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The income gap between rich and poor continues to widen, many people live in racially segregated communities.

People who have committed suicide in indianola iowa 2009 how to#

It’s hard to know how to live for a country that regularly tears itself apart along every possible ethnic and demographic boundary. Today’s veterans often come home to find that, although they’re willing to die for their country, they’re not sure how to live for it. It resonates with a lot of us who were there, civilian or military: The war reporter Sebastian Junger, in his book Tribe, deals with the issue of coming home. For many of those of us who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, our tours were defining moments in our lives. It remains to be seen what will happen in Afghanistan. Bad policy got us into the Iraq war and bad policy led us to having to return there. Just desolation and sorrow for the deaths of good people. So unlike “good wars”-meaning wars that America wins-for me there’s no sense of accomplishment in looking back at the sacrifices in Iraq. So my time in Iraq, in retrospect, may well have been wasted, given Shia intransigence and hatred of the Sunnis, which continues on. Hunted down and marked for death as America’s former allies. In the case of Iraq, so many of the Iraqis those of us Americans there came to know and trust, and who trusted us, paid with their lives for their association when ISIS took over large portions of the country, which we had left to its fate.Īlmost all of the Sunni leadership that I befriended in Anbar province are either dead or have fled for their lives to other countries. Then poof, war’s over and you’re flung into the diaspora, and life has little meaning anymore. You're in an extremely high-pressure environment, “living in a goldfish bowl” as the saying goes, and you enjoy a tight sense of community. Serving in Iraq was terrifying, exhilarating, and the most professionally meaningful experience of my life. I can only speak from my own personal experience of the war. He apparently didn't have that outlet like so many others.” There are times I struggle but I have people I can reach out to that I can talk to just to talk. He was suffering from what we think was undiagnosed PTSD from his time in Iraq and more recently Afghanistan. Yet he was a casualty of the war as well.Ī friend writes: “In the past few months he not liked where this world was headed. There are just tiny paid obituaries for those who served and then took their own lives, years later and thousands of miles away. There are memorial services held at the base or at the embassy. We have ramp ceremonies where a thousand people might stand at attention while the coffins are brought into the plane for the final ride home. In Iraq and Afghanistan one gets used to violent deaths. I am trying to grapple with these deaths. Military or civilian, the only people I know personally who have committed suicide have served in combat zones. But this latest acquaintance to die by his own hand had been a civilian government employee. The Department of Veterans Affairs has estimated that in 2014 an average of 20 veterans committed suicide every day. Another killed himself in Iraq’s Anbar province a few years before that. One friend killed himself in Afghanistan following a bad phone call from home a little over a year ago. His suicide follows others of people I served with. I was not close to him, but we were in the same group that hung out together. Yes, one of our best, who spent years in Iraq. Ivy League educated, and one of the quiet, effective ones. This time it was someone I knew who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan. News of yet another suicide came to me last month.

I’ve been home from the wars for over three years now, after seven years of tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, primarily as a State Department political advisor to the Marines.