Tornado Alley (PROG)

[StephanieVanbryce]

This is non-fiction Real story from the Bush Wars. I am only posting a small portion of it as it is the longest and the saddest story I have recently read about 'the human cost of what he did' that caused so much suffering for all, Over THERE and HERE!. This is the story of one Unit that has been devastated by so many Suicides in their Unit. It is a must read, it is required reading. I believe you learn as much in this story about wars and what WE ask OUR GUYS to do than anything AND the price they pay than I've read anywhere .. other than some stories listed as fiction. Please start reading this when you have the time. You won't regret it and you will want to keep these folks close to your heart every day in every way.. READ it when YOU have the time.

In Unit Stalked by Suicide, Veterans Try to Save One Another

After the sixth suicide in his old battalion, Manny Bojorquez sank onto his bed. With a half-empty bottle of Jim Beam beside him and a pistol in his hand, he began to cry.

He had gone to Afghanistan at 19 as a machine-gunner in the Marine Corps. In the 18 months since leaving the military, he had grown long hair and a bushy mustache. It was 2012. He was working part time in a store selling baseball caps and going to community college while living with his parents in the suburbs of Phoenix. He rarely mentioned the war to friends and family, and he never mentioned his nightmares.

He thought he was getting used to suicides in his old infantry unit, but the latest one had hit him like a brick: Joshua Markel, a mentor from his fire team, who had seemed unshakable. In Afghanistan, Corporal Markel volunteered for extra patrols and joked during firefights. Back home Mr. Markel appeared solid: a job with a sheriff’s office, a new truck, a wife and time to hunt deer with his father. But that week, while watching football on TV with friends, he had wordlessly gone into his room, picked up a pistol and killed himself. He was 25.

Still reeling from the news, Mr. Bojorquez surveyed the old baseball posters on the walls of his childhood bedroom and the sun-bleached body armor hanging on his bedpost. Then he took a long pull from the bottle.

“If he couldn’t make it,” he recalled thinking to himself, “what chance do I have?”

He pressed the loaded pistol to his brow and pulled the trigger.

Mr. Bojorquez, 27, served in one of the hardest hit military units in Afghanistan, the Second Battalion, Seventh Marine Regiment. In 2008, the 2/7 deployed to a wild swath of Helmand Province. Well beyond reliable supply lines, the battalion regularly ran low on water and ammunition while coming under fire almost daily. During eight months of combat, the unit killed hundreds of enemy fighters and suffered more casualties than any other Marine battalion that year.


I beg you to go read this, I sure needed to.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/20/us/marine-battalion-veterans-scarred-by-suicides-turn-to-one-another-for-help.html