ATTENTION! ATTENTION! ALL HIKERS! ALL MOUNTAIN WALKERS! ALL MOUNTAIN DWELLERS! THE NEXT TRAM DEPARTS IN 15 MINUTES! ATTENTION! ATTENTION! MAY WE HAVE YOUR ATTENTION PLEASE! THE TRAM IS NOW BOARDING! THE TRAM IS CURRENTLY BOARDING AT THE TRAM TERMINAL! ATTENTION! ATTENTION! ALL MOUNTAIN WALKERS! ALL MOUNTAIN DWELLERS WITHIN A MILE RADIUS! ATTENTION! ATTENTION! THE TRAM IS NOW DEPARTING! NEXT TRAM DEPARTS IN 15 MINUTES! ATTENTION! ATTENTION!

Dear Sir or Madam:

Operation Skywalk is an annual memorial march in honor of Colonel Ted Westhusing (Nov. 17, 1960-June 5, 2005) that covers the length of the Sandia Mountains from Placitas to Tijeras along the Crest Trail. Participants include classmates of his from West Point ’83, members of his unit from Iraq, and general members of the public. Some of the participants, due to age or infirmity, will only be able to travel as far as the tram, and then will be taking the tram down the mountain. This year’s Skywalk will take place on Saturday, June 1. In honor of the somber aspect of the occasion, we would ask that you consider lowering the volume of your loudspeaker on this day. It is the primary complaint that I have received from our participants, that as they come within a mile of the tram, they hear the piercing and shrill announcements of your PA system shattering the peace of the mountain. Some of them have expressed an interest in stopping at the restaurant to fortify themselves for the next 16 miles of their journey, but have found the loudspeakers so unpleasant that they elect to just continue on without stopping. If you could manage to lower the volume to even half or a quarter of its current intensity, we would be much obliged. Thank you for your consideration in this matter.

Alex Limkin, Captain, U.S. Army, Ret., Skywalker

http://mykecole.com/blog/2013/03/what-ptsd-is

I’ve talked before about genre writers who have been very open about per­sonal trials, par­tic­u­larly the kind of depression/anxiety con­di­tions that I feel are a nat­ural part of the uneven ter­rain all authors have to walk. I’ve always appre­ci­ated their will­ing­ness to go public with these issues, as the first (and false) thing that most people suf­fering from these sorts of things think is a.) that they’re alone and b.) the problem is unique to them. When your lit­erary heroes step into the spot­light and say, “hey, this is more normal than you think and you can figure out how to live with it,” well, let’s just say I wouldn’t be sur­prised if there are more than a few folks still pushing air past their teeth because of a blog post they read.

The thought of talking about what goes on in my head in any­thing but the most gen­eral terms in the public square takes me way out of my com­fort zone. But I reread the first para­graph of this post, espe­cially that last line. Some­times, you need to go out­side your com­fort zone, talk about a thing not because you need to get it off your chest, but because it might help others to hear it.

I was diag­nosed with PTSD in August of ’09, just after my third tour in Iraq. Of course my first con­cern (like everyone in my line of work) was losing my secu­rity clear­ance, and that kept me from going for help for a long time. But DoD did right by me, and I kept working for another 2 years before the book deal got me out of the business.

I had a hard time admit­ting it to myself. There was a cul­ture in my line of work, that PTSD was the province of the hard oper­a­tors, the door­kickers who got into 2–3 fire­fights every single day. Like most cul­tures, you bought into it silently, it was simply a thing that was, not worth ques­tioning any more than the law of gravity.

I mean, sure I’d sup­ported cer­tain spe­cial­ized units, sure I’d been to some funerals, sure there’d been some danger close indi­rect rounds. Sure I’d had some mis­giv­ings about what I was fighting for, what my actions were con­tributing to. But, I’d seen the ads onAFN, showing young men with gun­powder still on their hands, often fresh off the bat­tle­field, having trem­bling flash­backs of a fire­fight where their best friend went down right next to them.THAT was PTSD.

Except, it wasn’t.

