http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/5/6/145612/2342/388/510148 IGTNT: Another Casualty of Vietnam - Another Vet Suicide Hotlist
by FreedomRider
Tue May 06, 2008 at 12:22:29 PM PDT
After years of visiting DailyKos as a reader, I have never posted a diary or even a response. But the time has come for me to speak out, particularly after reading two recent diaries about US military veterans -- one from the current war and one from WWII -- who ended their lives recently.
...
On Sunday, April 13, my mother and I were at our home in suburban southern California when we heard a massive gun shot. I ran downstairs to find my stepfather, L. John Berreyes, sitting at our dining room table with a 50 caliber gun at his head. He had fired into the wall (for some reason). My mother was screaming at him in panic. I tried to calm her down and talk to John. In the subsequent 30 minutes or so, John turned over several guns to us, enigmatically saying "I'm done." He would find a gun (always locked safely away in a closet or the garage), load it, point it at his head or throat, then drop it, unload it, and hand it over.
John was a gun owner but not a hunter; he always assured us that he would never shoot at a living thing or bring a loaded gun into the house. As I pleaded with him to reconsider his decision to die, he assured my mother and me that he would not and did not want to hurt us.
But he also said the world was too horrible of a place for him to live anymore. A severely abused child, John had registered for selective service as a conscientious objector in the late 1960s. Of course, that request was ignored, and as a poorly educated, half-Native American with little sense of his rights, he was shipped to Vietnam as a gunner on a chopper. His commanding officer, an Oliver North type mad with power, decided to start his own campaign by selling drugs and guns to the VC. In the early 1970s, after several months of being asked to slaughter civilians he was told were military targets, John and his company were ambushed. Everyone was murdered right in front of him except his CO (who shot himself). John was captured and taken to a POW camp for several weeks of torture, where he was near death, suspended in a bamboo cage over a river, when an American rescue patrol happened to find him.
Back in the states, he spent a year in a VA hospital, where doctors tried to convince him that the activities practiced by his CO were a figment of his imagination (they never "officially" happened). He ended up with a discharge and was never entitled to any military benefits.
More at the link. IGTNT = I Got The News Today. I just thought it was somehow appropriate that Kerry's name would be near that diary. He heroically worked so that there weren't more men sent to Vietnam, many of them with "hidden wounds" that never healed.
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