Memorial Day: Remembering Those Lost, Well After Action

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Memorial Day: Remembering Those Lost, Well After Action
by Philip Bump | 12:57 pm, May 31st, 2010


On a Saturday night last November, Joe, a good friend of my father-in-law, celebrated his 62nd birthday. His wife made his favorite dish, spaghetti with boneless ribs, served in a giant kettle. There was a German chocolate cake, people brought presents. He had friends, children and grandchildren with him.

The next night Joe drove to a nearby park, walked into the woods, and shot himself to death.
My father-in-law Dennis was, until he retired, the Veterans Service Officer for Tulare County, California. A Navy vet, Dennis served as a bosun’s mate on the USS Oklahoma City in Vietnam. Joe, was a veteran as well, of the Army. The two met through the local chapter of the Vietnam Veterans of America and became good friends. Dennis was the first person Joe’s wife called when the police found the abandoned truck the night he killed himself. As Dennis was telling her that he would help in the search, as he was putting on his sneakers, the line went dead. Searching was unnecessary; the police had found Joe’s body.

Joe suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, compounded in the years before his death by a bad motorcycle accident which left him with chronic severe back pain. He came back from Vietnam and married, worked as a mechanic, but the war stayed close. At his birthday party, he asked if a box he’d been given as a gift could hold bullets. On a seat in the truck he parked in the lot the night he died, Joe left a copy of his Army discharge papers.

Read More:
http://www.mediaite.com/columnists/memorial-day-remembering-those-lost-well-after-action/