Michael Ware: "Suck it up."

Last week's post on BG Pittard hit a nerve - so let's hit that nerve again: suicide.

I do not think that the Care Bear approach works for most men - I simply do not - and I think the big self-congratulatory pity party for those who kill themselves is counter productive in the extreme. Not popular to state - but I stand by it.

Again, with the exceptions I outlined last week standing; a grown man who selfishly ends his life deserves no sympathy; save that for those they leave behind. Full stop.

Near my position, and probably closer to where we should be, follows.

Correspondent Michael Ware has been there and has some good advice - read it all, but here is the pull quote to those who are thinking that they need to end it in order to stop that which is haunting them. I think he is much closer to the right answer:

We just have to suck it up. As we did the blood and sweat and sand. As we did on patrol, or over watch. As we did on cordons-and-knocks, on sweeps, in hides, in gun pits, in turrets, and on chopper doors. As we did killing or capturing or merely waving to children through Humvee windows.

Because of all of those things and more, our peace times are not necessarily so. But I wish it less now than I did. To be dead, that is. Time’s passage let me discover that the desire diminishes, that it mellows even as it rages, and that, possibly, it eventually quiets. I know it’s been my silent brooding companion; familiar, intimate. But I told the doctors. I even confided in my parents, now elderly, and they have watched their son grow older than them right before their eyes.

I’m here to tell you none of us has any choice. Because living is there to be done and it’s we who must do it. It must become our new mission. Because when our generation was called it was we who answered. And our Fallen cannot be left behind. It is we who must remember them.

So, if but one of you reads this, sees this, stumbles over it and you give me just one more day as a result, then this humiliation will have been worth it. Please allow me just to say to you, with no particular expectation at all:

DON’T.