IGTNT: Another Casualty of Vietnam - Another Vet Suicide

After years of visiting DailyKos as a reader, I have never posted a diary or even a response.  But the time has come for me to speak out, particularly after reading two recent diaries about US military veterans -- one from the current war and one from WWII -- who ended their lives recently.

 

(Small update:  I feel I should make it clear that my information about my stepfather's military career was based only on some stories he told me and some I have heard second-hand from my mother.  Anyone who has lived with vets knows that their memories about war-related trauma can vary from telling to telling, so these memories should not be mistaken for historical fact.)

On Sunday, April 13, my mother and I were at our home in suburban southern California when we heard a massive gun shot.  I ran downstairs to find my stepfather, L. John Berreyes, sitting at our dining room table with a 50 caliber gun at his head.  He had fired into the wall (for some reason).  My mother was screaming at him in panic.  I tried to calm her down and talk to John.  In the subsequent 30 minutes or so, John turned over several guns to us, enigmatically saying "I'm done."  He would find a gun (always locked safely away in a closet or the garage), load it, point it at his head or throat, then drop it, unload it, and hand it over.

John was a gun owner but not a hunter; he always assured us that he would never shoot at a living thing or bring a loaded gun into the house.  As I pleaded with him to reconsider his decision to die, he assured my mother and me that he would not and did not want to hurt us.

But he also said the world was too horrible of a place for him to live anymore.  A severely abused child, John had registered for selective service as a conscientious objector in the late 1960s.  Of course, that request was ignored, and as a poorly educated, half-Native American with little sense of his rights, he was shipped to Vietnam as a gunner on a chopper.  His commanding officer, an Oliver North type mad with power, decided to start his own campaign by selling drugs and guns to the VC.  In the early 1970s, after several months of being asked to slaughter civilians he was told were military targets, John and his company were ambushed.  Everyone was murdered right in front of him except his CO (who shot himself).  John was captured and taken to a POW camp for several weeks of torture, where he was near death, suspended in a bamboo cage over a river, when an American rescue patrol happened to find him.

Back in the states, he spent a year in a VA hospital, where doctors tried to convince him that the activities practiced by his CO were a figment of his imagination (they never "officially" happened).  He ended up with a discharge and was never entitled to any military benefits.

He later served on a police force but left because of the corruption; he also had to kill (again) in the line of duty.  For years he wandered around as a vagrant and handyman, until he found religion and started to put his life back together.  Twenty years ago he met my mother and the two of them formed an amazing bond based on complete trust, love, and respect for what the other had survived (my mother was also a victim of childhood abuse).  They married a month after 9/11, with their granddaughters as flower girls and me presiding over the ceremony.

For years John worked as a master carpenter.  He built bookshelves and kitchen cabinets for Hollywood celebrities like Kobe Bryant and Dr. Phil, but also for our neighbors.  He never charged anything but materials and travel money for friends and family.  He was happy, content, and completely in love with my mother.  Occasionally, he would talk about his past, what happened to him in the war, but it was vague, almost like a dream.

That bad dream came to life for some reason on the 13th.  As I sat pleading with him, tears in my eyes, telling him how much I respected and was inspired by his survival, he said to me:  "You don't know how many people I killed in the war.  You'll never know what it is like to live like that."

Of course there's more:  he'd been injured and out of work recently (though had seemingly recovered), and he'd become very upset by problems my mother was having at her job, where she was being mistreated and forced to take a massive pay cut.  "I can't take care of your mom," he said as he paced around the house with his gun.  "It's over.  I'm done.  If I could earn more money she wouldn't have to put up with the garbage at her work, but I'm useless, I'm done."

Somehow in the midst of this horror -- we knew that the police had been called because of the gunfire and that John would not react positively to their presence -- he managed to sneak away from us for a minute.  We thought he had turned over all of his weapons, but he hadn't.  He took a .22 caliber rifle from his closet; when my mother saw this, she turned away and told me to leave the house.  John stepped out on our balcony and fired a single shot into his head.  The SWAT team arrived at that moment and it was an hour before they could confirm his death (since his body was not visible from the street) and five more hours before we could get back into our house.  

We are devastated, as a great light and the bravest soul we know is gone.  He was killed by a lifetime of neglect and abuse by those who purported to take care of him; he was undone by just the mildest threat of loss of income (we are decidedly middle-class); he was a fully registered and responsible gun owner who, despite clear warning signs (Vietnam Vet, history of mental blackouts) owned (we think) 8 weapons capable of killing himself or others.

He HATED this war.  He got angry when he saw John McCain on TV, wondering how a former POW could ever justify a government that tortures.

In the California primary, he (along with my mother, a 64 year old  feminist raised in the midwest) voted for Barack Obama.

It will sadden me that John will not be here when Barack Obama is our president and this horrible war ends.

And I hope his spirit brings comfort in the afterlife to the thousands of unrecorded casualties of this war, and all wars:  the soldiers who return mentally destroyed from having been ordered to kill, the families who must walk on eggshells keeping them sane, and who must pick up the pieces when some of these brave and good people end their lives because the world is just too painful.

In memory of John Berreyes, 1949-2008.
Brave, Noble, Generous, Loved.