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Couple Trying To Open Eyes To War Vet Suicides
Timothy Bowman, 23, had been back from Illinois National Guard duty in Iraq for eight months when he drove to his father's electrical contracting business on Thanksgiving Day 2005, got a gun and shot himself in the head.
Last week, his parents, Mike and Kim Bowman, made the 85-mile drive to Chicago from their home in Downstate Forreston to try to save other military families from experiencing the pain they have endured every day since.
Nobody can tell you definitively how many men and women have committed suicide since returning home from our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the Bowmans can tell you for a dead certainty that it is too many and that we're not doing enough to prevent the next one.
On Friday, the Bowmans added a pair of their son's combat boots to the American Friends Service Committee's "Eyes Wide Open" exhibit, which already displayed 144 pairs of boots representing Illinois' official war dead.
Timothy Bowman's boots were painted white to symbolize a too-often-overlooked group of casualties from the war -- those who have taken their own lives.
In a nation that still has trouble talking about suicide, the Bowmans find themselves in an even tougher spot -- dealing with a long-established military culture that holds suicide in even greater disdain than the general public does.
What makes the Bowmans a rarity isn't that their son killed himself but that they are willing to talk about it.
While the "Eyes Wide Open" exhibit is an anti-war protest, the Bowmans are not protesting the war. They are veterans' advocates, trying to educate the U.S. military, the Department of Veterans Affairs and the rest of us on the need to change our attitudes and approach to suicide and the underlying mental health issues that can lead to it.
"Whether you agree with the war is irrelevant," Mike Bowman told a sparse crowd at Federal Plaza.
Tim Bowman was a 2000 graduate of Polo Community High School, home of the Fighting Marcos. An artistic kid who played the trumpet, baritone and tuba, Bowman had the lead role in the school play two years running. His parents say he also was the class clown, the one who was always quick with the comment that would make everyone laugh.
He wanted to pursue music in college, but it didn't work out, so he took a job as an apprentice electrician in his father's business, served as a volunteer firefighter and joined the National Guard, knowing full well that it could result in combat.
His air defense artillery unit was converted to cavalry for the mission in Iraq. Bowman was a gunner on a Humvee. For four months in 2004, he was assigned to protecting the dangerous stretch of highway leading from the airport to the Green Zone in Baghdad.
Within days of arriving in the country, Bowman's unit was sent to pick up body parts of U.S. soldiers killed in a helicopter crash, his father said.
It was a jolting introduction that instilled in the group a shoot-or-be-shot attitude. On at least one occasion of which his father was aware, that resulted in Timothy being the one doing the killing. He was manning a checkpoint when a car failed to stop, and he opened fire.
"Whatever it was he shot in that car bothered the hell out of him. He thought there was a kid in that car," said Mike Bowman, 49, a big, friendly guy with a brush cut and a Harley jacket. He was never able to confirm whether his son really had shot a child.
Maybe that incident was the later source of Tim Bowman's demons. Maybe it was the severe injuries suffered by another guy in his unit, Dusty Hill, who lost both hands and one eye and was severely burned in an explosion triggered by a suicide bomber. Hill had filled in that day after Bowman volunteered for what shaped up as a more dangerous foot patrol.
"It should have been me," a weeping Bowman told his father one night.
But Mike Bowman said too few clues to his son's mental anguish were apparent to his parents, other than uncharacteristic flashes of temper. His buddies knew he'd been drinking to excess. His girlfriend knew he'd been having nightmares, night tremors and had even taken to sleeping in a closet with a gun. But nobody talked about it with the others until he was dead.
The Bowmans want the military to educate families about how to recognize post-traumatic stress disorder and what to do about it. They want the VA to reach out to the veterans instead of making them ask for help. They want more mental health resources available for those who are ready for help.
On this Memorial Day weekend, we should resolve to give them our support.
Mark Brown is a regular columnist for The Chicago Sun Times.
© 2008 Chicago Sun Times
13 Comments so far
Show AllWe won't solve this horrible problem until we stop marching our children off to war. War is way to easy for Americans to go to, and so very difficult to come home from. If we really understood war we wouldn't go.
Hoa binh
War is like a poison. It is like a lifetime of breathing in toxins and pollutants from our air or our drinking water contaminated with our pollutants. In time the body reacts and develops cancers and diseases as a reaction. War does the same thing to our minds. Some are more able to resist its effects on the mind then are others.
Many will question why soldiers just will not refuse to go and by inference lay the blame on them. Resisting authority is a very difficult thing for the human mind to do. It has been conditioned from birth to respect authority. This was demonstrated in Milgrams experiments where an authroity figure instructed a volunteer to "shock" a test subject everytime that test subject answered a question wrong.