I kept seeing non­profit TV spots, charity pieces and solemn psy­cho­an­a­lyt­ical essays. They all described a PTSD that I’d never seen in myself, and more impor­tantly, in anyone else I knew who suf­fered from it. I’ll never forget this one spot on AFN, where a sol­dier washes his hands, only to find blood pouring out of the faucet Stephen King’s Shining style. He hears gun­fire, looks into the mirror, the back­ground is a desert bat­tle­field strewn with corpses, glowing red.

I picked that apart with some friends for an hour. I’m not saying that there aren’t people out there for whom PTSD is like that, but it sure as hell wasn’t like that for any of us. As I thought about that spot, as I con­sid­ered the mounting reports of sui­cides, home­less vets, col­lapsing fam­i­lies, I began to get the uneasy feeling thatPTSD is a lot like autism: A thing iden­ti­fied, but poorly under­stood. I read about the sup­posed symp­toms, the height­ened alert­ness, the re-experiencing of spe­cific trauma, the going numb. It was all true. Up to a point.

When James Lowder invited me to write an essay for BEYONDTHE WALL, we started brain­storming what it would be about. After a few rounds of back and forth, I real­ized that I wanted to write about PTSD, and how I saw it man­i­festing in fan­tasy char­ac­ters. I used the Cooper Color System, talked about how living in the per­petual state of readi­ness known as “Con­di­tion Yellow,” both enfran­chised and hurt people. Con­stant vig­i­lance has its uses, but it is exhausting and, over time, transforming.

After the book was pub­lished I real­ized that I hadn’t gotten close enough to the issue. Arya Stark and Theon Greyjoy aren’t real people, and so addressing their PTSD was tack­ling the issue at a safe remove. It was a toe in the water. It wasn’t good enough.

Because the truth is, I’ve never heard anyone, med­ical pro­fes­sional, spir­i­tual leader or oth­er­wise describe the PTSD I know. What I see are people embracing a def­i­n­i­tion that explains PTSD using the vocab­u­lary of clas­sical pathology. It implies that, like a dis­ease, you can pre­scribe a course of treat­ment and fix it.

But, in my expe­ri­ence, PTSD doesn’t get fixed. That’s because it was never about get­ting shot at, or seeing people die. It was never the snap trauma, the quick moment of action that breaks a person.PTSD is the wages of a life spent in crisis, the slow, the­matic build that grad­u­ally changes the way the suf­ferer sees the world. You get boiled by heating the water one degree each hour. By the time you finally suc­cumb, you realize you had no idea it was get­ting hotter.

Because you kept adjusting.

Because PTSD isn’t a dis­ease, it’s a world view.

War, dis­aster response, police work, these things force a person to live in the spaces where trauma hap­pens, to spend most of their time there, until that world becomes yours, seeps through your skin and runs in your blood. Most of us in indus­tri­al­ized western soci­eties live with feeling that we are safe, that our lives are sin­gular, mean­ingful, that we are loved, that we matter. We know intel­lec­tu­ally that this may not be the case, but we don’t feel it.

PTSD is what hap­pens when all that is stripped away. It is the cur­tain pulled back, the deep and the­matic real­iza­tion that life is fun­gible, that death is capri­cious and sudden. That anyone’s life can be snuffed out or worse, ruined, in the space of a few sec­onds. It is the shaking real­iza­tion that love cannot pro­tect you, and even worse, that you cannot pro­tect those you love. It is the final sur­ren­dering of the myth that, if you are decent enough, eth­ical enough, skilled enough, you’ll be spared. The war­riors that the media ascribes so much power are the first to truly know pow­er­less­ness, as death becomes com­modi­tized, sta­tis­tics that you use to make an argu­ment for pro­mo­tion, or funding, or to score polit­ical points.

War­rior cults (and, heck, most reli­gions) were invented to give death meaning. Even if you look past the promise of immor­tality, they offer a tremor in the world, a ripple of sig­nif­i­cance in your passing. You do the right thing knowing that, some­where down the line, you have a mean­ingful death. PTSD is what hap­pens when you realize that you won’t, that your sur­vival will be deter­mined by some­thing as random as the moment you bent over to tie your shoelace.

