Tell Me About Sgt J Patrick Lamoureux

The double edged sword cuts both ways, it is a blessing and a curse; and oddly there is no better example of the power to both help and harm than the act of sharing my interests with my husband. It's a blessing that he genuinely wants to involve himself in the pursuits I'm interested in and the online research I enjoy, it helps him feel connected to me and strengthens our bond. And yet at the same time it's almost a curse when he wants to be engaged with reading accounts of veterans fallen on hard times or struggling with life after combat. He becomes terribly distressed about those stories, and consequently all I want to do is stop sharing yet he still insists I keep talking until he can't take it anymore.

The latest quandary was when I was reading a story online about Sue Highsmith Lamoureux, the wife of a former Army Reserve Sergeant J Patrick Lamoureux incarcerated in Nye County Detention Center, after being involved in a pre-dawn gunbattle with Nye County sheriff's deputies. It's a very compelling story for me, especially as I work in corrections, and have first hand experience of dealing with combat vets in jail. Highsmith Lamoureux says it was the weight of post-traumatic stress that caused her 46-year-old husband with a previously "squeaky clean" record, to mentally collapse in September 2008.

As I was reading her Blog "The J Patrick Lamoureux Defense" I was about to click on the relating newspaper story link when my husband just hapened to glance across at my laptop.

"What'cha reading there?"

"A blog written by the wife of a Sergeant J Patrick Lamoureux, he's in jail awaiting trial after getting into a shootout with deputies last year. I was just gonna get the scoop from the newspaper report."

"Really? Do you mind reading it to me."

And as the healing edge of the sword swooped down, I clicked on the link to the newspaper article, and our bonding session began.....

Joseph "Pat" Lamoureux couldn't erase from his mind the sight of the young Iraqi girl walking up to his heavy equipment transport truck and blowing herself up. "Her body parts were all over his vehicle," his wife, Sue, said about the 2003 suicide bomber attack.

She said her husband was knocked down from the blast and later was evaluated for traumatic brain injury. In a benefits claim he filed with the Department of Veterans Affairs, Lamoureux wrote that the Iraqi girl, who was 12 to 14 years old, "came out of nowhere.

Then there was a firefight near the Baghdad airport and, later, an old man with a donkey who wouldn't stop when soldiers hollered at him. "He was 'lit up,'" Sue Lamoureux wrote in a July 1 e-mail. "To this day Pat believes the old man may have been deaf, and the image of him haunts Pat."

She said it was the weight of post-traumatic stress from these and other incidents that caused her 46-year-old husband to mentally collapse last September. That's when he went on a shooting spree that began in their mobile home at Terrible's Lakeside RV Park and Casino in Pahrump and ended after a pre-dawn gunbattle with Nye County sheriff's deputies......."

.... partway through the fourth paragraph I felt a nudge against my arm and looked down to see my husband collapse into my lap, tears streaming, almost as though he had literally been struck by the harmful edge of the sword.

"Stop, please stop." He said in a broken voice.

"But I thought you....?"

"I just don't want to hear any more." He sobbed.

"You know you're training me to want to keep my mouth shut and not share this stuff with you. I can't keep putting you through this all the time. I'm not gonna do it any more...no...that's it...no more." I came back defiantly fighting back tears of my own.

"No, I want you to share, it's just.... it's just.... it's hard you know?" Came his emotional insistence.

And as he lays with his head in my lap, I wished he wouldn't argue with me about sharing this stuff with him, wished I hadn't upset him, wished I could turn the clock back just 15 minutes and been checking emails instead of reading her blog when he looked at my screen. Then spared a heart-wrenching thought for J Patrick Lamoureux's wife who I'm sure would do anything right now to be in a position to comfort her husband during his greatest hour of need, wishing she could turn back the clock too.

Signature Wounds, A Scott Gaulin Documentary

CALLING ALL COMBAT VETERAN SPOUSES!

This is my video submission to Scott Gaulin's "Signature Wounds" project. It literally only took me a few minutes to record and I threw in some stills on top of the video. I am soliciting your input on his behalf, to help make his project not only a successful one but one with a real voice, powerful and compelling enough to affect change.

Scott is a journalist from Texas. His documentary is being sponsored through the Kiplinger Fellowship Program and the John Glenn School of Public Affairs. It is centered around spouses and families struggling to cope at home when a loved one returns suffering from combat PTSD or TBI. He needs our help in collecting as many personal stories as he can from across the country from spouses, children, siblings, or parents of veterans. His website Signature Wounds supplies all the details you will need to contribute to this wonderful cause.
The following is an extract from his website:

He would like you to share your personal experiences not those of your veteran. It should offer some insight into you; how you cope, what your experiences are, changes in your family's life after PTSD.

