Winter Soldier (24 page)

When I left the Reserves, I finished my education. I really wanted to continue serving veterans, so I decided to work at the VA. In 2004 and 2005 I did internships at the VA in Georgia. After I graduated I got a job at the VA in Richmond, Virginia where I worked as a research assistant on a study looking at Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and traumatic brain injury, because the symptoms of these two illnesses are incredibly similar.

The research group wanted to develop a mechanism to screen returning soldiers for traumatic brain injury. There were a lot of incredibly educated, well-informed people establishing this traumatic brain injury screening. Before we could make it happen, I was on a conference call when somebody said, “Wait a second. We can’t start this screening process. If we start screening for traumatic brain injury, tens of thousands of soldiers will screen positive. We do not have resources to take care of these people. We cannot do the screening.”

Medical ethics say that if you know somebody has a problem you have to treat them, so they didn’t want to know about the problem since they didn’t have the resources to treat it. But I think it’s incumbent upon all VA workers to find every area that we need addressed, and to demand that we get the resources to meet those needs.

Former VA secretary Jim Nicholson said that to meet the needs of returning veterans, they wanted to prioritize OIF and OEF veterans, which sounds great. Prioritizing always has a nice ring to it. But if you prioritize one group of veterans, another group has to do without. The VA needs to address the fact that we have hundreds of thousands of new veterans entering a system that has not grown to meet the demands of these two occupations. No veteran should have to go without.

The VA’s mission to care for our nation’s veterans is one of awesome responsibility. I personally believe that the best preventative health care for our soldiers is not to use them to fight illegal occupations. But so long as our government is going to force soldiers to continue fighting, I would call upon all workers at the VA to remember our pledge to serve and provide for our returning veterans.

It’s also important to realize that we do not lose our free speech rights just because we’re federal employees. We all know that behind the red tape there are just not enough resources to treat people. It is incumbent upon all VA employees to continue fighting, and fighting vocally, until we have all the resources necessary to take care of our veterans.

Joyce Lucey

Jeffrey’s death should never have happened. He was caught between the humanity of what he saw and what he had to do. My son was let down first by the government, who sent him to fight their war of choice and destroyed his soul, and then by the VA.

The tragedy is not that one marine has committed suicide, but that this continues to happen four years after our son’s death, countless others’ names that will never be placed on a memorial wall, though they are causalities of the emotional battlefield that rages on well after the guns and missiles have been silenced.

Jeffrey told me that he only wanted to help people. His voice is now silenced, but ours is not, and we intend to follow Jeff’s wishes by adding our voices to others, demanding that our government be held accountable for its actions or lack thereof.

Jeffrey Lucey, the young man who in January 2003 was sent to Kuwait to participate in an invasion that he did not support was not the same young man who stepped off the bus in July. Our marine physically returned to us, but his spirit died somewhere in Iraq. As we celebrated his homecoming, Jeff masked his anger, guilt, confusion, and pain behind his smile.

Jeff was a convoy driver and participated in the invasion of Iraq. On March 20, he entered in his journal, “At 10:30 p.m. a scud landed in our vicinity. We were just falling asleep when a shock wave rattled through our tent. The noise was just short of blowing out your eardrums. Everyone’s heart truly skipped a beat, and the reality of where we are and what’s happening hit home.” His last entry is, “We now just had a gas alert and it’s past midnight. We will not sleep. Nerves are on edge.” The invasion had begun and Jeff never had time to put in another entry.

The letters we received from him were brief and sanitized, but in April 2003 he wrote to his girlfriend of six years, “There are things I wouldn’t want to tell you or my parents, because I don’t want you to be worried. Even if I did tell you, you’d probably think I was just exaggerating. I never want to fight in a war again. I’ve seen and done enough horrible things to last me a lifetime.” This is the baggage that my son carried when he stepped off that bus that sunny July day at Fort Nathan Hale, New Haven, Connecticut.

Over the next several months we missed the signs that Jeffrey was in trouble. In July he went to Cape Cod with his girlfriend, and she found him distant. He didn’t want to walk on the beach. He later told a friend at college that he had seen enough sand to last a lifetime.

At his sister’s wedding the following month, he told his grandmother that “you could be in a room full of people, but still feel so alone.” That fall we learned that Jeff had been vomiting nearly every day since his return. That continued until the day he died.

On Christmas Eve his sister found him at home, drinking. He was standing by the refrigerator. He grabbed his dog tags, and he tossed them to her and called himself a murderer. Later we learned that the dog tags belonged to two Iraqi soldiers that he felt or he knew he was personally responsible for their death. He was wearing these to honor the men, not as a trophy, he told the therapist he saw for the last seven weeks of his life. In February he told me he dreamed that these men were coming after him in an alleyway.

Throughout the spring and summer of 2004, our family watched Jeff fall apart. He was depressed and drinking. Attending community college was very difficult. He had panic attacks, feeling that the other students were staring at him. He started taking Klonopin and Prozac. He had trouble sleeping, nightmares, poor appetite, and he was isolating himself in his room. He couldn’t focus on school and was unable to take his final exams. Although he had previously been an excellent athlete, now his balance was badly compromised by Klonopin and alcohol.