Dis­eases are dis­crete things. But how do you treat a change in per­spec­tive? Joe Aber­crombie cap­tured it best in his descrip­tion of Ferro Maljinn’s final rev­e­la­tion of the world of demons just along­side our own. Once seen, the crea­tures cannot be unseen. When you’re quiet enough, you can hear them breathing.

Nobody talks about this. Nobody talks about the boredom, the impos­si­bility of finding meaning in 8 hours work in an air-conditioned office after you just spent months working 18 hours a day on a bat­tle­field where your touch altered his­tory. Nobody talks about the sur­real expe­ri­ence of trying to remember how you got excited about a book, or clothing, or even a car or house. On the bat­tle­field, in the burning building, the ground trem­bled, we felt our impact in every­thing we did, until the world seemed to ripple at our touch. Back home, or off shift, we are sud­denly the sub­ject of sym­pa­thetic glances, of silly, repet­i­tive ques­tions. The anonymity of the uni­form is nothing com­pared the anonymity of com­fort. We drown in it, cut off from what makes it worth­while for others, unable to carve out a piece of it for ourselves.

Time helps you to shift back, but you never shift back all the way. You develop the dreaded “cop’s eyes,” where you see the poten­tial threat around every corner, where you ask the waiter for the chair with its back to the wall. Where the trust essen­tial to build rela­tion­ships is com­pro­mised, because in the world you live in, every­body is trying to harm someone.

And this is why so many of us, even post diag­nosis, go back to work in the fields that exposed us to the trauma in the first place. Because the fear is bone deep, and the only thing that puts it to sleep is the thought that you can maybe patch a few of the holes in the swiss cheese net under the high wire. Because we are fright­ened from the moment we wake until the moment we sleep, and if we can stave that off for someone else, well, then maybe that’s some­thing to live for.

And that’s for those of us who get off easy. In the worst cases, people aren’t able to find meaning in a reg­ular job, or in wealth-building, or rela­tion­ships, or any of the things that modern soci­eties tell us charts the course of a life. These are the people thatPTSD takes, as they flail their way into sui­cide, or crime, or insanity, des­per­ately trying to carve meaning out of a world where all the goal posts have sud­denly moved, where the giant ques­tion that no one can answer is, “why bother?”

The root of the treat­ment has to come from meeting those who suffer where they are. It isn’t just hard oper­a­tors. It’s clerks and phle­botomists and chem­ical engi­neers. It’s people who thought they were fine, only to wake up one morning and realize that the last few years have changed them in ways they don’t quite under­stand. It isn’t just sol­diers and cops and ER nurses. Life in poverty can bring on PTSD. An abu­sive parent can have the same effect.

We need to treat the fear, address the world view, acknowl­edging that these aren’t things you cure, maybe aren’t even things you change. We need to tip our hat to the trauma, and look instead at what the life after it looks like. We have to find a way to con­struct sig­nif­i­cance, to help a changed person forge a path in a world that hasn’t changed along with them.

And if you’re a vet, or an EMT, or a cop, or fire­fighter and you’re reading this, I want you to know that you can’t put the cur­tain back, but it’s pos­sible to build ways to move for­ward, to find alter­na­tives to the rush of crisis. There are ways you can matter. There is a way to rejoin the dust of the world, to find your own space on the dance floor.

I know this.

Because I did it, am still doing it, every day.

Don’t give up.

Published in Truthdig.com

Tomas Young                            – Photo by Claudia Cuellar

To: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney
From: Tomas Young

I write this letter on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War on behalf of my fellow Iraq War veterans. I write this letter on behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who died in Iraq. I write this letter on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been wounded and on behalf of those whose wounds, physical and psychological, have destroyed their lives. I am one of those gravely wounded. I was paralyzed in an insurgent ambush in 2004 in Sadr City. My life is coming to an end. I am living under hospice care.

