Well, the national reporting on this story that we broke on Tuesday of last week has finally dribbled in – some of it good, most of it painfully mediocre – and none of it frankly enlightening, if you’ve been following his story here at all. (And btw, CNN hasn't covered it yet, though logically at some point they will have to, if only to keep up with the Joneses. It's pretty embarrassing to see what they deem worth covering instead, versus treating this American hero's death with any coverage at all. Here is a slate of what CNN deemed more worthy of coverage just today (the breathless exclamation points are mine, but they seem in keeping with the "Mad magazine meets Entertainment Tonight!" reportage topics -- or is it becoming, "News of the World," with a little political commentary thrown in?) More worth covering than Travis Triggs, four tours of duty and PTSD sufferer, we have: "Cancer survivor pitches no-hitter!" "Photographer snaps own javelin-spearing!" "Autistic boy, 13, banned from church!" "Wealthy Town Wants Its Own Currency!" and best/worst of all: "Yearbook [staff] switches kids' heads, bodies [in yearbook]!" (I'm firmly convinced CNN is now staffed entirely by two prepubescent boys, and the story line-up on any given day is an accurate reflection of what they'd find interesting, given that they're 11 years old, and boys, and all.)
A hard shock in the recent, actual news coverage about Travis Triggs was learning that his wife, Kellee, though she knew her husband was deeply troubled by PTSD, didn’t realize he was in Arizona, and didn’t learn that he killed himself, until she saw it on a news report. That has to just add to the horror of the whole situation. (At the end of this entry, we'll share some nice things people have been saying in Travis Twiggs' memory, about the man and the Marine.)
One of the things that’s been great is the interviews she’s given to the media, captured in video and audio files, such as we blogged about here – because what we’re getting there is the wife’s perspective on what went wrong with T-Bo, from someone who knows him (pun coming) intimately, and also someone who’s known him for years. (They grew up together in Louisiana.) (I've linked to the main raw interview footage in this blog entry, here.)
At some point I’d like to make an actual transcript of the interview with the Arizona TV reporter, Suzanne Kennedy, and put it up on this site, because even in the printed word, it will convey a lot of what she’s feeling. And not to say that she’s right about what she’s saying, but it’s definitely her perspective, and it’s well worth hearing.
It’s always curious trying to unravel what makes someone who’s struggling with something as serious as PTSD snap, and do something irreversible. Recently in the news we had the story of Eric Acevedo, another four tour of duty Marine who killed his girlfriend in Saginaw, Texas. As I blogged about earlier on this site, here, once I did a little digging into Acevedo’s backstory, I realized he had seen some horrific things in his third tour of duty. Three days after I posted about what I found on this blog, here, the Marine Corps purged the information off their site, as I learned from a reporter at the Dallas Morning News, who contacted me to tell me that my links were broken. Hmmmn.
This time, I pulled up the Eric Acevedo blog entry again, linked here, wondering if the hard times he’d experienced were anything near in time to the hard times Travis Twiggs experienced. It turned out they were only a few months apart – October and December, 2005 – in Iraq – and both of them “snapped” recently, to use the vernacular. If you delve into the topic of PTSD at all, you will learn that many people have a delayed reaction to what they experience, especially if they’re “medicating” themselves with alcohol, drugs, or workaholism – they can essentially keep the pain and possibly the memories at bay for years. (That’s part of why PTSD screening needs to happen at intervals after a servicemember returns from combat, to catch the experiences that happen later on.)
In the material Travis Twiggs wrote about his own battles with PTSD, he shares that he definitely mixed alcohol and medications, and weaning himself off alcohol apparently improved his situation for a time.
But now let’s splice in to the conversation what we learned from Kellee Twiggs, about her husband’s struggles. These are some of the elements that stood out to me, with observations included, where appropriate.
Kellee Twiggs says that her husband was in and out of three locked psychiatric facilities – aka, mental wards – in the last six months to a year. She brings this up to say, I’m not sure why he was still out and about, working, driving, etc., during the times between those – in other words, he was really sick.
