There is no "purple heart" for PTSD. There is no "war memorial" that lists those who died by suicide from PTSD, even when combat was the most likely explanation. And maybe there should be... But in the meantime, all we can do is try to reconstruct what we can find about who Orrin McClellan was in the 25 short years he was here.
Digging around on the Web, we can find out much about who McClellan was. The exercise becomes less macabre, or voyeuristic, than the assembling of an online shrine to the memory of someone we never knew, who's now too soon gone. There are the two online journals that McClellan kept, at MySpace and LiveJournal. There is his photo stream on Flickr. There is an obituary by a caring friend, who attended his memorial service. There is McClellan's listing at an online dating service, "Hot or Not," which he set up when he was in Afghanistan, and elsewhere pans with the single word, "whatever." There are some videos that a friend shot of him, who mourns his passing and wishes he had captured a few more shots of McClellan while he was still alive. There are the photos and the poems that his family shared with the Seattle Times, that are part of the original article. And there is a truly beautiful video about his deployment to Afghanistan, called "They Carry," that McClellan himself pieced together, shown on YouTube, and set to music: not heavy metal, but classical...He uploaded it in late September, 2007, after he got back from Afghanistan, and it carries the interesting descriptor: "this generation's wars from eyes on the ground...the faces and names are placeholders. those who were there remember. the rest can only watch." WELL worth viewing...
His interests, as he discloses them on one of the two online journals he kept, are nothing out of the ordinary: places he's been, music he likes, hobbies: "airborne, american beauty, army, dave barry, death cab for cutie, flickr, glen phillips, haruki murakami, italy, langley, lava lamps, led zeppelin, military, muse, orbital, photography, pink floyd, quentin tarantino, seattle, the big lebowski, toad the wet sprocket, vicenza, washington, whidbey island."
There's his brief description of the key dates and places in his short life, again from an online journal:
"Born in Milwaukee, WI. But home is between the Cascades and Olympics on the Puget Sound. Grew up in Langley, on Whidbey Island, Washington. Enlisted in the Army in late '03, started Basic in Feb '04, Airborne School that June, got to Italy that July, and to Afghanistan Mar '05. Getting out Feb '07."
(In September of 2007, he uploaded the excellent video, "They Carry," of his time in Afghanistan.")
And then there are the news items about him, focusing on an arrest, locally. And what look like three court cases: in July of 2008, January of 2009, and September of 2009, listed on King County Superior Court's website.
In July of 2008, he was in the local paper, for assaulting some cops at a concert, allegedly threatening to kill them, gouging one of their eyes, and basically asking for them to shoot him. In October of 2008, he's back in the news locally, after being acquitted of assaulting and threatening police officers in the earlier event. He spent time as an inpatient at the VA for PTSD. He also lived too far away to make regular treatment a likelihood, and getting there, via a ferry trip and highway driving on I-5, was triggering.
His parents, who describe themselves as self-employed and dedicated (i.e., more available than most) seem to be doing everything in their power to help him, but he is melting down. The previous article, yesterday, describes some of the symptoms of his raging PTSD. The two articles in the local papers also detail the attempts his family made to get him help.
In one of the articles, his mother is quoted as saying, "We must not stop with research and development of the healing of visible wounds and helping the veterans become whole with prostheses for severed arms and legs. We have a responsibility to get just as expert at healing the inner wounds of the body, mind, emotions and spirit.”
She also goes right to the heart of the matter when she says, also quoting from those articles, "Our military is well-versed at training our sons and daughters to be experts in weapons, combat and killing, and distrust of the other, but they fail to complete their warrior training of our troops by failing to train them in the skills of regulating the emotional responses of the body, mind and spirit after experiencing the traumatic horrors and terrors of war, and in the skill of reintegrating into families and communities.”
When she talks about her son's difficulties, she is very clear: "Our son, only halfway, came home from the war; half of him is still fighting over there, within his body, mind, heart and soul,” Gorman said. “Every day, all the time.”
Unfortunately, on May 18, 2010, Orrin McClellan lost that fight. And his family, and everyone concerned about combat veterans and PTSD in America, grieves with them.
