself understand what it means to be one of the brave souls who carries an immense burden for us.
That was where this story, already quite sad enough, was supposed to end. Fate had other plans.
The day that I finished writing about the interview with Carter, George’s name popped up on my cell phone screen. I had a sinking feeling in my gut, even when he opened with a cheerful, “How are you?”
“I’m great,” I replied. “How are you doing?”
George’s voice began to break. “I’m afraid I’m calling with sad news,” he said.
I can’t explain why I knew what would come next, but I tried to stave off the inevitable, pleading, “No, no, no…”
George went on and the dreaded words came out: “Carter killed himself yesterday.”
“That’s…you can’t be serious. I’ve been listening to his voice all week. I was writing about the interview,” I said. “I was so worried about him…”
“I’ve been talking to him every time I’ve seen him since he told me about his brother,” George said. “But I came home yesterday and there were cop cars…”
The conversation continued as George and I tried to make sense of the senseless. Finally, I reminisced on Carter’s eerily prescient words about attending his brother’s funeral, and wondered aloud at what it had led me to contemplate: whether Carter felt, after Calvin’s passing, that part of his own identity had been lost forever.
“It could be,” George said. “I wonder, is he a twin now?” he asked.
Surely, Carter is a twin again, having reunited with his brother just shy of two months after Calvin took his own life. But at what horrible cost to his friends and remaining family?
I can’t begin to surmise what went through Calvin’s mind to lead him to his choice, nor what led Carter to join him. All that I have is the crystal clear recording of words Carter spoke eighteen months ago. Those words lead me to believe that we can all provide our veterans returning from combat with better support, and that, at the very least, we should demand that the VA and our various service branches do so as well.
Estimates indicate that between twenty and twenty-two American veterans commit suicide each day. Though it’s too late for Carter and Calvin and their families, it is not too late to make a change for other struggling veterans.
Resources exist for veterans who find themselves dealing with depression and suicidal thoughts. If you or someone you love is affected, please reach out to any of the following:
www.veteranscrisisline.net
*Names have been changed to protect privacy