I write this letter on behalf of husbands and wives who have lost spouses, on behalf of children who have lost a parent, on behalf of the fathers and mothers who have lost sons and daughters and on behalf of those who care for the many thousands of my fellow veterans who have brain injuries. I write this letter on behalf of those veterans whose trauma and self-revulsion for what they have witnessed, endured and done in Iraq have led to suicide and on behalf of the active-duty soldiers and Marines who commit, on average, a suicide a day. I write this letter on behalf of the some 1 million Iraqi dead and on behalf of the countless Iraqi wounded. I write this letter on behalf of us all—the human detritus your war has left behind, those who will spend their lives in unending pain and grief.

I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.

Your positions authority, your millions of dollars of personal wealth, your public relations consultants, your privilege and your power cannot mask the hollowness of your character. You sent us to fight and die in Iraq after you, Mr. Cheney, dodged the draft in Vietnam, and you, Mr. Bush, went AWOL from your National Guard unit. Your cowardice and selfishness were established decades ago. You were not willing to risk yourselves for our nation but you sent hundreds of thousands of young men and women to be sacrificed in a senseless war with no more thought than it takes to put out the garbage.

I joined the Army two days after the 9/11 attacks. I joined the Army because our country had been attacked. I wanted to strike back at those who had killed some 3,000 of my fellow citizens. I did not join the Army to go to Iraq, a country that had no part in the September 2001 attacks and did not pose a threat to its neighbors, much less to the United States. I did not join the Army to “liberate” Iraqis or to shut down mythical weapons-of-mass-destruction facilities or to implant what you cynically called “democracy” in Baghdad and the Middle East. I did not join the Army to rebuild Iraq, which at the time you told us could be paid for by Iraq’s oil revenues. Instead, this war has cost the United States over $3 trillion. I especially did not join the Army to carry out pre-emptive war. Pre-emptive war is illegal under international law. And as a soldier in Iraq I was, I now know, abetting your idiocy and your crimes. The Iraq War is the largest strategic blunder in U.S. history. It obliterated the balance of power in the Middle East. It installed a corrupt and brutal pro-Iranian government in Baghdad, one cemented in power through the use of torture, death squads and terror. And it has left Iran as the dominant force in the region. On every level—moral, strategic, military and economic—Iraq was a failure. And it was you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, who started this war. It is you who should pay the consequences.

I would not be writing this letter if I had been wounded fighting in Afghanistan against those forces that carried out the attacks of 9/11. Had I been wounded there I would still be miserable because of my physical deterioration and imminent death, but I would at least have the comfort of knowing that my injuries were a consequence of my own decision to defend the country I love. I would not have to lie in my bed, my body filled with painkillers, my life ebbing away, and deal with the fact that hundreds of thousands of human beings, including children, including myself, were sacrificed by you for little more than the greed of oil companies, for your alliance with the oil sheiks in Saudi Arabia, and your insane visions of empire.

I have, like many other disabled veterans, suffered from the inadequate and often inept care provided by the Veterans Administration. I have, like many other disabled veterans, come to realize that our mental and physical wounds are of no interest to you, perhaps of no interest to any politician. We were used. We were betrayed. And we have been abandoned. You, Mr. Bush, make much pretense of being a Christian. But isn’t lying a sin? Isn’t murder a sin? Aren’t theft and selfish ambition sins? I am not a Christian. But I believe in the Christian ideal. I believe that what you do to the least of your brothers you finally do to yourself, to your own soul.

My day of reckoning is upon me. Yours will come. I hope you will be put on trial. But mostly I hope, for your sakes, that you find the moral courage to face what you have done to me and to many, many others who deserved to live. I hope that before your time on earth ends, as mine is now ending, you will find the strength of character to stand before the American public and the world, and in particular the Iraqi people, and beg for forgiveness.

