Sgt. 1st Class Patrick Henderson, a strapping Iraq combat veteran, spent the last, miserable months of his life as an Army recruiter, cold-calling dozens of people a day from his strip-mall office and sitting in strangers' living rooms, trying to sign up their sons and daughters for an unpopular war.
He put in 13-hour days, six days a week, often encountering abuse from young people or their parents. When he and other recruiters would gripe about the pressure to meet their quotas, their superiors would snarl that they ought to be grateful they were not in Iraq, according to his widow.
Less than a year into the job, Henderson — afflicted by flashbacks and sleeplessness after his tour of battle in Iraq — went into his backyard shed, slid the chain lock in place, and hanged himself with a dog chain.
He became, at age 35, the fourth member of the Army's Houston Recruiting Battalion to commit suicide in the past three years — something Henderson's widow and others blame on the psychological scars of combat, combined with the pressure-cooker job of trying to sell the war.
The mind toll of our wars is tremendous and the tragedy continues to compound itself. I can't imagine the trauma, nor the act of committing suicide, but sometimes pain exceeds resources, especially when we don't provide enough support for our returning troops.
Beyond the real human consequences for people I don't know--not to mention the few times I've personally been impacted by suicide--this story got me thinking about the larger philosophical significance of killing oneself in the context of war. I also thought about suicide as a deliberate act of resistance.
One famous example of mass suicide as defiance against an opposing force is the Masada.
[T]he Romans...finally [breached] the wall of the fortress with a battering ram...When they entered the fortress, however, the Romans discovered that its 936 inhabitants had set all the buildings but the food storerooms ablaze and committed mass suicide rather than face certain capture, defeat, slavery or execution by their enemies.
The account of the siege of Masada was related to Josephus by two women who survived the suicide by hiding inside a cistern along with five children, and repeated Elazar ben Yair's exhortations to his followers, prior to the mass suicide, verbatim to the Romans. Because Judaism strongly discourages suicide, Josephus reported that the defenders had drawn lots and killed each other in turn, down to the last man, who would be the only one to actually take his own life. Josephus says that Eleazar ordered his men to destroy everything except the foodstuffs to show that the defenders retained the ability to live, and so chose the time of their death over slavery...
That story was brought to mind when considering Gandhi's oft-criticized suggestion of what European Jews should have done during WWII (as recounted by Louis Fischer in Gandhi and Stalin):
"I [do] not believe in passive resistance. Satyagraha is something very active. It is the reverse of passive. Submission is passive and I dislike submission. The Jews of Germany made the mistake of submitting to Hitler."
...
"Hitler," Gandhi solemnly affirmed, "killed five million Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher's knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs. I believe in hari-kiri. I do not believe in its militaristic connotations, but it is a heroic method."
...
"[That] would have been heroism. It would have aroused the world and the people of Germany to the evils of Hitler's violence, especially in 1938, before the war. As it is they succumbed anyway in their millions."
There were probably other forms of resistance that Jews and Europeans could have employed, but Gandhi's motto was "do or die" and as I've noted before, he even advocated the unthinkable:
[N]on-violence has to be non-violence of the brave and the strong. It must come from inward conviction. I have, therefore, not hesitated to say that it is better to be violent if there is violence in our breasts than to put on the cloak of non-violence to cover impotence. Violence is any day preferable to impotence. There is hope for a violent man to become non-violent. There is no such hope for the impotent.
The Mahatma hated impotence and passivity even more than violence. Suicide is, at the very least, active--doing and dying.
I don't think the recruiters who have killed themselves are doing so for any political reason, any other reason than ending their pain. There obviously are issues they faced deeper than just trying to sign up more cannon fodder, but in the end their actions can give the rest of us pause, providing space to consider the morality of recruiting and training people to kill, die, suffer lasting physical and mental wounds. A final sacrifice we should honor.
ntodd