• The story can be whatever you make it; it’s your story. It can be a recollection – how was life before the deployment, or the day you first met.
• It can be about a coping technique or hobby that calms and centers you.
• If you’re an artist – it could be a conceptual work such as a painting that represents your emotions.
• It could be song you’ve written, a page from your journal or a more traditional narrative.

He can take video, audio, a photographic submission, a drawing, a painting or handwritten letter. He encourages you to be as creative as you like. Visit his website and add your voice to the magnificent chorus I am hoping we will create.

This is an awesome opportunity....and if you need help, let me know and I would be willing to work out any of the technical issues that might stand in your way of contributing.

I Feel Shitty, Oh So Shitty......

I unintentionally upset my husband last night, the details of which are inconsequential to the emotion behind this post.  When I left the house for work he remained behind sitting alone unconsoled.  I was so mad at myself that before going into the Jail I sat in my truck, grabbed a scrap of paper, and frantically scribbled out my frustration.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words.... so enough said.

THE WARRIOR’S CODE OF HONOR

I received a request from Paul Allen, a Combat Veteran decorated with the Purple Heart to post a letter he has written. He states, 

It was revised for the first and last time 11/6/09 on request from the CSRA Wounded Warrior Care Project, who's first step in giving care is to issue my Warrior’s Code to the wounded warrior. [The]CSRA Wounded Warrior Care Project of Augusta, GA says the Code drastically reduced the secret suicide rate before the revision, and now after the 11/6/09 two hundred word addition giving hope, I am told that it reduces the suicide rate even more. 

Please read as it gives a powerful message to those who have fought and lived so that they may fight another day. From http://www.militarycodeofhonor.com/:

As a combat veteran wounded in one of America’s wars, I offer to speak for those who cannot.

Were the mouths of my fallen front-line friends not stopped with dust, they would testify that life revolves around honor.

In war, it is understood that you give your word of honor to do your duty -- that is -- stand and fight instead of running away and deserting your friends.

When you keep your word despite desperately desiring to flee the screaming hell all around, you earn honor.

Earning honor under fire changes who you are.

The blast furnace of battle burns away impurities encrusting your soul.

The white-hot forge of combat hammers you into a hardened, purified warrior willing to die rather than break your word to friends -- your honor.

Combat is scary but exciting.

You never feel so alive as when being shot at without result.

You never feel so triumphant as when shooting back -- with result.

You never feel love so pure as that burned into your heart by friends willing to die to keep their word to you.  And they do.

The biggest sadness of your life is to see friends falling.

The biggest surprise of your life is to survive the war.

Although still alive on the outside, you are dead inside -- shot thru the heart with nonsensical guilt for living while friends died.

The biggest lie of your life torments you that you could have done something more, different, to save them.

Their faces are the tombstones in your weeping eyes, their souls shine the true camaraderie you search for the rest of your life but never find.

You live a different world now.  You always will.

Your world is about waking up night after night silently screaming, back in battle.

Your world is about your best friend bleeding to death in your arms, howling in pain for you to kill him.

Your world is about shooting so many enemies the gun turns red and jams, letting the enemy grab you.

Your world is about struggling hand-to-hand for one more breath of life.

You never speak of your world.

Those who have seen combat do not talk about it.

Those who talk about it have not seen combat.

You come home but a grim ghost of he who so lightheartedly went off to war.

But home no longer exists.

That world shattered like a mirror the first time you were shot at.

The hurricane winds of war have hurled you far away to a different world -- the Warrior’s World -- where your whole life is about keeping your word or die trying.

But people in the civilian world have no idea that life is about keeping your word -- they think life is about babies and business.

The distance between the two worlds is as far as Mars from Earth.

This is why, when you come home, you feel like an outsider -- a visitor from another planet.

You are.

People you knew before the war try to make contact.

It is useless.

Words fall like bricks between you.

Serving with warriors who died proving their word has made prewar friends seem too untested to be trusted – thus they are now mere acquaintances.

And they often stay that way because, like most battle-hardened Warriors, you prefer not to risk fully trusting anyone whose life is not devoted keeping their word, their honor.

The hard truth is that doing your duty under fire makes you alone, a stranger in your own home town.

The only time you are not alone is when with another combat veteran.

            Only he understands that keeping your word, your honor, whilst standing face to face with death gives meaning and purpose to life.

            Only he understands that spending a mere 24 hours in the broad, sunlit uplands of battle-proven honor is more deeply satisfying to a man than spending a whole lifetime in safe, comfortably numb civilian life with DNA compelling him to anguish endlessly over whether he is a brave man or a coward.

            Only he understands that your terrifying – but thrilling – dance with death has made your old world of babies, backyards and ballgames seem deadly dull.