REPRINTED FROM THE ALIBI

i was driving in the mountains at dawn. there were spots of ice and snow. i spotted two dark lumps in the road that looked like chunks of ice that had fallen off the bottom of a truck. i slowed down. then the chunks moved, just slightly, and i realized, now less than 50m away, that the chunks of ice were in fact a pair of squirrels. there wasn’t much time. first i went right, then left, then winced as i heard the cha-chunk sound beneath the car. i continued driving. i had a destination. what was i going to do for a dead squirrel? road kill is just a reality of our roadways. but it didn’t feel right, to just continue. this forest, this road, was their home. after about a half mile i realized i had to turn around and go back. what was i going to do? i didn’t know. if the squirrel was mangled but not dead i could kill it, put it out of its misery. then i saw the little body at the edge of the road. it was not flattened. i half expected it to jerk back to life. i parked and went over. i squatted in the road and took the squirrel in my hands. i cradled its body. still warm. it was black with a white tail and had brown stains on its two front teeth, like it smoked heavily and drank black tea. i hoped death had been immediate. i’m sorry i said. i couldn’t leave him in the road, to be run over again and again, becoming part of the asphalt, so i took him to a tree at the road’s edge. in a natural depression that had formed at the base of the tree, i laid him down and curled his tail over his head as though he were sleeping. then i got back in the car and drove off. it was harder that there had been two of them together. i was left to wonder: were they mates, family? did it matter? i came into the squirrels’ home and killed them. it got me thinking about coming back from iraq. i was seeing a va doctor. i was living like a recluse and had a mouse problem in my century old house. they found their way into drawers. they found their way into the insulation in the back of the oven. i found their little droppings around which enraged me. i had to do something. it took me a while to act. finally i set a trap in one of the drawers baited with cheese. nothing for several days. then one morning, i opened the drawer to the sight of a dead mouse. dead in my trap. i began to shake all over, the sight of its crushed neck, its little teeth. i shook all over. i’m sorry i said. i’m sorry. over and over and over again. and i wept. i told the va doctor. he said the mice, they’re like an insurgency, it’s like you’re fighting an insurgency in your very house. he wasn’t trying to be funny, he was just trying to help me understand my reaction. i thought of this while driving up the road. i thought of what it is like to go into someone’s home, someone’s country, and kill them, and how you feel afterward. i thought of what it is like to hold a still warm body in your hands that will never move again. i thought of why i walk the length of the sandia mountains on the anniversary of westhusing’s death. am i still trying to carry his body, to carry all the bodies? is this not why i climb alone in the mountains, so i can carry the bodies like i held the black squirrel, looking down at its brown stained teeth and beautiful black fur? i told myself i would stop and move the squirrel to a site away from the road. and then i tried to stop thinking about it. i tried not to think about it as i parked my car and got out and started climbing. at some point i was able to forget. maybe i started thinking about some new gear i needed for the mountains. crampons or a snow shovel. who knows. i managed to forget. that is what the mountains do for me. the weather was warm. despite the snow and middle of winter i could climb without any fleece, without any layer at all. just in my bare skin. i was forgetting everything climbing in the sun. several hours later, heading down the mountain, i remembered what had happened, and what it had been like to hold a body in my hands, and i remembered that after iraq, i hadn’t ever wanted to stop, couldn’t bear to stop, couldn’t bear to look back. if you looked back, if you paused, you would get hit by a truck. then i got hit by a truck. doctors put me back together with screws and rods and chains. i parked the car in the same spot and went to the tree. i took the squirrel’s body in my hands and looked up the hill for a suitable resting spot. my eyes settled on a jagged stump about 7 feet tall and not easily reached. i clambered through the snow up the hillside. when i raised him up he was backlit by the sun. his tail glowed like silver filaments. i am sorry, i said. i am sorry. i am sorry. i am sorry.

FROM EMORY MAGAZINE

By Mary J. Loftus

“An atmosphere of trust . . . where guile is minimized, if not eliminated, is a requirement for excellence internal to the warfighting unit.” —Ted Westhusing, Journal of Military Ethics

Already a lieutenant colonel in the army when he came to Emory, Ted Westhusing 03PhD used to jog around campus with his backpack filled with bricks so he wouldn’t “get soft.” An honor graduate of West Point, he was fluent in Russian and classical Greek, and was working toward a doctorate of philosophy with an emphasis on military ethics.

