In the Moment and Alone

Editor’s Note: If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts or is in crisis, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. Veterans, service members, and their loved ones can Dial 988 then Press 1 to reach the Veterans Crisis Line, or text 838255. Help is available 24/7.

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By Dr. Wylie Brace

There is a great moral dilemma that a man faces when going to war for his country. His loyalty to his country and comrades will constantly be in competition with his evolutionary coding of care and sanctity. I use the term evolutionary morality because each of these hardwired universal traits (Loyalty, Care, and Sanctity) comes naturally to all humans.

When you must pick one over the other, it can cause cognitive dissonance so great that some cannot bear it. Loyalty is self-explanatory but is of great benefit to the survival of a species. Humans tend to group/flock together. We are very social animals. It would make sense that a primary moral obligation hardwired into our brains would cause us to be loyal to our group, peers, family, and close friends.

But humans also have a hardwired switch that causes us to want to protect those who face harm, especially women and children. Our internal sanctity alarms don’t tend to go off only over religious matters, either. Someone’s moral sanctity can be violated if something they hold in high regard (whether that be a religion, person, object, or ideology) is tainted in an impure way that somehow degrades that object or belief.

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The weathered hemp rope causes my neck to become itchy. I am balancing in my hot, humid garage on a shop stool. I look up and do a final inspection of my bowline knot, securely fastened to the rafters of my unfinished ceiling. I smile and remember when I learned to tie that knot. It was my second deployment, and my squad leader at the time told me it was a knot that would not fail. The memory opens the floodgates to the past.

Being part of an elite group (military special operations) was the high point of my life. I gave up my autonomy to move as one with my brothers in my unit. The unit did an excellent job of tugging on my loyalty strings.

After going through so much with those guys, I would die for them before ever breaking my bond of loyalty.

Nine deployments is a lot. I remember stepping on a plane, leaving my wife and two daughters at the airfield, then stepping off that plane in a distant land. I have so many close memories of the men in my unit: the laughs and the jokes, going through the tough times and the good. My loyalty ran deep not only to the men of my group but also to my country. What I had to do in that faraway land had to be done, no matter the cost.

I hold my hands out before me and gaze into my palms; they are filled with creases into an abyss. The smell of fresh dirt and death overcomes me. My hands are covered in a mixture of earth and blood. That night I fumbled with her vest. She wore a corset of high-explosive material that I clumsily attempted to pull off her body. Her daughter’s body lay next to her, lifeless. If only I could have somehow not killed her when shooting this suicide bomber. But the cost of a mother and her child saved my squad and me. But I had killed a woman and her child. I didn’t know that I was capable of such bestial harm.

I close my eyes and a tear falls. A father is a caring and loving individual who will do anything for a woman and her child. A man will also do anything for a woman and her child.

This image of what a man and a father must be is seared into my mind. A father and a man are noble ideas. They are both pure, strong, and untainted. I ponder on this thought and think of how my hands and soul can never be washed of sin.

The smell of my daughters’ hair fills my imagination as I recall the many times I carried them to bed from the couch. My wife’s soft lips and silky skin fulfill my tactioception. I open my eyes. From my perch, I can see out the garage door window. I don’t notice much of the outside world, but I see a reflection in the window that can never live up to my image of what a man and a father should be. My sacred ideologies of what those two things must be will never be met by the person in the window’s reflection.

I kick the stool … darkness follows.

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For more than five years, much of my work and thinking around military suicide prevention has centered on a simple idea: perhaps we need to do a better job preparing service members and veterans for the possibility that they may one day find themselves in a moment like this. Suicidal ideation should not be treated only as an abstract warning sign that happens to someone else. For a population at elevated risk, there may be value in openly acknowledging that these thoughts can occur, even among strong, capable, accomplished people.

Awareness does not make someone immune to despair, but it may give them something to recognize when they are standing alone in it. There may come a moment when no one else is physically near, and in that moment, I want a veteran to be able to recognize what is happening and remember that other people have stood there too. Other service members have experienced the same thoughts, and others have believed there was no way through and later discovered that there was.

Being alone in a moment does not mean being alone in the experience. The goal is not simply to teach people to recognize suicide in others, but to help them recognize the possibility within themselves before the darkest moment arrives. If we can make that possibility familiar before it becomes personal, perhaps recognition itself can become one more reason to remain.

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Dr. Wylie Brace served with 3rd Ranger Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, and is a cognitive psychologist. He is the founder of Brace Research & Consulting LLC and specializes in perception, decision-making, and applied veteran-focused research.

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.