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It was a nice surprise to see Mike Bowman and his
wife, Kim, last week on the NBC network news, testifying before the House
Committee on Veterans Affairs. They were on CNN and CBS as well, and
newspapers across the country picked up their story. The congressional
hearing and the media attention were therapy for the pain they have been
living with for the past two years. “I challenge you to do for the
American soldier what the soldier did for each of you and for his
country,” Bowman told Congress. “Take care of them.”
It was Thanksgiving Day two years ago, while the rest
of us were basking in the joy of family and food, that my friends, the
Bowman family of the northern-Illinois town of Polo, experienced the worst
day of their lives. Several generations had gathered for a feast, but Tim
Bowman, a 23-year-old who had returned earlier that year from a one-year
stint in Iraq with the Illinois Army National Guard, didn’t show up.
After he failed to answer phone calls, his father, Mike Bowman, decided to
see whether he was at the family electrical shop. He was on the floor,
dying of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. “His war was over; his demons were gone,”
Bowman said at the hearing. But if the Department of Veterans Affairs will
stop its attitude of denial and take serious action, others can be saved
from becoming victims of an epidemic of veterans’ suicides. Earlier
this year, CBS News launched an investigation to find out just how many
veterans commit suicide. The Department of Defense gave statistics only on
suicides among active-duty soldiers —188 in 2006. When CBS went to
the Department of Veterans Affairs in search of more comprehensive
statistics, reporters were told that they weren’t available, so CBS
did its own study. In 2005, in the 45 states reporting, there were 6,256
suicides among people who had served in the armed forces. That’s 120
a week. The VA only quarreled with the statistics, which drew an angry
reaction from Mike Bowman on Capitol Hill: “The VA should embrace
this study as it reveals the scope of a huge problem rather than
complaining about its accuracy. An average of 120 veterans will die every
week by their own hand until the VA recognizes this fact and does something
about it.”
A better demobilization process for National Guard
troops would be a start. After Tim Bowman came home, in March 2005, he told
his father he’d undergone some mental-health screening, but it was
“a joke.” One source describes the current system as “Ask
but don’t tell.” Every returning soldier is asked four
questions related to posttraumatic stress, the source says, but “no
one expects them to answer truthfully.” The soldiers just want to get
home. Tim’s commander in Iraq, Maj. Mike Kessel of Mahomet, made a
request two months before his unit returned from Iraq to change the process
by allowing the soldiers to go home briefly, then come back together for
health screening. His proposal was rejected. “We got off the bus, we
had a five-minute ceremony, and boom, we were released,” he told a
reporter. “We didn’t come back to drill for 110 days. Suddenly,
your support system is gone.”
Mike Bowman’s idea is that if veterans
won’t go to the VA, the VA should go to them. I ask what he means by
that. “The VA has always focused on the fact that veterans have to
come to them for help,” he says, “but these guys don’t
know they’re screwed up — they think how they feel is the new
normal — so you need to bring awareness to everybody that they can
get better.” Many people don’t realize that although veterans
are registered with the Department of Defense they have to start over,
through a new paperwork process, to get registered with Veterans Affairs.
Bowman suggests hiring veterans part-time to go out and get other vets
signed up for counseling or other services: “If you don’t get
registered with the VA, you don’t get anything.”
After returning from Iraq, Tim Bowman was moody and
had a glazed look in his eyes, but he hadn’t shown many other signs
that he wasn’t coping well. He once told his father about having to
shoot at a car with a family inside that had failed to stop at a
checkpoint, but it was rare for him to talk about the war. It was only
after Tim’s death — when the VA sent a letter saying that he
could come in for an appointment — that the family learned that Tim
had reached out for help. His is a sad story at Christmas, but Mike Bowman is a
voice of hope, determined to get this country to take a more tender and
proactive approach to suicide prevention and combat-related mental-health
issues. Here’s what he says we can do: “Let soldiers know that
admitting they have a problem with doing the most unnatural thing that a
human being can do is all right. Grab that soldier and thank him for
saying, ‘I’m not OK.’ ”
Contact Fletcher Farrar at ffarrar@illinoistimes.com.
This article appears in Dec 13-19, 2007.
