How do Veterans carry the friends they lost?

Raivadus Gill was up in an elevator shaft, working iron on a stadium, when his phone went off.

“I get the phone call, but I got my harness on. I’m in the air and I kind of look at my phone. I see it’s my brother.”

Hear it at 7:07

He put the phone back in his pocket. He would call him back. Later there was a voicemail: just home from a trip, might be busy tonight. Gill called. No answer. The next call was from his mother.

Gill is an Iraq combat Veteran and the founder of Operation Battle Cry. His brother, who had served in the Navy, died by suicide that day. Gill has told the story before. He says our interview was the first time he told all of them.

This article is about that kind of weight. We are not going to explain grief to anyone who has stood in a formation and listened to a name get called three times with no answer. We are going to put down what people told us in interviews filmed by Vegas Veteran Voices, a Las Vegas nonprofit, including the parts where they do not agree about what helps.

More than one name

The hard thing in Gill’s account is that it does not stop at one. After his brother he names his major, who died after they came home from Iraq. Then a friend he deployed with. Then a friend who had been helping him build his nonprofit.

“That hurt the hell out of me and I didn’t know how much it hurt me, but it did.”

Hear it at 9:59

A year or so before his brother died, Gill had come close himself, alone in the house they shared. So when he talks about the people he lost, he is not talking about them from a safe distance.

“It’s not that I was better than them. It’s not that I was stronger. It’s not that I had more money.”

Hear it at 15:16

A word on numbers. Our guests quote several different figures for how many Veterans die by suicide, and we are not going to repeat any of them. VA publishes its own count every year in the National Veteran Suicide Prevention Annual Report. If you want the number, get it there.

The ceremony does not get easier

Some people carry one name. Some people had the job of saying the names.

“Cheeks” Aguillon, a U.S. Army Veteran and former chaplain assistant who now serves on the Vegas Veteran Voices board, worked his first memorial ceremony at 20. It was for a soldier in his own unit. By his count he had done something like 18 by the time he left.

“Memorial ceremonies don’t get any easier.”

Hear it at 34:27

He does not think 18 is a lot.

“I know guys that have done over a hundred memorial ceremonies.”

Hear it at 1:17:31

Alfred Brenner, a Purple Heart recipient, retired USMC K9 handler and author, was on the ground in Afghanistan after an IED, unable to see, when he heard the radio call go out: one wounded, one killed. He assumed the one killed was the captain. Then he listened to who was talking.

“I heard everybody talking except I didn’t hear anybody talking about my dog. And that’s when I realized that he was killed.”

Hear it at 34:36

The dog was a military working dog who had been at his side the whole deployment. If you think that is a smaller loss, you have not worked a dog.

And then there is the ceremony seen from the other side. Gretchen Catherwood is a Gold Star mother. Her son, Lance Corporal Alec Catherwood, was a Marine with 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, killed in action in Afghanistan in October 2010. His battalion lost 25 Marines on that deployment. She was at the remembrance ceremony at Camp Pendleton.

“25 of those battlefield crosses were lined up and you could hear the dog tags jingling in the breeze in the background.”

Hear it at 5:13

She was there to mourn her son. What she could not stop seeing, she says, was the look on the faces of the Marines who had come home. She went on to found Darkhorse Lodge for combat Veterans, with one bedroom for each of the 25.

The promise nobody could keep

The phrase turns up once in our archive, in the narration of our episode What Veterans Call an Alive Day.

“For those of us who made it back, survivor’s guilt is a real thing. It doesn’t clock out.”

Hear it at 17:29

Nobody we have interviewed uses the words survivor’s guilt about themselves on camera. Catherwood describes it better than the phrase does.

Her son’s best friend came home. He carried back a battlefield cross he had made over there, and then, she says, he could hardly stand to see her family for a couple of years. He told her why: the two of them had promised to bring each other home.

“Here’s the thing about those kind of promises. You had no right to promise each other that because that wasn’t in your control.”

Hear it at 50:25

That is the mother of the Marine who did not come home, telling the one who did to let himself off the hook. She did not stop there.

“Those of you who came home owe it to those of you who didn’t to take care of yourselves.”

Hear it at 49:06

She holds herself to the same rule. She says she thinks her son and her father are watching, and mostly laughing at her mistakes.

“I think sometimes he’s watching and I don’t want to let him down.”

Hear it at 52:03

What they say kept them going

Here the agreement ends.

Ross D. Bryant, a U.S. Army Veteran who leads UNLV Military and Veteran Services, has lost student Veterans. He says the common thread was isolation: people in distress who were not part of anything. So he gives every one of them his own number.

“I hand out my cell phone and I say, ‘Now look dude, you can call me anytime, day or night. I mean it.’”

Hear it at 1:12:36

Gill’s experience does not fit that neatly. The people he lost, he says, came from different walks of life and looked like they were doing well. Bobi Pike-Oates, a retired Air Force Senior Master Sergeant, says the same thing in six words.

“Some people hide it really well.”

Hear it at 51:23

AJ Kehl, a U.S. Air Force Veteran with more than 22 years of service and a career firefighter, tells a story about a four-star general pulling him aside at a reception and asking him, of all people, how to stop it. Kehl believes the people at the top care.

“I don’t think they fully understand, and neither do I, to be frank, how to stop it.”

Hear it at 14:56

Nick Merrick, a former U.S. Army Green Beret and founder of Green Beret Racing, is out of patience with one answer in particular: the hashtag, the push-up challenge, the awareness campaign.

“Suicide awareness. We know. Got it.”

Hear it at 11:42

“Now, what do we do about it? And our thought is community.”

Hear it at 12:00

His version of community is a race team. The theory is not complicated. A man whose buddies are racing this weekend has a reason to be there this weekend, and then there is another weekend after that.

“We’re just playing for time and that’s all it is.”

Hear it at 11:33

Delvin Bourn, a U.S. Army Veteran, 82nd Airborne paratrooper and Gulf War Veteran, works with a group of Veteran nonprofits. He says most of the founders he knows started theirs for the same reason he did.

“In the Veteran community, if you don’t have something to do, our minds wander.”

Hear it at 34:17

And Tarek “Joey Nobody” Kadourah, a U.S. Army Veteran, does not trust the phone alone.

“Even if they tell you they’re fine, take it from me. I lost some friends. Still go physically check on them.”

Hear it at 1:00:14

A phone number. A race. A job to do. A knock on the door. None of them claims theirs is the answer. Every one of them is describing the same move from a different angle: do not leave a person alone with it.

From the inside

Two of the people in this article have been the one others were worried about.

Jason Brooks, a medically retired Marine, Recon and SERE instructor and firearms instructor, lost his career to injury, and with it, he says, part of his soul. He went through suicidal thoughts. He came out the other side as a peer mentor, and this is what he tells the people he sits with:

“It might look like everything’s closing in on you, but that’s not the reality of the situation.”

Hear it at 37:31

And Gill. On the worst afternoon of his own life, what turned him around was a flyer on a table, for an event he had told people he would be at that weekend.

“It gave me a reason to live.”

Hear it at 5:39

A flyer. He has spent the years since asking why he is still here when his brother is not, and that piece of paper is the answer he keeps arriving at: he had somewhere to be, and somebody was counting on him. He describes the dark stretch as a tunnel on a train line.

“After that tunnel, guess what? It’s going to be bright again. Just get through the tunnel.”

Hear it at 12:10

What nobody has told us yet

Veterans talk about losing the faces: reaching for a friend and finding the picture has gone soft. We went back through our interviews looking for it. Nobody has said it to us on camera. That may only mean we have not asked. We will.