A Military Father’s Heartbreak
Chris Scheuerman, the father of Private First Class Jason Scheuerman, on radio with me Wednesday night.
Private First Class Jason Scheuerman nailed a suicide note to his barracks closet in Iraq, stepped inside and shot himself…His parents didn’t find out about the note for well over a year, and only then when it showed up in a government envelope in his father’s rural North Carolina mailbox…after battling a military bureaucracy they feel didn’t want to answer their questions, especially this: Why did Jason Scheuerman have to die?
He is not alone. At least 152 U.S. troops have taken their own lives in Iraq and Afghanistan since the two wars started, contributing to the Army’s highest suicide rate in 26 years of keeping track…For Jason Scheuerman, death came on July 30, 2005, around 5:30 p.m., about 45 minutes after his first sergeant told the teary-eyed private that if he was intentionally misbehaving so he could leave the Army, he would go to jail where he would be abused.
Here is the full, heartbreaking story.
And what does war do to those who survive it; those who live; those who manage to go on with their lives, forever scarred by the experience? It’s not natural to ask young men and women to go off and kill people; young men and women with no other life exprience than that which they may have encountered in their often small towns and young, sheltered lives; young men and women without the coping skills necessary to deal in such foreign environments. And for what cause? Iraq? A nation that was never a threat to the United States?
Click here for reuse options!Scheuerman’s body was discovered in a closet, blood streaming from his mouth.
Copyright 2007 Liberaland
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