Copyright ? 2011 National Public Radio?. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.
MICHEL MARTIN, host:
I'm Michel Martin and this is TELL ME MORE from NPR News.
Coming up, is your iPhone spying on you? Some customers are alarmed by reports that these popular phones have been storing more data than Apple had previously disclosed. We'll talk about that in a moment.
But, first, a very important conversation about something we don't talk about very often, despite the fact or perhaps because of the fact that we are a nation at war. Starting today, Americans will be seeing and hearing some public service announcements that ask all of us to give serious thought to the people who serve in America's military operations, especially those who have faced violence or experienced the death of others in combat.
(Soundbite of public service announcement)
Unidentified Woman #1: I don't know what it's like.
Unidentified Woman #2: I don't know what it's like.
Unidentified Woman #3: I don't know what it's like to be in a war.
Unidentified Woman #2: To be so far away from my family.
Unidentified Woman #1: I don't know what it's like.
Unidentified Woman #3: I don't know what it's like.
Unidentified Woman #4: I don't know what it's like
Unidentified Woman #5: ...to be the one who stays home.
Unidentified Woman #3: But I do know this.
Unidentified Woman #1: No matter how patriotic you are.
Unidentified Woman #2: How patriotic you are...
Unidentified Woman #3: Or how loving you are, being in a military family
Unidentified Woman #2: Can be harder than anyone knows.
Unidentified Woman #1: If you're feeling at a loss, you're not alone. There's help.
MARTIN: The campaign is the creation of Blue Star Families, a group that helps veterans and their families and by a nonprofit group of artists and entertainers called the Creative Coalition. In part it was inspired by the stories of veterans who have not been able to restart their lives back home. Just last month, veteran Clay Hunt lost his battle with depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. He took his own life at the age of 28. What made his death all the more disturbing was Hunt's own extensive work to try to help prevent suicide among his fellow veterans.
Joining us to talk about efforts to help other veterans cope in the aftermath of war, we're joined by Susan Selke. She's the mother of the late Marine, Clay Hunt. She's with us from Houston.
From NPR West in California, we're joined by Jake Wood. He's a veteran Marine, a friend of Clay Hunt. Mr. Wood founded Team Rubicon. That's a nonprofit that uses military veterans' skills for humanitarian aid work.
And here with us in our Washington, D.C. studio, Alison Buckholtz, a military wife, whose 2010 op-ed in The Los Angeles Times helped inspire the new public service announcement campaign. She's also author of the memoir "Standing By: The Making of a Military Family in a Time of War."
I welcome all of you. Thank you so much for joining us.
Ms. SUSAN SELKE: Thank you.
Mr. JAKE WOOD (Marine Veteran): Thank you for having us.
MARTIN: And I do want to note that this conversation may not be appropriate for all listeners. So with that being said, Susan Selke, if I could start with you. The irony that your son had worked on suicide prevention efforts is obviously something that has, you know, really hit home for many people.
May I ask you and, again, I am so sorry for your loss, can you talk about how you knew he was struggling? Did he talk about the fact that he was struggling?
Ms. SELKE: He did. I'll just kind of go back to the beginning of it. After his brief tour in Iraq, he was injured in Iraq after about six or seven weeks into that tour and had to come back to the States for rehabilitation and was very distraught that he could not go back and rejoin his group. During that time is when the beginnings of the PTSD set in.
And he struggled with it. At the beginning he did want to be diagnosed with that because he was worried about that being on his military record and how that might affect both his military, you know, career, as well as getting out of the military and future jobs and all of that. But it didn't take very long. He just accepted the fact that he had some issues that he needed help with.
MARTIN: Jake, I wanted to ask you. You fought side by side with Clay Hunt and you worked with him at Team Rubicon. His concern that his efforts to get help might mar his military record, is that something that you hear other people talking about? Is that still a concern?
Mr. WOOD: It's absolutely a concern for a lot of reasons. Guys like Clay don't want to be taken out of - they don't want to be taken out of their platoon. They don't want to be removed from the infantry for having sought help and for being diagnosed with PTSD. For people coming out of the service it's also a problem because many of these guys want to go and continue their careers of service both, you know, in police or, you know, fire and rescue.
And men and women are concerned that with something like PTSD on their records that that's going to hurt their chances of getting employed when they leave the service.
MARTIN: As I understand it, he experienced some, you know, very dire things -not uncommon, given the conflicts that, you know, the country's facing, but also the kinds of experiences that most people just don't have. I mean, he narrowly escaped a sniper's bullet about four years ago in Iraq. He saw friends die, you know, right in front of him.
Jake, I wanted to ask, do you think that in part he felt guilty for having survived when so many other people didn't? And is that a common feeling, too?
Mr. WOOD: Absolutely. I think everybody that served a tour like we did in both Iraq and Afghanistan walks away with some level of survivor's guilt. I know I battle with it daily. It doesn't possess me as strongly as it did Clay. But survivor's guilt is something that if you've gone to combat with a group of men and not all of them have come home, every day you wake up and ask why it was them and it wasn't you.
MARTIN: Alison, you helped inspire the PSA campaign that we are about to hear and see nationwide. Where did this idea come from?
Ms. ALISON BUCKHOLTZ (Author, "Standing By"): Well, I've written a lot over the years about the military-civilian cultural divide in our country. I came from a very non-military background myself. My parents were anti-war protesters in Wisconsin in 1969. And some of my first memories were of the anti-war rallies that they took me to.