Definitely. But it also calls into question why the Marine Corps Gazette published what amounted to his “success” story back in January, 2008, which we talked about here (Includes a link to the original article). At least in the non-military publishing world, one of the first things you’d want to vet before publishing a victory story in print, is that the person is still overcoming or still succeeding at whatever they were doing – otherwise, it’s embarrassing for all concerned. Did the Marine Corps Gazette not know he was struggling? From what Kellee Twiggs is saying, he was in and out of locked psychiatric wards during the same time period that article was published as his overcoming story. I’m personally still glad they printed it – I think it served to give people hope – but I have questions about why they did that, if they knew that he was still in the midst of valiant struggles with PTSD. At the very least, they should have checked, and maybe written a caveat – like, at press time, Twiggs appears to be relapsing, but we wish him all the best with his continued recovery.
- She says that at one point, he was on 19 different medications for PTSD. Obviously, this isn’t a good thing. She mentions that his treatment fell short – overmedicating him and locking him up in a psychiatric ward just turned him into a zombie, and didn’t “fix” what was wrong with him. Agreed. Her preference would have been to have him treated at a special facility in New Jersey, but perhaps her impression of that is overhyped, and it too might not have been able to help.
I think what Kellee is on to is the fact that nobody really knows what medications to put someone on for PTSD. There was even a report going back a few years now that that’s one of the things that should be studied first, is what works and why. I know I’ve seen an article in print about a young servicemember’s struggles with PTSD, and his telling the tale that he went to the doctor (most likely at the VA), and whoever he saw, gave him essentially a bag full of pills, and said, try this, try that; we’re not really sure what works, so you figure it out – see what you think is helping.
Obviously that’s not a good solution, however true it might be. And given how many drugs interact poorly with one another, or cause other symptoms, a 19 drug cocktail isn’t in anyone’s best interests, or even sounds like good practice. If that’s what really happened to him, it does sound pretty bad.
- She says that Travis Twiggs was seen at Quantico, not by a doctor, but by a Physician’s Assistant (“PA”) who was known to be “their expert” in PTSD. She has a comical remark where she says, essentially, the Marine Corps is a huge, worldwide operation – you meant that they can’t either spend the money for a doctor or find one who’s qualified?
Again, if this is the case, that is pretty shocking. There needs to be a higher standard of care than that.
- In a TV interview with Kellee and her older daughter, Ireland, 8 or 9, soon after Travis Twiggs’ suicide, her daughter talks on camera (a surprising move, in general) and says how hard it was for her dad to lose the guys in his platoon, blogged about here – “especially when one passed away in his arms” (I’m paraphrasing). Wow. If that’s what really happened – and I wonder why anyone would have told her if it wasn’t – that’s also a level of trauma even beyond being around the guys when they died. From what I’ve read elsewhere, and blogged about here, it sounded like the two guys in his platoon who died on his third tour – one died instantly and the other died in the combat hospital later that day. Either way, it’s heavy spaghetti – all the more so if how it happened was quite that personal. I can’t picture why the daughter would think that unless it were true – sounds like something an adult would have told her, so that she could better understand the difficulty of what her dad was going through.
The Wounded Warrior Regiment connection. Later press reports made much of the fact that Travis Twiggs had been working with the Marine Corps’ Wounded Warrior Regiment, and had in fact met President Bush a few months ago, hugged him and said how willing he’d be to go back to Iraq for the president. I’m not going to touch the politics of this with a ten foot pole, but given how badly Travis Twiggs was struggling with PTSD, both before and after – that sounds to me like something someone says as much to convince himself as whoever he’s talking to. Obviously a noble, big-hearted guy, who wants to do the right thing. But a realistic read on how able he was to do that? Not so much.
A much more interesting aspect to the Wounded Warrior Regiment red herring – which in turn circles back to the topic at the beginning of this post about just what causes someone to finally snap is this.
I wrote elsewhere on this blog about my trying to get in touch with Travis Twiggs by email at the beginning of March, and also the Marine Corps Gazette, in order to republish his story in full, and how I never heard back. My sense is he was struggling hard with PTSD then, and it caused everyone to back off from wanting further publicity for his “overcoming” story, since it was starting to seem like it had holes.
But here’s something very telling. In one of her interviews, Kellee Twiggs talks about how much her husband Travis enjoyed working with the Marine Corps’ Wounded Warriors Regiment, and in turn, how much the guys in the regiment enjoyed or adored him. Perfectly understandable so far. Many people who knew him talk about what a great guy he was, and what a huge heart he had for others. But watch what comes next.
In one of her earliest interviews with a reporter late last week, Kellee said that her husband had been promoted to Gunnery Sergeant, but then stripped of his rank (I’m paraphrasing) when it became apparent that he was continuing to struggle with PTSD, and demoted to Staff Sergeant.
