Self-Termination

by Benjamin Fortier

I wrote this piece after telling the story aloud to some of my cohorts at the Patrol Base Abbate book club retreat in the summer of 2023. I’ve gone back and forth many times on whether I want to make it public. After learning about the suicide of famed Army Ranger Joe Kapacziewski, it became clear that not talking about this topic is only doing my fellow warriors and citizens a disservice.

I was almost a casualty of self-termination. It came closer than I would like to admit. With all of these talks about 22 A Day, push-ups, and reaching out to your buddies, I’m realizing that so much of it is surface fluff. There may be some avenues to get the public interest, but so much of it is fleeting. I’ve Got Your Six. Red, White, and Blue. These fantastic organizations, thoughts, and ideologies aren’t swaying enough people to stop taking their own lives.

The answers do not lie in this essay. They are found in the ambiguous truths that are the framework of this story. No one wakes up one day and decides to “do it.” There is planning and thought that goes into the final decision. Reaching out and deciphering a plan or process isn’t good enough anymore. We need to gut the walls of our social frameworks to the studs. We must learn how to keep one of the greatest debacles in American foreign policy (the GWOT) from becoming the failures of those who sweat and bled for that campaign.

Sometime around 2009, my childhood friend and I sat in a quiet bar, reminiscing about bygone days of our youth. This would be his last day on deployment leave. The next morning, he would begin his journey back to Iraq. I tried not to think that he had several months of duty still left overseas. Iraq still felt so close to us. Its grains of sand were embedded deep in the lower lobes of our young lungs.

Struggling to answer the cell phone due to drunkenness, I glanced through my blurred eyes to see my girlfriend buzzing me.

“Hey babe,” I probably slurred.

My friend saw the dramatic expression changes roll over my face like a pot of boiling oil. Excitement became confusion, fear became anger, and bewilderment finally settled deeply into pure sadness.

“I just got broken up with.”

My friend, also stunned, did his best to console me. I brushed it off and returned to the task: numbing my emotions.

We closed the bar out. The barkeep knew us well, so she let us stay a bit after closing. As we got closer and closer to going our separate ways, my anxiety turned into a torrent of suffering. Hope was a fleeting circumstance. I got into the rental car with my childhood friend and drove away with him into the dead night.

It didn’t take me long to get home. Not only was I a few miles from the bar, there was a good chance I was reckless, not giving a fuck what would happen to myself or anyone else. I retreated to my childhood bedroom. It hadn’t changed since the late 90s, with its plaid blue wallpaper and twin-sized bed. My parents were in the midst of a divorce. They had bigger shit to worry about than making my accommodation less juvenile.

I retrieved the pistol from the gun safe. It was always condition one – magazine inserted and a round in the tube. Staring into the closest mirror, I put the barrel against my temple. As my finger slipped inside the trigger well, I thought of my parents reacting to the loud POP.

I imagined them on their hands and knees, screaming at the ceiling, trying to scoop my body up. Maybe they put the skull fragments in a neat pile as they realized I was too far gone. It made me think of the times I had cleaned gore, mopping up blood with towels in the back of a casualty evacuation vehicle. I was throwing pieces of my friends – sinew, bone, clumps of tissue – into trash bags.

This terrifying image caused my finger to quickly exit the trigger well, dropping the gun to my side.

Just endure one more day.

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As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.