The Seattle Times has an article in yesterday's paper about a young Whidbey Island OEF veteran who unfortunately killed himself in May of this year. Orrin Gorman McClellan served with the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team in Afghanistan in 2005-2006. He took a lot of photos of his experience in Afghanistan, and he also wrote, poignantly, about his experiences as a soldier in an online journal, where he wrote every day. (The article doesn't reveal the location of that journal.) In what's known in the journalism biz as a "package," the article also has two multimedia presentations included with it: a video of his parents leafing through a book they're putting together of poems Orrin wrote, linked here, and a video narrated by his parents of some of his photography from Afghanistan, linked here. "I've become numb," McClellan writes, "but not comfortably so."
It's wrenching watching his parents in the videos sit side-by-side on the couch, in a tableau no doubt repeated across America, as the parents of the approximately 18 veterans a day who kill themselves must do, trying to make sense of why Orrin had to go, and still actively grieving, trying to come to terms with their own loss. In Orrin's case, his mother is a social worker, who the article says specializes "in the treatment of traumatized individuals." Of course, not even a mother with this background can necessarily save her son, which only adds to the tragedy. It says his mother even "took a counseling job with the Whidbey Island NAS and helped her son navigate through the VA system." He was retired with a 100% disability due to PTSD. The article quotes the mom as saying that as a community, we all need to listen better to our vets. And practice "deep listening" to their stories of what they've gone through.
What makes the article good, from this reader's perspective, is that it positions Orrin McClellan's death against the backdrop of the statistics of veterans suicides across the country, and then projects how those statistics affect Washington state, where the Seattle Times is based, and where Orrin lived. Eighteen deaths of veterans a day, the number of suicides approximating deaths in combat this year -- these are shocking statistics, but like so many others, we become numb to them over time. Bringing it closer to home, those same statistics mean of the almost 36,000 OIF and OEF veterans from Washington state, a dozen would be lost to suicide. In 2010, Orrin McClellan was sadly one of that number.
(Army veteran Chris Loverro, who served with the Stryker brigade from Fort Lewis, Washington, did a poignant video of his own about PTSD and suicide in the life of a veteran. We've shown it in a recent article, linked here.)
McClellan's mother, Judith Gorman, says that her son never really came all the way back home, because of his PTSD. Retired Army General Eric Shinseki, now head of the VA, is also quoted in the article, as ruminating -- perhaps not about McClellan's death in particular but about veterans' suicides in general -- that he often asks himself, "Why do we know so much about suicides, but so little about how to prevent them?" That's a fabulous quote, but it's also quite a profound question.
Edwin Shneidman, the so-called "father of suicidology" -- who ironically got his start leafing through files at the VA, reading suicide notes of veterans -- is someone we've written about a fair amount on this site. He's also known as the originator of the concept of a "psychological autopsy," where someone, reasoning backwards from the fact of the a person's death, tries to reconstruct the extent and timing of the stressors in that person's life, to determine how and why it became too much for them (the "when" having already been determined.)
I'm not sure, but I would hazard a guess that, other than the families of veterans who commit suicide, who are directly involved, there isn't much of an effort made on a larger level to reconstruct what stressors became unbearable in the lives of those who kill themselves, during or after military service. Perhaps a broader study into this, a la Shneidman's methods, would produce important or helpful conclusions.
McClellan's story is in many ways all too typical...except for the social worker mother, and the wonderful legacy he left behind in the poems he wrote and photographs he took. He struggled, as many veterans with PTSD do, with drugs and alcohol, with trying to fit back into his life, with impulse control, with hypervigilance, with nightmares, with combining alcohol with prescription medications, with grief and perhaps blaming himself over the deaths of two close friends. And he struggled with long drives to the VA, which was located quite a distance from his home.
His parents sound like amazing people, who tried so hard. They even established a Veterans Resource Center, on the island where they lived, "to offer referrals, networking and other assistance," to help other veterans in addition to their son. In the wake of his son's death, they may also publish a book of his writings, to raise awareness about PTSD.
Digging around on the Web, especially within social media, it wasn't hard to find some of McClellan's thoughts. He had two journals where he kept his writings, one on MySpace and one on LiveJournal. I've chosen not to link to them, to protect his privacy in case that's an issue. But in one he quotes from T.S. Eliot's famous poem, "The Hollow Men," which closes with the memorable lines about "this is how the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper."
It also contains an entry from September of 2008, while McClellan was actively struggling with PTSD, but a full year and a half before he ended his life. In an entry called "What the hell happened to me?" he writes:
"I read some entries in my journal from two years ago"
[2006, the end of his Afghanistan deployment and beyond]
I love who I was.
Why did I do this to myself?
Was it war?
Did I implode from all the shit I saw?
Or was it something else?"
Questions really with no answer. He goes on for a bit more, and then concludes with the poignant question:
Why did I let myself
Get so lost?
RIP Orrin McClellan, gone too soon, and comfort to your family and your friends.Editor's note: The photo is of a point on Whidbey Island, a thoroughly beautiful place in Washington state.