I had heard that little factoid early on, but not connected it with any other part of the story, still wondering why he went AWOL from the Marine Corps on Monday, May 5th, and then showed up in Arizona, a place his own wife didn’t realize he had plans to visit.
Then it turns out…
She says Travis was doing much better, working with the Wounded Warrior Regiment, and getting back in the groove of responsibility and discipline and interacting with his guys. He thought he had been put in charge of the group, and perhaps he had, or was already functioning in that capacity, awaiting official confirmation.
Then, suddenly, a few weeks ago, according to Kellee Twiggs, the order came down that he was not to work with the Wounded Warrior Regiment, not to be their company gunny, and basically this was the moment when Travis snapped, and started struggling violently with PTSD again. Potentially because it was also the moment when Travis Twiggs felt like the Marine Corps has lost confidence in him. What happened next – going AWOL, showing up in Arizona, the armed carjacking, the 130-mile police chase, ending in murder-suicide, I have to say, it sounds very much like Travis Twiggs hit his own personal wall.
This was a man who was obviously very much caught up in the Marine Corps culture of “one for all and all for one.” The most devastating psychic injury he’d suffered, that he talked about at least, was the death of two young guys in his platoon, on October 27, 2005. In his essay on struggling with PTSD, published in January, 2008, he talks very transparently about fears that he had disappointed his command. This seems to be a guy who is extremely concerned with perhaps the external manifestations of leadership – and is heartbroken when he feels he’s failed either his guys that he leads, or the ones who lead him.
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At one point in the interviews, Kellee Twiggs says, in the most grief-stricken of ways, how crushed she is that Travis Twiggs died, leaving their two beautiful girls to grow up without their dad. Almost as if to say, “Was Travis not thinking about how painful that was going to be?”
There’s a well-regarded Australian study that we blogged about here that shows, at least with a rigorous, long-range study of Vietnam veterans, that CHILDREN of combat veterans who suffered from PTSD are at a much higher risk for suicide and other psychological struggles than are their peers. I’m sure that wasn’t exactly what was on Kellee’s mind when she said that, but it’s part of the heartache. The Twiggs’ “two beautiful little girls,” Ireland and America (love the names, seriously) now do have to grow up without their father, and probably will never understand the pain and torment he felt on likely a daily basis. And they will run the risk of feeling abandoned by him, in a very real way.
But the problem is, I believe, by the time that Travis Twiggs died, what was on his mind was essentially saving face with the Marine Corps, and how he’d lost his role. That would explain why his wife, who seems in every interview we see of her, to both love him and be a reasonable person, under the circumstances – to not have heard from him for two weeks, to not know that he was headed to Arizona, and of course to wonder how he (paraphrasing) could not have been thinking of her and their daughters when he killed himself. My sense is, he probably had his situation with the Marine Corps much more on his mind at the time, as sad as that may be to say. It doesn’t mean he loved them less, but it does mean, in his self-respect for himself as a leader, he may have felt that he’d finally lost the opportunity to lead, and experienced this as a fatally crushing defeat.
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There’s always the possibility that in potentially unfamiliar territory – Arizona desert, which certainly shares some visuals with Iraq – at the level of hallucinations that it sounds like he experienced – that during the car chase with police, that he might have flash backed to Iraq, and lost his contact with reality. It would be interesting to learn whether he was driving (or whether his brother was), and from the couple who was carjacked, which of the Twiggs brothers seemed to be leading and who was following, or whether they were both pretty well matched. It probably doesn’t matter in the long run, though, but it would, as they say in the legal biz, speak to Travis’ state of mind at the time.
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I’ve already blogged somewhere else about how it doesn’t sound all that relevant that “they didn’t leave a note.” Since the authorities blew up the large bag they were traveling with, on the offchance it was booby-trapped, no biggie. Any note might have blown into smithereens. But leaving a note also indicates presence of mind, and in Travis Twiggs’ wild, PSTD-fueled ride, it sounds a bit mutually contradictory or unlikely.
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There’s been a certain amount of crappy reporting that I would imagine is hard for the family to stomach. The initial press reports talked about both brothers’ “violent criminal histories.” Huh? If that’s not true, it should be retracted. No proof was ever provided, and that tangent never got developed. When Kellee talked in her interviews about the pain she felt hearing her loving husband portrayed as a monster, I couldn’t help but think of that remark, publicized quite heavily at the beginning of last week. See this media report, linked here, as evidence.
