Uncomfortably Numb: A Grunt's Perspective on Suicide

By Travis Burns

Written by a U.S. Army Infantry soldier, Uncomfortably Numb is an unflinching look at the issues of active military & veteran suicide from the military perspective. This direct, intense work tells hard truths; and leaves out everything people think they know about life after war.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Traveling Soldier Media, LLC
• Release date: Nov 11, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386362265

Travis Burns

Travis served in the U.S. Army Infantry from 1987-1991, with a tour in Korea and service in the Persian Gulf War.

Book preview

In Memory

Brian Callan

A U.S. Marine who reached out of the pages of a newspaper and saved my life

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Adam Hill Gibson, U.S. Army

Beloved son of Annette

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And, to the person who in April 2013, answered a call on the Veterans Crisis Line:

Thank you.

What you think you know don’t mean nothin.

There is a difference between thinking and knowing. You might think you know something; you might even think you know it pretty well. But there are some things that you can’t ever really know without having lived them.

Without doing, thinking does not become knowing.

No matter that it happens over and over again, systemic warfare is not a normal human condition. The normal human condition in regards to conflict is fight or flight; not the grind of constant combat operations. It is not a normal human condition living every day knowing that your name is written on a bullet, or a bomb, or even the

(INSERT NAME HERE)

body bag tag of random chance or a mistake.

It is not a normal human condition living every day knowing that it has now become your job to perform the violent extinction of living human beings. Sooner or later, some of the people that do that job will begin to pay the price. It is easy to think that it must be what people saw in the war that made them kill themselves; in that thought, there is truth. But it goes back much further; back to when those people were first programmed to kill. The process occurs over time, and the damage was done long before they arrive on the battlefield.        

Before people become veterans, first they must go to Basic Training; a place that is so far outside the realm of normal human experience it is almost impossible to describe to those who have not lived it.

When a person, especially