            Only he understands that your way of being due to combat damaged emotions is not the un-usual, but the usual, and you are OK.

Although you walk thru life alone, you are not lonely.

You have a constant companion from combat -- Death.

It stands close behind, a little to the left.

Death whispers in your ear: “Nothing matters outside my touch, and I have not touched you...YET!”

Death never leaves you -- it is your best friend, your most trusted advisor, your wisest teacher.

            Death teaches you that every day above ground is a fine day.

            Death teaches you to feel fortunate on good days, and bad days...well, they do not exist.

            Death teaches you that merely seeing one more sunrise is enough to fill your cup of life to the brim -- pressed down and running over!

            Death teaches you that you can postpone its touch by earning serenity.

Serenity is earned by a lot of prayer and acceptance.

Acceptance is taking one step out of denial and accepting/allowing your repressed, painful combat memories to be re-lived/suffered thru/shared with other combat vets -- and thus de-fused.

Each time you accomplish this act of courage/desperation:

            the pain gets less;

            more tormenting combat demons hiding in the darkness of your gut are thrown out into the sunlight of awareness, where they disappear in a puff of smoke;

            the less bedeviling combat demons, the more serenity earned;

            serenity is, regretfully, rather an indistinct quality, but it manifests as a sense of honor, a sense of calm, and gratitude to your creator – which lengthens life span.

Down thru the dusty centuries it has always been thus.

It always will be, for what is seared into a man’s soul who stands face to face with death never changes.

 Writer’s Note (1):

This work attempts to describe the world as seen thru the eyes of a combat veteran.

It is a world virtually unknown to the public because few veterans talk about it.

This is unfortunate since people who are trying to understand, and make meaningful contact with combat veterans, are kept in the dark.

Those who wonder why they cannot connect with combat veterans need look no further than these few lines to understand why this is so.

How do you establish a rapport with a combat veteran?

It is very simple:

            Demonstrate to him out in the open in front of God and everybody that you too have a Code  of Honor --that is, you also keep your word -- no matter what!

Do it and you will forge a bond.

Do it not and you will not.

End of story. Case closed.

I offer these poor, inadequate words – bought not taught – in the hope that they may shed some small light on why combat veterans are like they are, and how they can fix it.

It is my life desire that this tortured work, despite its many defects, may yet still provide some tiny sliver of understanding which may blossom into tolerance – nay, acceptance – of a Warrior’s perhaps unconventional way of being due to combat-damaged emotions from doing his duty under fire.

Signed, a Purple Heart Medal recipient who wishes to remain an unknown soldier.

Life Member of the Military Order of the Purple Heart (MOPH), member number L63550.

Life Member of the Disabled American Veterans (DAV)

In press Military Order of the Purple Heart Magazine, used with authors permission. 

Depression and the Combat Veteran

Have you ever felt so sad, that sad where zoning out can mask momentarily? Where a laugh can give you a spritzer of joy, but falls flat into felling of sorrow?

I do not want to take my medications anymore, they make me feel less of a man. I want to feel my virility as I effortlessly strum her passion.

That sadness that engulfs and to answer I call upon disconnection, not just from everything and everyone but the self that I seek as it flees my rationality.

Female Combat Veteran Reaches Out For Help

I received this comment on the 20th of February from a female combat veteran.

PFC.Army2007 said...

I am a sister, a daughter, a mother, a wife, a combat veteran. It's sad to say that after all this time the horror I have experienced in the war still haunts me. It is affecting my relationship with my children and my marriage to my husband of 10 years. I felt so alone sometimes...empty...mad...I can see myself changed after my service and I don't know how to fill the emptiness inside me. Things around me in the civilian world still triggers my memory. I want to forget everything and move on. I couldn't.... I found my self sometimes staring at a distance...screaming silently inside of me...tears would fall down my cheeks..my husband would ask.."Whats wrong? Do you want to talk?" I always say nothing...I felt that I need to enlist in the service again just to feel whole again...I don't know what to do....

My response,

Welcome home. Some suggestions...do not reenlist...that will make your situation worse and you could possibly loose everything. Right now you feel like everything is wrong. Today you have been experiencing delayed reactions to the insanity of combat but did not have time to process during the threats to your life. If you would have felt what you feel today on the scale you experience today, while in combat, then you would of had a greater chance of getting killed.

What you are experiencing is a normal reaction that happens when we leave the adrenaline driven world of combat and then transition to home in the "real world" (which to us seems to be a false reality). Our world view have been completely and permanently altered by what we witnessed. To describe "what I did" in combat usually leads to use of the word "witnessed." I can only reconcile my spiritual side by seeking the perspective of a witness; to never forget, to be vigilant in advocating for the mentally wounded and to find a personal purpose from the insanity of war. This was paramount for me to move past the position you reside in now.