“There are so many good stories about Teddy,” says his thesis adviser, Professor of Philosophy Nicholas Fotion. “Most people, it takes them two years to write their dissertation. It took him from September to April. He was such a dedicated, well-organized guy. He would say—he used military lingo, even to describe his academic work—that he was on a mission.”

Westhusing set and pursued goals with a hard-driving dedication, apparent even at a young age. One of seven children, he was born in Dallas on November 17, 1960, and grew up in Tulsa, where he was starting point guard on his high school’s basketball team, often going to school early to practice his jump shot. As a National Merit Scholar, Westhusing had his choice of colleges, and decided on the United States Military Academy at West Point.

A devout Catholic, he thrived in an environment that emphasized integrity, virtue, and self-discipline. He served on the Cadet Honor Committee as senior honor captain, enforcing the code that a cadet “will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do,” and graduated third in his class in 1983. Westhusing’s father had served in the navy, and his grandfather in the army during World War II; he had his mind set on following them into military service.

After graduation, he became a platoon leader, received Special Forces training, and was stationed in Italy, South Korea, and Honduras. He met his wife, Michelle, through a mutual friend while he was overseas, and they wrote letters back and forth for three and a half years, sweetly courting during his furloughs.

“My friends tease me that the first time we met, it was like something out of Romeo and Juliet,” Michelle says. “I was in my apartment in Memphis, and he came walking up to my balcony, this jarhead guy with no hair and flowers. He had this smile, and I hugged him and said, It’s so nice to finally meet you. We went to the barbecue festival down at the river, and lunch turned into dinner, and then he was going to Honduras for six months. But he wrote really good letters. He was so different than anyone I had ever dated, and so genuine.”

Westhusing returned to the states and became division operations officer for the Eighty-Second Airborne based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He and Michelle married in 1988.

He enjoyed the camaraderie of military service, but missed the intellectual rigor of a university. In 2000, he enrolled in Emory’s graduate school, moving with Michelle and their three young children—ten-year-old Sarah, five-year-old Aaron, and one-year-old Anthony—to Atlanta.

“Emory was the only school with the emphasis on military ethics and the ancients that Ted was looking for,” Michelle says. “He took it and applied it to his daily life by the code of honor he learned at West Point.”

“Competition and cooperation are often in conflict . . . and the bridge between the two is honor.” —Ted Westhusing’s doctoral dissertation

Westhusing’s dissertation was titled, “The Competitive and Cooperative Aretai within the American Warfighting Ethos,” with aretai, from the Greek, meaning virtues or excellences.

“Born to be a warrior, I desire these answers not just for philosophical reasons, but for self-knowledge,” he wrote in the opening to the 352-page exploration of military honor.

A student at Emory at the time, Jeff Jackson 04C, remembers asking Westhusing for advice about joining the military after taking a class the lieutenant colonel cotaught. Jackson went on to serve in Afghanistan with the Army Reserves. Westhusing, he says, was “a very upbeat guy, a rarity among philosophy types.”

After completing his doctorate, Westhusing returned to West Point to teach English and philosophy, and Michelle and the children settled into life on the scenic, historic campus, which runs along the Hudson River in New York. He was offered a lifetime assignment as a professor and seemed to enjoy the role of preparing young officers-in-training.

“I will never forget the lessons [Westhusing] taught me. As a cadet in his philosophy class, he forged an understanding of right and wrong—the harder right, over the easier wrong,” wrote Carlos Keith, a 1996 graduate of West Point, on an alumni website.

But Westhusing found it hard to be in a classroom when the country he loved was a year into a conflict that he strongly supported, considering the Iraq War a “just war” in the ancient, Augustinian sense of the term—a war that occurs for a good and just purpose rather than for self-gain or power, waged by a proper authority, using no more force than necessary, with peace as the ultimate goal.

Serving in Iraq, Westhusing told friends, would help him be a better professor to cadets who might be facing service there or in Afghanistan.