He confided in his younger sister that he had picked out a rope and a tree near the brook behind our home, but told her, “Don’t worry. I’d never do that. I wouldn’t hurt Mom and Dad.”

He was adamant that we not tell the marines of his condition, fearing a psychological discharge and the stigma associated with PTSD. He was reluctant to go to the VA for the same reason.

His dad called and explained what was happening with our son, and they said it was classic PTSD. He should come in as soon as possible. They assured Jeff that they would not discuss his condition with his marine command. The problem was getting Jeffrey to go in. Every day it was, “Tomorrow. I’ll go in tomorrow. I’m tired.”

The day he went in he blew a 0.328 blood alcohol content, and VA administrators involuntarily committed him for four days. It took six employees to take Jeffrey down. He had gotten out the door and ran out into the parking area.

During his four-day stay, he felt like he was being warehoused. He saw the admitting psychiatrist and did not have another appointment until his discharge. He told the VA about the three methods of suicide he had contemplated—overdose, suffocation, or hanging. When he was admitted, he even told them he had a hose to choke himself. None of this was relayed to us. Instead, on Tuesday, June 1, 2004, he was released.

The VA told us that he would not be assessed for PTSD until he was alcohol free. But as with so many veterans, Jeff was self-medicating. He often told us that alcohol was the only way he could sleep at night. The VA said that we might consider kicking him out of the house so he would hit rock-bottom and then realize he needed help.

Jeff said he had wanted to tell the psychiatrist conducting his discharge interview about the bumps in the Iraqi road that were the children his marine convoy was told not to stop for and just not look back. He decided not to reveal this deeply sensitive information when the psychiatrist interrupted their session three times to answer phone calls.

On June 3, on a Dunkin’ Donuts run, two days after he was released from the hospital, he totaled our car. Was it a suicide attempt? We’re never going to know. No drinking was involved. I was terrified I was losing my little boy. I asked him where he was. He touched his chest and he said, “Right here, Mom.” On the 5th he arrived at Holyoke Community College to watch the graduation of his sister. This was supposed to be his graduation also, but he wasn’t able to take his finals. How he drove his car there we’ll never know. He was so impaired.

We managed to get him home, but his behavior got worse. He was very depressed. His sisters and brother-in-law and my dad took him back to the VA.

When they arrived at the VA, he refused to go inside the building. VA administrators decided that he was neither suicidal nor homicidal without ever consulting anyone with the proper medical expertise. Our daughters called home in a panic saying it didn’t look like the VA was going to keep their brother.

In their records the VA says Jeffrey’s grandfather pleaded for someone to help his grandson. My father lost his only brother in World War II. He was twenty-two years old. He was now watching his only grandson self-destructing at twenty-three.

When we learned Jeff was coming back, Kevin and I went through each room in our house. We took his knives, his bottles, anything we felt he could use to harm himself. I took a step stool, a dog leash, anything I thought could trigger something. We disabled his car, not only to protect Jeff but to protect others from him.

Kevin called the civilian authorities. They said they couldn’t do anything because he was drinking. My child was struggling to survive, and no one would help us. The VA did not follow up with us even though he was in crisis. We had no guidance about what to say to him or how to handle the situation. We felt isolated, abandoned, and alone. While the rest of the country lived on, going to Disneyworld, shopping, living their daily lives, our days consisted of fear, apprehension, helplessness, watched this young man, our son, being consumed by this cancer that ravaged his soul.

I sat on the deck of our home with a person who was impersonating my son, and listened to him while he recounted bits and pieces of his time in Iraq. Then he would grind his fist into his hand and say, “You could never understand.”

On Friday, June 11, a girl who’d grown up down the street called to say that Jeff had climbed out his window and gotten into her car, looking for beer. When Jeff came home, he was dressed in cammies with two Ka-Bars knives, a modified pellet gun, and he was carrying a six-pack. He had just wanted that beer. There was a sad smile on his face like a lost soul. When I told him how concerned I was about him, he said, “Don’t worry, Mom. No matter what I do I always come back.”

Later, his girlfriend was talking to him on our deck, and she said tears were streaming down his face. The words to “.45,” a song by the heavy-metal group Shine Down, that he listened to over and over again described him:

After Jeffrey died on June 22, we found a note in the cellar. It said, “I am truly embarrassed of the man I became, and I hope you can try to remember me only as a child, when I was happy, proud, and enjoyed life.”

Kevin Lucey

Jeffrey went through a lot during the intervening weeks. On June 22 the VA finally drafted a letter for Jeffrey, which was setting up an appointment for him on July 13. Regretfully, he wouldn’t be able to make that appointment.

On the evening of Monday, June 21, I returned home and Jeffrey was in a total rage. I’ve never seen him like this. He was totally irate about the war, about his treatment at the VA, about so many different things. At about 7:30, I finally resorted to calling the Vet Center. The people at the Vet Center and the people at the VA are very, very good people. The angel who answered us at the Vet Center that evening calmed me down, and then got Jeffrey to calm down wonderfully.