Unvalidated Pain: A Chaplain’S Journey to Iraq and Back

By Melinda Russell

Iraq, fall 2007. The surge was in full swing. The tours were increased to 15 months. IEDs had become a daily occurrence. But she was a chaplain in an Aviation Brigade, going to a large, safe COB. There wouldnt be dangerous convoys. There wouldnt be mortars shaking everyone from their beds in the middle of the night. Except for the long time away from family and home, it would be an easy tour. Until June 2, 2008, when the Chaplains world was turned upside down.
You know the pain of military suicides through statistics. Now, share that pain through the eyes of a Chaplain who lost her assistant 10 months into a 15 month tour in Iraq. His pain may have ended that fateful summer morning, but nothing will ever be the same for those who experience Unvalidated Pain.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jan 9, 2013
• ISBN: 9781481704489

Melinda Russell

Melinda is a Lutheran pastor who served as an Army chaplain in Iraq from 2007-2008. She was medically retired in 2010, served the Ft. Bliss WTB as a civilian, and then became a student and homeschooling mother. She founded Hope & Healing Horse Therapy Ranch to help PTSD and TBI suffers.

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© 2013 by Melinda Russell. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 01/04/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4817-0449-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4817-0448-9 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 Leaving Home

Chapter 2 Kuwait

Chapter 3 In Theater

Chapter 4 Life of a Chaplain

Chapter 5 The Holidays

Chapter 6 It’s All Fun and Games Until…

Chapter 7 Problems at Home

Chapter 8 Losing a Battle Buddy

Chapter 9 Another Difficult Day

Chapter 10 Saying Good-Bye

Chapter 11 MEDEVAC’d

Chapter 12 Completing What I Started

Chapter 13 The Long Road Back

Chapter 14 The WTB

Chapter 15 Closure

In Memoriam

Meditation for Memorial Service

Acronyms

References

I dedicate this to all those who have suffered the loss of a service member through suicide

and

to those who have served before me, especially my grandfathers:

J. L. Gamble and John O. Yarwood, who served on land and sea during WWII.

Thank you for your sacrifice!

Introduction

Thousands of military non-combat deaths have gone uninvestigated. In some cases, the cause of death has been purposely misrepresented by the military services. Family members, noticing inconsistencies in reports and seeking answers, are generally ignored. Years go by and eventually these non-combat deaths are successfully covered up and forgotten.

—From noncombatdeath.org

Since the United States began its War on Terror following 9/11, the suicide rate in the military has steadily risen in the last few years at such alarming rates that the Pentagon, the Washington politicians, and the media have spent countless millions of dollars studying, reporting on, and worrying about the number of lives lost. Hands have been wrung. Policies have been made. But no real understanding of the problem has ever been reached. One problem is that the military hides behind the term noncombat-related death, making it impossible to learn from suicides in theater.

Any death in a combat zone not caused by the enemy can be termed a noncombat-related death: a heart attack, an automobile accident, a chemical exposure, or a suicide. While the military has very diligently updated the suicide statistics that indicate the increase in completed suicides during the past decade, these updates don’t include noncombat-related deaths that were, in fact, suicides, which is to say that the real statistics are even more alarming. When the military hides behind such generic terms in order to save the reputation of the soldier, the unit, or the military or to spare the feelings of the family, nothing can be learned from the death and changes cannot be made to prevent such tragedies from happening again and again. The story of one soldier’s suicide and the impact of that suicide is a way to begin learning from a noncombat-related death.

Chapter 1

Leaving Home

The expected blowup of the night before a deployment had already blown over. The tears of the children and mother had already been shed at the doorsteps of the the school where she walked them to say a final good-bye. Now was the time to begin the thirty-minute drive to base where she would say good-bye to her husband before beginning her fifteen-month deployment.

Will you just hide me? she begged her husband, only half in jest, as he started the car. Please!

No. I know you couldn’t live with yourself if you didn’t go, he responded with a trace of sadness in his voice. Was it a faint desire to grant her wish or disappointment that she would even consider it? I’m proud of you.

Those were the words my husband and I spoke the last time I looked upon our nearly century-old Kansas farmhouse before I was deployed to Iraq—our last moments alone before my world turned upside down. Not for the first time in my life, but certainly for the longest. No, I don’t ever wish he had taken me up on my fleeting desire, spoken in a moment of fear that would pass once I had settled into my new temporary home. But I do wish I had never experienced the events that would change my life and any hope I had of continuing on my current path as a military officer and chaplain, and I know no other way to accomplish this except to have never taken that drive.

*****

My life has taken many twists and turns, but since I was nine, one constant has been a desire to grow in faith. We moved to a small town where everyone went to church, but we were Christmas/Easter—type Christians. So my sister, Laura, and I asked our parents if we could start going regularly. With only a couple of options to choose from, we began attending the Lutheran church where my sister’s high school friends went. I had my First Communion and went through confirmation. When I went to college, I joined the chapel choir and took the time to read the Bible from cover to cover. After I graduated, prayer and discernment led me to seminary.

I applied to the Lutheran seminary in 1996 and began the following year. Having two children, attending part time, and moving across country for a change in my husband’s career turned the four-year education into a seven-year journey before I was finally ordained and began serving a congregation. But I never wanted to be a civilian pastor. I wanted to be a military chaplain, where life was less about worrying about how to pay the bills and placate the council and more about ministering to those in need. Of course, with two kids and a husband in the midst of a U.S. Customs career, that seemed impossible, until the War on Terror grew to include a war in Iraq. All those fighting men and women needed people to share in their pain and share the love of God in the midst of that pain. So I started the long process of applying to the army as a military chaplain. Finally, in January of 2007, I arrived at Ft. Jackson, SC, to start Chaplain’s Officer Basic (CHOBC).

CHOBC is a three-month school that takes ordained pastors who have been endorsed by their ordaining body and turns them into military chaplains. We learned military doctrine, rules, and laws about what we could and could not do as a chaplain. We memorized too many acronyms to remember. We practiced counseling skills to help soldiers deal with some of the difficulties typical in the military—failing marriages, problems dealing with being deployed or taking another’s life, and suicidal ideation. We had fun going into the gas chamber, taking off our masks, and saying our name, rank, and social security number and being woken up three or four times by incoming mortars in the middle of the night while we camped. And we ran. And ran. And ran.

After a decade of attending seminary and working as a civilian pastor and three months physical, military, and counseling training, I arrived at Ft. Riley, KS, to join the 601st Aviation Support Battalion (ASB), Combat Aviation Brigade (CAB), 1st Infantry Division (1ID) the day before my birthday, May 1, 2007, as a first lieutenant with eighteen months in grade (which meant I would be promoted to captain before I deployed). It was nice to be reunited with my husband and kids, but I already knew that we were scheduled to deploy late that summer or early fall. And I knew that the deployment rotations were being increased from twelve months to fifteen months so that soldiers didn’t get involuntarily extended. I guess the Pentagon had finally figured out that people react better to bad news up front than telling them more than halfway through their tour, or worse, at the end of their tour, that they won’t be going home for another three to six months! Even so, thinking about leaving my ten-year-old son, my eight-year-old daughter, and my loving husband for more than a year brought fear, anxiety, and even a