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Suicide by Rental Truck: America Gets Another Violent Wake-Up Call From Vets in Distress
https://prospect.org/health/2025-01-13-suicide-by-rental-truck-violent-veterans-ptsd/A good analysis of how our war-making machinery can turn soldiers into time bombs.
Twenty years of war has created tens of thousands of broken men and women.
Recent headline-making events in two of America’s most famous party-hardy cities sent us back to our well-thumbed copy of Touching the Dragon, a 2018 memoir by James Hatch.
Never heard of Hatch? Well, maybe that’s because he spent much of his military career as a Navy SEAL “warfighter” always “close to the enemy” in Bosnia, Africa, Iraq, and Afghanistan, but never seeking headlines. A survivor of 150 combat missions, Hatch returned home in bad mental and physical shape; in fact, his crippling wounds of war ended his career. Then, adding insult to injury, he was “forced to … reintegrate into a society that I had spent two decades defending, but in which I didn’t feel I had a place.”
In his insightful and prophetic book, Hatch warned that his generational cohort of “special operators,” who experienced a similar “volume of fighting,” were now facing “a serious volume of aftermath. Marriages falling apart. Alcoholism. Guys getting kicked out of their houses. Guys drowning in opioids. The real recoil hasn’t even hit yet.”
...
The final missions of two previously unknown Army sergeants—37-year-old Matthew Livelsberger and 42-year-old Shamsud-Din Jabbar—left millions of other Americans scratching their heads. Why would two much-saluted young men—who served their country so honorably at home and abroad, for a combined total of 33 years—both rent trucks in two different locations, within the same week? And then turn them into instruments of mass and/or self-destruction?
Recent headline-making events in two of America’s most famous party-hardy cities sent us back to our well-thumbed copy of Touching the Dragon, a 2018 memoir by James Hatch.
Never heard of Hatch? Well, maybe that’s because he spent much of his military career as a Navy SEAL “warfighter” always “close to the enemy” in Bosnia, Africa, Iraq, and Afghanistan, but never seeking headlines. A survivor of 150 combat missions, Hatch returned home in bad mental and physical shape; in fact, his crippling wounds of war ended his career. Then, adding insult to injury, he was “forced to … reintegrate into a society that I had spent two decades defending, but in which I didn’t feel I had a place.”
In his insightful and prophetic book, Hatch warned that his generational cohort of “special operators,” who experienced a similar “volume of fighting,” were now facing “a serious volume of aftermath. Marriages falling apart. Alcoholism. Guys getting kicked out of their houses. Guys drowning in opioids. The real recoil hasn’t even hit yet.”
...
The final missions of two previously unknown Army sergeants—37-year-old Matthew Livelsberger and 42-year-old Shamsud-Din Jabbar—left millions of other Americans scratching their heads. Why would two much-saluted young men—who served their country so honorably at home and abroad, for a combined total of 33 years—both rent trucks in two different locations, within the same week? And then turn them into instruments of mass and/or self-destruction?
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