Even though many of the people inflicting the shock were in tears, questioning what purpose it served, asking over and over again they be allowed to stop, they continued to inflict the shock when ordered to do so.
Milgram found that there were cultural differences between groups of people with some refusing to follow instructions at an earlier time then other groups.
It was also found that if the person in the same room with the subject s/he was likely to stop inflicting the shocks much earlier and that if the subject simply had another press the button (a surrogate) then he rarely refused to follow orders.
This demonstrates how easy it is for those at the top to give intructions to the tools below.
Recently the Police force in a major American city got new "all black uniforms" . The Police Chief was elated because he felt it would help intimidate the Public and would instill a sense of fear and respect for the Police in Children.
This IS conditioning.
With all due respect, who are we at war with? Who are our sons and daughters fighting? There is no nation, there is no army to defeat. These wars are euphemisms– a word used in place of another term that might be too direct, harsh, or unpleasant in favor of a word that is more neutral, vague or indirect (Encarta World Dictionary).
In this case the word war carries all the understandings necessary to unite us against a common enemy. But there is no common enemy. Iraq was never a threat to the United States. And statements that everyone thought Iraq was a threat based on the available information at the time, are a distortion of the truth. We were all alive then. Do you not recall that there was plenty of evidence to question the Bush, Cheney distortions? There was no world consensus, only the emotion of 9/11.
Children, yours and mine, and theirs have and are dying, suffering, killing, and sacraficing, for what?
Ask Cheney who was in that energy meeting and ask whether the plan to attack Iraq was hatched years before 9/11. He won't say because it would be the biggest crime in history. Yes, we have gone to war for made up events in the past. But this is purely for the self-righteous and financial interests of a few self-deluded greedy, power hungry individuals, who all deserve the same fate as Saddam Hussein.
If our loved ones suffer, if we suffer, we have only ourselves to blame for failing to be responsible for our government, and for failing to do something right now!
"Whether we agree with the war is irrelevant" is indicative of this mindset. It is indeed relevant, for these deaths wouldn't have happened if we took the time to make it relevant. It is sad that it takes teh death of loved ones to make us pay attention to the killings of other's loved ones.
i come here for a reality check and to be with those who, for the most part, share my beliefs and convictions...the postings above, though terribly sad and frustrating, are based on reality...
memorial day is an especially difficult time because so much praise is offered for those who chose to go to antoher country to kill people rather than protest and refuse to go...we need to stop glorifying the horrors of war and those who wear the uniform...
peace to all, here and now and forever.....let it begin with me......
......jade
Fraid this is the primary reason.
http://www.gulfwarvets.com/du_blowinginthewind.htm
This albatros must be hung around the neck of our ChristoCorptocracy! From the corporate penthouses to the rood topped spires they have conspired to destroy our children and our nation.
Going in to combat should be like the Presidency: Soldiers must be at least 35 years old. They are at their peak both physically and in terms of who they are; having had a chance to live their young life, grow to maturity, raise their own kid's!, and then go out and represent their country in the most intense of situations. A kid of Timmy Bowman's age doesnt stand a chance. We need to stop shipping our young lambs to war, sheeple. To do our killing for us. What is that? No wonder we are so F'D up.
Praises to the parents of this young life who gave his life. I wish nobody elses sons and daughters ever had to do this ever again.
Whenwe do our Sea of tombstones to mourn the deaths of the young men and women that died in an ILLEGAL OCCUPATION, in the front right side for all to view we mark their photos not as KIA's but in bold letters PTSD WITH SUICIDE. Look in these kids faces, redeployed so amny times they lost themselves, had a 100% disabled WWII Vet tell me, "Yeah, we all had that but the VA just said , don't worry kid 'ya just gotta little shell shock", we traet them as cardboard cutouts, stand there for 18 months for perhaps 7 tours and F$$K YOU from the VA by the way. WE WONDER???? WE WONDER????????? Got to go back and sleep in my car and watch the tombstones, gatheringofeagle MOTHERF$$KERS desicrate the tombstones because we do not care for our kids to die any longer, Philly cops won't help us so we stay every night and if we shut our eyes it is from inside a vehicle.
Piss on this government now Mullen sends a damn all hands letter warning everyone in every branch of the military to stay APOLITICAL, WTF???>?
War is just one many addictions that guide the U.S., along with fossil fuels and good old fashioned vices that one must be 18 or 21 to enjoy, legally and illegally, depending on which state one resides in. But to misquote the sage wisdom of someone sometime ago...only a select few profit from the suffering of many.
