There was suicide in my battalion in the spring of 2018. I went to the memorial ceremony, which nearly brought me to tears. He left behind a wife and children. At the end of the ceremony, several sergeants put some of their old patches and medals in a box in front of a picture of the deceased. Suicide is always irrational, and from my view, all the more so for someone who had worked so hard and so long for a job that I thought was fun and interesting.
When I was at DLI, another soldier thought I was suicidal. I’ve never been a merry ray of sunshine, and at the time I was sleep-deprived and striving to lose weight. So perhaps I looked more morose than usual. About the same time, a sergeant asked the same question of me, and I assured him that I was not. There have probably been suicides at DLI, but none while I was there.
There was another suicide in my battalion in 2019. I remember going to a formation for that one. There are about 400 soldiers in my old battalion, and in those two years, the suicide rate was about 1 in 400 or 250 per 100,000. That rate is ten times the rate of the Army as a whole. I told my brother later that I had survived the suicide capital of the Army. In November of 2019, someone at the NSA building I worked in left a note in a public place which expressed suicidal thoughts. It read something like ‘I’m glad I don’t have a gun because I might shoot myself.’
For some reason, I was seen as the culprit. My platoon sergeant and commander took me aside and asked point blank if the note was from me. I said no, adding that I owned guns and stored them off base. I also said that I know I don’t smile like I’m in a toothpaste commercial because that’s just the way I am. I told them I worked very hard to get into the Army and become a linguist and I wanted to do it as long as I could.
Back to October of 2020. I told my squad leader that I and my subordinates were all on different shifts, so there wasn’t a good time for us to meet for group exercise. I asked if we could exercise on our own. This was common at the time. He then asked me to write up a PT calendar and a risk assessment form. I had been leading my soldiers in group exercise without filling out such forms for months and couldn’t understand why it would be necessary for individual exercise. I sensed another paperwork conflict was brewing like what had happened in August.
Furthermore, given all the time I was spending on my exercise bike, it seemed silly to make a calendar that said the same thing over and over. And it is absurd to do a risk assessment form for pedaling a *stationary* exercise bike. That has to be the safest form of exercise there is. At BLC we were instructed to fill out risk assessment forms for sitting in a classroom, which is so ludicrous that it would be amusing to hear the reactions of Washington or Patton to such nonsense.
After some back and forth with my squad leader, I submitted a few very brief replies to his requests. For the risk assessment, I wrote:
***
Risk Assessment: low
***
I had hoped that it would get him to come to his senses, but it did not. Nor did it help when I mentioned the case of a soldier who got a bad ankle injury because he decided we should run in the dark on uneven ground. I chose to walk that night when then ground started getting very bumpy. The soldier was injured not long after I stopped running.
He calls me in, and I see the paper in his hands. I knew it was a counseling so asked if I could just read it instead of having it read to me. No dice, he began reading. He basically called me incompetent and threatened me with a bad conduct discharge. I saw his foot was in a medical boot and asked what happened. He said he broke it while running. I asked if there had been a risk assessment for that event, and when he said yes, I asked what good was that form if he got hurt anyway. He said it protected the run leader from punishment.
I told him that his order seemed stupid and asked if he had ever gotten a stupid order, and if so, how he did he react. He said that once his squad leader told him to move sandbags back and forth. He did it reluctantly and then made fun of that squad leader behind his back. Here I will note that I have no respect for people who kiss up and kick down. One of my favorite sayings is people who to drag you down are already beneath you, and I vowed long ago not to kiss anyone’s ass and tell them it tastes like ice cream. I like to say there is no point in tiptoeing through life just arrive safely at death.
I said that my intel work is more important that paperwork, which I thought was about as airtight a statement as can be made. His response was to say that my intel work was 90% meaningless. Some morale booster that was. I wonder if he ever considered the implications of that. If my work was meaningless, and he was in charge of me, didn’t that make him meaningless too? My punishment was to make a PowerPoint presentation about the importance of counseling, which I’m sure he did precisely to aggravate me.
When we were parting ways, I basically begged for mercy and said that I would be out of the Army in about a year and besides, there was not much going on anyway. He refused and asked about my last job before the Army. I said I had been an engineer and that it had ended in a way similar to what was happening at that moment. He even looked and sounded like my old nemesis from the plastic bag factory.
He said I wasn’t going to change the Army, which was true, but was also not my goal. The Army should change in some ways given that the longest war in US history recently ended in a catastrophic defeat after 20 years of war, a trillion dollars, and 2,000 dead American troops.
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