The person most difficult to convince, however, was Michelle. “It was one of the biggest arguments we ever had,” she says, when she discovered he had volunteered for duty in fall 2004. “We had three kids, he was a professor. I couldn’t understand it.”

“In the minds of friend and foe alike, our army is, without a doubt, the best-trained, best-equipped, best-led, and most intelligent of any in our nation’s history. Our soldiers are recognized as the world’s finest.” —Ted Westhusing, editorial in the Tulsa Tribune during Gulf War I.

But Westhusing wouldn’t be dissuaded. After a few weeks of training at Fort Benning, at age forty-four, he was on his way to Baghdad to help train Iraqi forces to take charge of their own security. As head of counterterrorism and special operations for the Multinational Security Transition Command, he worked in partnership with a private US security company contracted to train an elite group of Iraqi police in special operations.

Westhusing reported to Major General Joseph Fil and Lieutenant General David Petraeus, a fellow West Point graduate who was then in charge of operations in northern Iraq. Petraeus was widely known for his ability to inspire his troops and gain the trust of the Iraqis; helping to rebuild Iraq and train their own forces was an important part of his strategy. Millions of dollars from the US, much of it in cash, were being used to stimulate the local economy, support public works, and pay private contractors.

At first, Westhusing’s correspondence indicated he was excited to be in Iraq, and his commanders commended his performance; Petraeus soon promoted him to full colonel.

But within a few months, the situation, and Westhusing’s state of mind, had started to deteriorate. In May, Westhusing received an anonymous letter claiming that there was rampant fraud, waste, and abuse of power in the private company he oversaw.

“Their only goal is to make as much money as they can, doing as little work as possible,” read the letter, now publicly available under the Freedom of Information Act.

Westhusing sent the allegations to Fil, saying he had reviewed the alleged discrepancies and found that the company was complying with its contractual obligations, and that “the evidence suggests that these allegations are untrue.”

But his emails home were filled with disillusionment—about contractors, the money changing hands, and infighting among the Iraqis they were training. He began to lose sleep, grew physically ill, and told Michelle that he thought he might have to resign his position.

“Trust was very important to Ted. And in the last conversation I had with him, he said he was having trouble trusting anyone,” she says. “He couldn’t trust the Iraqi police force, the contractors, even his commanders. He was in a place far away from home, by himself, and he felt very isolated. He felt like he had lost control over the whole, hopeless situation.”

“Death before being dishonored anymore.” —from a note found beside Ted Westhusing’s body

On June 5, 2005, Ted Westhusing was found dead in a trailer at Camp Dublin in Baghdad, his service pistol on his bed along with a letter indicating that he had taken his own life. “I cannot support a msn [mission] that leads to corruption, human rights abuse, and liars. I am sullied—no more,” it read in part. “I didn’t volunteer to support corrupt, money grubbing contractors, nor work for commanders only interested in themselves. I came to serve honorably and feel dishonored. . . . Death before being dishonored anymore.”

The letter, says Michelle, was in her husband’s handwriting. An official inquiry declared his death a suicide. Westhusing was the highest-ranking military official to have died in Iraq at the time, and the story received widespread media coverage, especially after documents and interviews associated with the investigation were released under the Freedom of Information Act.

But many unanswered questions remain for Michelle, who now lives a quiet suburban life with her eleven- and fifteen-year-old sons (her daughter is away at college).

“Ted very much believed in honor and doing the right thing. I think he was told not to worry about things, to sweep them under the carpet and go home,” says Michelle. “But Ted couldn’t do that. He wasn’t just a professor of ethics, he didn’t just teach it, he believed it with all his heart.”

Fotion also had stayed in contact with Westhusing. “I had no clue that this was going to happen,” he says. “The last email I got from him was a week before he died. He said he’d be going home in a month or so. He hid it from me, but I gather his emails to his family were more honest.”

His former student had a strong sense of morality, says Fotion, that could have been challenged when “things ended up seeming so dirty to him there,” he says. “Ethics can be a brittle shell, and when that broke . . . well, I want to believe it was not a suicide. It breaks my heart for his kids and his wife.”

