I was in D.C. a year ago when I received a phone call from Justin, my closest friend through five wonderful years in the Marine Corps that included our tour to Afghanistan in 2008. Justin had called me to tell me that one of our close comrades had recently taken his own life: Joseph Gellings, a mortarman in our battalion. Gellings was the 11th of 13 to do so.
That call has never left me. To military psychologists, Gellings was just another victim of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. That diagnosis seemed too generic for a human soul, too careless, yet no one had another solution.
Although PTSD is the standard diagnosis for most veteran-related problems, I believe we must instead examine the culture with which veterans are confronted. I firmly believe that the unprecedented number of veteran suicides is an understandable response to our sick world.
Just as a symptom is evidence of an illness, the struggles of veterans today are symptomatic of a great sickness within our culture: the absence of objective truth.
C.S. Lewis’ analysis in “The Abolition of Man” describes the the cultural implications of rejecting objective truth and offers a profound insight to veteran suicide. For Lewis, objective truth (“the Tao,” as he calls it) is a necessary element of society and the last bastion of civilized humanity. Outside the Tao, Lewis warns, our only options are the bestial pursuit of pleasure — or suicide.
Reading Lewis’ defense of objective truth resolved my frustration with PTSD diagnoses as the general solution to veterans’ issues. In our scientific and progressive era, the truth is held in contempt, scrutinized until it is dismissed.
Lewis aptly names these “men without chests.” Out of a military society built by men of principle, men with chests, centered on objective truth, veterans emerge into a culture that has “stepped out of truth and into the void.”
Months after Justin’s call, I was notified of an article in the New York Times that highlighted the battalion. To my astonishment, the article wasn’t about our accomplishments, valor, or the two marines who received the Navy Cross (an award second only to the Medal of Honor). It wasn’t about our fierceness or bravery in battle. It was the record number of suicides within the my battalion.
The veteran understands what is evil and what is good by the nature of his training. If the veteran has any uncertainty of objective truth walking into combat, it is quickly swept away with the snap of the round overhead, the soul-chilling whistle of the rocket, or the eyes of the enemy. There exists in those moments the visceral and violent confrontation with objective truth.
In those moments the veteran feels the presence of the divine, of something higher and worth recognizing as true. You cannot escape it. During my time with the platoon I could see the superstitions that were a result of this feeling: the archangel placed on all corners of the Humvee, a bible that had survived the beaches of Normandy stowed under a seat. The armed forces are truly a value-laden society because of their continued interaction with death and destruction.
When the veteran is thrust back into a society without values, it can be overwhelming and immensely lonely. While others have stepped outside of the Tao, the veteran inches closer to the void. He is considered an outsider, and he very much is. His aloofness is psychoanalyzed away as PTSD.
In a world of men without chests, the veteran truly feels alone.
This is not the rhetoric used to describe my unit in the New York Times nor anywhere else in the professional environment. We are told that PTSD is real, that scores of veterans have experienced it for millennia unnoticed. Not once does anyone venture a guess that a veteran is reacting against the culture, not from a symptom of his own, but a sickness within society itself, the absence of objective truth.
It is astounding to me that veterans have a desire to fight and die for this country, but when they return to their homes and their community, they return to a community they fought for but cannot live in.
Perhaps what we fight for is truth, for a society that believes in something that is true, good, and divine. For the veteran, everything is lost and we have spent our lives living a lie, for a truth that doesn’t exist, killed without a purpose, and now must deliberate an existence living in the void, or suicide. Gellings felt it. He left behind a little daughter.
My hope is that my brothers will find solitude in a community of order and truth. A value-laden education can assist in the plight of the veteran. The Freedom Scholarship at Hillsdale accomplishes more than I believe its founders could possibly anticipate. For that I will be forever grateful. A college is a community and it is community that can solve this issue. Even if that community is small, it may be enough to save a life or even a family.