Over 60% of Americans are against this illegal invation and want the troops home now. I am still wondering why this has not happened. Even last week Dems walked lock step with Reps to borrow that's right borrow 165 million more, weaken the buck again, send the price of oil higher and for something 60% of America does NOT WANT. Again the people elected are not listening.
I got up to start my nightly insomnia a little while ago and idly tuned into ABC World News at Night to see some network frijole cheerleading the Pentagon's announcement that it wants to greatly expand special forces units of all kinds (Rangers, Seals, Delta Force, etc.) to meet "the rapidly growing global demand!" He mentioned unquestioningly the "need" for more special forces in Latin America. Just whose "need" he was specifically referring to was omitted. A little later on he featured a Christian fundamentalist far-right general who spouted, "Praise God, we'll have enough troops when we need 'em!"
Local TV news glorifies our illegal, cruel and militarily incompetent oil wars just as garishly only with more overt racism--routinely featuring poor minority military families with too many kids and no other economic opportunity besides the military. The ignorance of these target recruitment populations--almost a decade into Bush's bloodbaths--is astonishing. As is their complacent willingness to be used by local network affiliates to generically tout "service" in the era of Bush-Cheney.
Munitions firms and oil companies have, just in the last year and a half, overrun the sponsorship on PBS "news" programs like the News Hour & Washington Week. I correspond occasionally with a senior PBS reporter and this person writes of the real struggle there now in terms of editorial choices/money allocations for incisive, controversial segments.
News industry Mccoverage of Israel, well, you might as well be watching DVDs of the Banana Splits on LSD and Cialis. You'd have a much better time and learn more worth knowing.
The fix is IN, people, like Chicago in the 1920s under Al Capone. In another year it'll be--content-wise-- SEAMLESSLY like Pravda, Isvestia and Tass under the Soviet Union only slicker than Orwell. The way the networks actually SELL our economic meltdown to us like it's some kind of exciting adventure we all get to watch on TV (but THEY don't have to experience in real life) is another example.
But scariest of all is the dumbed-down, pumped-up, steriodal-yet-mentally servile, violence worshipping and thoroughly unbalanced concept of MANHOOD among a dangerously large proportion of American men ages 16 to 40-ish. Even the ones who are apathetic or clueless about BushReich (TM) and Duhhbya's wars love gratuitous violence in video games, movies, TV, ultimate fighting, military PR and militarism in general. Torture and other "collateral damage" is just entertainment they've all seen for years. They don't know the difference between TV, video games and reality until it's too late. Too predisposed to be cannon fodder with PTSD and suicidal tendencies from their early teens on.
The news industry itself is crawling with these pumped-up Ken-bots and their knowledge of history or current events is drool bib drool. Too predisposed to turn subsequent generations into cannon fodder.
Young men are almost non-existent in any local or regional anti-war/anti-Bush groups I have participated in or witnessed since 2002. History will record that our best, brightest, most original, creative and persistent protest organizers during this long nightmare were, almost without exception, women. And most of them over 45. The women who bore children starting in the early 1980s have raised two generations rife with culturally dominant Idiot Amurkans who apparently would vote strictly GOP (the ones intelligent enough to enter a voting booth--considering 80 million Amurkans don't even vote) even if Undead Dick Cheney and Little Dougie Feith were selling their daughters to polygamist cults on Fox News.
The disgusting truth is that most of our contemporary male population is more sheepish, more utterly incapable of thinking for itself than ANY previous generation (even those ostensibly less well educated in any traditional sense). They possess zero gumption, zero balls, zero planning and organizing capacity. Cattle being rounded up for the slaughter strutting around like militarist Biffs and rednecks, spoiled boy-toyz or infantile nerds with no reality lense besides a corporatist produkt instruction manual. Preoccupied with minutia and incapable of contributing meaningfully to building a stable healthy family or community. Totally abdicated from ANY concept of civic duty except for the ones stupid enough or desperately poor enough to be suckered into BushWars, Inc.
Even when the Roman empire finally fell, from what I've read, they somehow avoided the outwardly macho cultural infantilism now suffocating Bush's Amurka--where the entire ruling class and its media arm conduct themselves exactly like spoiled Ivy League frat boys who know they will never suffer the consequences of their actions that they have heaped up on the rest of us since they scorned Jimmy Carter for advocating energy conservation and putting solar panels on the White House over 30 years ago.
GW NORTH: You're a natural educator, as you patiently lay out a good argument.
Good posts: Dillan & Metal.
To quote a famous philosopher and world leader: "...we have seen the enemy and it is us..."