Veteran Dan Cantey is a graduate student in Emory’s Department of Religion who, while he never knew Westhusing, also served in Iraq and shares an interest in the classics and the ancient notion of just war. “You know, Book Nine of The Iliad is about Achilles—his friends go to him and say, we need you to come back and fight, and he gives a long speech asking basically, am I going to go back and seek the glory of war or go home?”

For his part, “I had no expectations about war being all glory, but I had very few qualms about going over there,” Cantey says. “The imbalance of power was between a tyrannical government and its people, and I’m glad we tried to put a stop to that.

“But I would also be naive to say that I was unstained by it,” he adds. “Going to war, in general, changes you in ways that you don’t understand.”

“Two fates bear me on to the day of death. / If I hold out here and I lay siege to Troy / My journey home is gone, but my glory never dies.” —Achilles, The Iliad, Book 9

Westhusing’s funeral service and burial at West Point were attended by generals Fil and Petraeus, who returned from Iraq for the ceremony, as well as several other generals of two stars or more. Looking back on it, Michelle would just as soon his commanding officers not have been present. “I feel like they let him down,” she says. “I feel as if no one was watching out for Ted’s welfare. He was trying to tell them something, and they ignored him. I can only imagine how that felt to him.”

Since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, suicide rates among American troops have risen steadily to the highest levels in nearly three decades. In 2004, the army reported that 67 soldiers on active duty committed suicide; in 2009, that number was 162. Officials say primary causes are longer deployments to war zones, depression, and stress.

The strength of Westhusing’s aretai, however, has been carried forth. A memorial at Emory, organized by Fotion, was held for Westhusing in September 2005 in the philosophy seminar room in Bowden Hall and was well attended. “Everyone told Teddy stories,” Fotion says, smiling at the memory. “I bound them up in a book and sent them to his wife.”

One of Westhusing’s West Point classmates, D. Richard Tucker, has written a one-act play about Westhusing’s death called Duty, Honor, Profit: One Man’s Struggle with the War in Iraq, which was performed in Seattle in 2008 during six weekends.

“I knew Ted briefly, I had one class with him,” says Tucker. “I mainly knew him by reputation. He was the star of the class. When I saw the news story on the Internet, I couldn’t believe it. It hit me hard. Two years later, when the FOI documents were released, I decided to write the play.”

“What made Ted unique among men is that he was exactly as he intended to be: ethical and moral beyond measure, forthright in all his dealings, always questioning.” —Tom Weikert, writing on West-Point.org, in remembrance of Ted Westhusing

Classmates and colleagues continue to pay homage to Westhusing on a memorial site at west-point.org.

Reads one: “At this, the fifth anniversary of his death, is appropriate to remember all that Ted was . . . for what made Ted unique among men is that he was exactly as he intended to be. Ethical and moral beyond measure, forthright in all his dealings, always questioning—Ted was the very conscience of our class.”

Another: “We all were very interested in Ted’s projects with the Trojan War and the Discovery Channel documentary, and he recommended that we read The Iliad and Odyssey and picked out what he thought were the best translations.”

And another: “I remember Ted best as captain of the honor committee. In many ways the Honor Code epitomizes West Point, and Ted certainly epitomized the Honor Code. I think if you had to tell someone what a West Pointer is supposed to be like, you couldn’t do much better than to start describing Ted.”

The remembrances continue: Westhusing effortlessly leading a rifle platoon, reading Kant, perfecting his Russian and Italian, rocking out to Bruce Springsteen.

But perhaps Westhusing’s most poignant living memorial, on this chilly fall evening just before Thanksgiving, is the gangly fifteen-year-old warming up before a basketball game in his high school gymnasium.

He’s laughing, joking with his teammates, rolling the basketball effortlessly between his hands and behind his back.

And when he catches the ball and goes up for a jump shot, it looks like he’s flying.

“Just like Ted,” says Michelle, watching her son play. “He looks just like Ted when he does that.”

ORIGINALLY POSTED BY NMCOMPASS ⋅ FEBRUARY 20, 2013 ⋅ 3 COMMENTS