Of my two other least favorite reporting moments with this story, one was the leading question asked by the television reporter to Kellee Twiggs, on what looked like her porch. “Here, grieving widow, microphone stuck in face (I’m paraphrasing) – who do YOU think killed Travis Twiggs – the Marine Corps?” Yikes. Give the lady a little room, and don’t put words in her mouth, even if you think that makes for good television. Seemed like a low moment in shallow or manipulative reportage, just to get the quote.
Another was Tucson, Arizona KOLD 13 news producer, Stephanie Johnson, referring to the Twiggs brother's "crime spree" in the Grand Canyon, linked here. Wasn't sure whether they also knocked over a liquor store or passed bad checks in the gift shop while they were there, but seriously -- doesn't a "crime spree" imply more than a single event (the carjacking)? It just seemed pretty ridiculous, and inflammatory for the sake of being inflammatory.
And not in the news department, but just in the generally offensive department, as soon as "Travis Twiggs" started being a popular search on the Web last week, someone at AOL Live Journals threw up a porn site, liberally sprinkled with "Travis Twiggs" name in the metatags, and it shot up in the Google page ranks, to about number six -- even though the violent porn had nothing to do with Twiggs himself. And talk about offensive to the grieving family. Very deliberately manipulative. Fortunately, the editors at AOL's Live Journal caught the porn in time and disabled the links. Grotesque how people attempt to profit off someone else's huge misfortune/tragedy.
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Well, on that cheery note, perhaps you'd like to hear some good news -- some of the POSITIVE things that rolled in about Marine Staff Sergeant Travis Twiggs, from those who knew him before he died, in an attempt to flesh out the picture we have of him, and/or set the record straight. Here are a few:
From his neighbor, and landlord, who I believe is a prominent international philanthropy official in the Washington, DC area:
Having known Travis Twiggs and his family for 2 years, they rent a house we own near Quantico , my wife and I firmly believe the real story here is not about a chase/suicide. The real story is captured in the link right at the beginning of your article which most people won't open.
The real story is how this war, and PTSD devastates lives and families. The real story is also how the Marine Corps blew it.
Contrary to the impression given, Travis Twiggs was a very good man. One had just to watch him interact with Kellee and the girls, or see him jump in to help his neighbors to know this. He loved the Marine Corps. He'd often get up pre-dawn to work out to ensure he stayed in shape.
While he was at Bethesda Naval Hospital I would occasionally e-mail him with words of encouragement. The first time I did it I said, "I hope you don't mind". It took a while for Travis to respond. He said he couldn't get to a computer often, but my words "meant more than you'll ever know".
Travis loved his family and loved the Corps. That is what we will always remember [about him].
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From one of his social workers, who treated him at Quantico:
Staff Sgt Twiggs was seen by me at Quantico for many months and treated for his TBI/PTSD. He was an honor to know and to work with. He served our country with many deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan and served his men and led them well. The trauma and death he experienced is a very common story by our military people coming back. Many do not appear to be harmed because they have no "visible" wounds. However for those of us in the Mental Health field that work with the men and women who serve in the Military every day, know how deep these wounds go. Staff Sgt. Twiggs was given the best medical treatment the USMC has to offer. We stood by him and loved him and were committed to his recovery everyday.
What the Public needs to understand that our men and women coming back from this war suffer on many levels and some just can not come back from their experiences. Staff Sgt. Twiggs served his country up until the moment he died. I knew him very well and he was running from his deep, deep pain and I am grief struck that his story ended this way. Please, Please know this is but a very sad moment in a mans life who was a Hero and an Awesome and very loved Marine. Please think of him in this way and not by the end of the Story. Honor him please as I will do the rest of my life. He was a blessing to know and I was very honored to have shared in his life for as long as I could. Please honor all of our military who serve this country. They deserve you respect, your love and your support.
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From a family member (in-law):
T-Bo was a loving brother, son, husband and father not to mention a loyal and dedicated Marine. This I can vouch for.
Editor's Note: If you haven't done so already, spend a few minutes watching the raw video footage of the interview with Kellee Twiggs last week. It's quite good, and gives you a renewed appreciation for how hard Travis Twiggs was struggling with PTSD, before he died, and how much his wife and family loved him. That blog entry is linked here.