But I married a naval officer and I became entrenched in the military lifestyle. And that really helped me see that the military side and the civilian side really experience our country in two totally different ways. So I kind of set out to be a translator between these two Americas.
First I wrote the book "Standing By" and then last fall it was right around the time that a lot of young gay men were committing suicide. And Dan Savage launched the It Gets Better campaign, which I thought was brilliant. I thought it was a great way to reach out to people to let them know there were better days ahead.
Almost exactly the same time there were three days in late September when four military men committed suicide down at Fort Hood in Texas. And I couldn't help but notice that there was no coverage of that. And it seemed to me like this was a great way for the military to take its cue from social media and work out its own mainstream campaign.
And that's where The Creative Coalition came in and the idea to do it through PSAs. Originally it was going to be a series of YouTube videos much like the It Gets Better campaign. But it became much bigger because there was so much support for it.
MARTIN: Mr. Wood, I wanted to ask about Team Rubicon and what you hope to accomplish with it.
Mr. WOOD: Sure. Well, our genesis really began last year following the disaster that struck Haiti and it really came down to myself and a group of veterans, including Clay, saw an opportunity to provide a lot of help and to use the skills that we had learned in the military and apply them. And we had an enormous impact.
And what we really saw was that, you know, veterans aren't being engaged by a lot of these service organizations. And the skills that they've learned are really just kind of rotting away in civil society and not being applied to a greater good.
While we were down there then, we also identified that, you know, this continued service, this feeling, this value really helps veterans and it gives them a sense of purpose. It gives them a sense of, you know, self worth and esprit de corps that they may have been lacking since leaving the Marine Corps or the Army or the Navy.
MARTIN: I hope it's not distressing to our guests who knew him best, but I do think people would appreciate hearing Clay Hunt's voice. May I have your permission to play a short clip from him on the Team Rubicon website? Would that be okay?
Mr. WOOD: (unintelligible)
Ms. SELKE: Absolutely.
MARTIN: OK. This is Clay Hunt talking about his service and what he was doing with Team Rubicon. Here it is.
Mr. CLAY HUNT: I've been in two third world countries where every second that I have walked through, I've been - happen to worry about my own safety before I can worry about doing good and helping others. It was the complete opposite down in Haiti. I was able to walk through a rubble strewn, just destroyed city. It looks like it had just been carpet-bombed and I didn't have to worry once about my safety. I was there to do a job, to help people. And I have a renewed faith in humanity.
MARTIN: Ms. Selke, tell us just a little bit about Clay just for a minute. Just tell us about him as a person.
Ms. SELKE: Clay had a huge heart. And he was a very active, energetic, hard-to-keep-still kind of guy. Maybe this story will kind of give you a little insight into the kind of person he was. He was actually in Houston for his stepbrother's wedding the weekend, or at the time, that Jake and a couple of others headed down to Haiti. And Clay knew about it through Facebook. Jake had kind of started this momentum.
And Clay wanted desperately to go. But he knew he had to be here for his stepbrother's wedding. And he immediately, when he got back to L.A., literally, the night he got back, he booked a flight and went by himself, flew down there, and my question as a mother was, well, how in the world are you going to find Jake and all these guys? And he just laughed and he said, Mom, I'm a Marine.
MARTIN: I'm a Marine. Yeah. I knew that was coming. Don't worry about it.
Ms. SELKE: And I - honestly, I just completely - at that point I just laughed. I thought, what are you worrying about? This guy is a totally trained Marine, and he will find them, and he did. And it just - those are the happiest, absolutely the happiest times of Clay's entire life.
MARTIN: Jake, I wanted to ask you in the couple of minutes that we have left, you know, you heard Alison say that the country as a whole is not taking this problem as seriously as it should. Do you share that point of view? And what do you think would make a difference in saving the lives of people like your friend Clay Hunt?
Mr. WOOD: Well, I think it's very convenient for the country to not know and I guess not care about what's happening with our veterans and our active duty service members and the suicide epidemic that is growing. And when I say that I mean that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were a front page issue for a number of years.
And they've since gotten off the front page and they are now buried in the middle of the newspaper. But I don't think there's anything more important than, you know, the fact that our nation is at war and we have been for almost 10 years. You know, this issue needs to be front and center at the highest levels of our government and there needs to be a very open and candid conversation at the highest levels of elected officials as to what this problem is, what caused it, and the best way to move forward on how to fix it.
And I don't think that conversation is happening, and if it is, it's not getting the attention it deserves.
MARTIN: Alison, can I have a final thought from you about what you think would make a difference?
Ms. BUCKHOLTZ: It sounds really simple. But a thank you can go a long way.
MARTIN: Thank you?
Ms. BUCKHOLTZ: I think that's it. Thank you for your service.
MARTIN: Alison Buckholtz has inspired a new public service announcement campaign to highlight the growing problem of the suicides of service members and former military service members. She's also author of the memoir "Standing By: The Making of a Military Family in a Time of War." She was here with us in our Washington, D.C. studio. Alison, thank you.
Ms. BUCKHOLTZ: Thank you.
MARTIN: Also with us, Susan Selke is the mother of the late Marine Clay Hunt. He took his own life after serving in both Iraq and Afghanistan and earning a Purple Heart. Susan Selke, thank you for joining us. And thank you for the gift of your son.
Ms. SELKE: Thank you.
MARTIN: Jake Wood is a veteran Marine who served tours in both Afghanistan and Iraq. He also founded Team Rubicon. That's a nonprofit that uses military veteran skills for humanitarian aid work. Jake Wood, thank you for joining us and thank you for your service.
Mr. WOOD: Thank you for having me.
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