There are days that define a generation. Pearl Harbor Day. November 23, 1963, the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. And 9-11. Days that reverberate through history. And the aftermath of those days haunt us today. Twenty-two veterans a day take their own lives. We, as a nation, owe them more.
This podcast is adapted from a speech Bill Enyart made to the employees of Aledade, a nation-wide primary care physician health care management practice to honor 9-11 and focus attention on the issue of veteran suicide. Special thanks to Erica Lanter-Stewart, Illinois Army National Guard veteran and Aledade executive, for her work in making the event possible.
There are days that define a generation. Pearl Harbor Day. November 23, 1963, the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. And 9-11. Days that reverberate through history. And the aftermath of those days haunt us today. Twenty-two veterans a day take their own lives. We, as a nation, owe them more.
This podcast is adapted from a speech Bill Enyart made to the employees of Aledade, a nation-wide primary care physician health care management practice to honor 9-11 and focus attention on the issue of veteran suicide. Special thanks to Erica Lanter-Stewart, Illinois Army National Guard veteran and Aledade executive, for her work in making the event possible.
There are days that define a generation. For my parents that day was December 7, 1941. Pearl Harbor Day. The day the Japanese Navy caught America sleeping and destroyed much of the US Navy’s Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
For my generation it was Friday, November 22, 1963. The day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Texas. For today’s generation it will likely be the pandemic of 2020.
For many, if not all of you, it was September 11, 2001. Nineteen years ago, today. The day terrorists hijacked four airliners, crashing them into the World Trade Center towers in New York City, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania farm field. Nearly three thousand people were killed that day. Almost seven hundred more than died in the Pearl Harbor attack.
Those days have reverberated through history. Those days have echoed through lives. Since 9-11 at least sixty-seven hundred servicemen and women have died. More die every day. An average of twenty-two veterans take their lives each day.
I want to tell you about one of those veterans who died overseas and one of the twenty-two.
Ashley Sietsema. Twenty-years-old. An Army National Guard combat medic. Daughter of undocumented immigrants. Father under a deportation order. Died: Kuwait, November 12, 2007.
Married just a few months. Nursing student at Northern Illinois University. She and her new husband were high school sweethearts. They met in a Chicago suburban high school English class. Her wedding photos show a beautiful girl. Oval face, olive skin, perfect teeth showing in a bride’s wide smile, dark, sparkling eyes gleaming against the white off-shoulder wedding dress. The light of so many lives.
Private First Class Sietsema died when the ambulance she was transporting a patient in left the road and rolled over. Ashley’s death left a gaping hole in her husband’s life, her family’s life and the 708th Medical Company, Illinois Army National Guard.
Her death haunted members of her unit. Her first sergeant never recovered from the loss. A first sergeant is the senior enlisted soldier of an Army company. In the Army National Guard, a company typically ranges from eighty-five or so personnel up to over two hundred soldiers. The first sergeant is an E-8 with nearly twenty years, or more, of service.
Her First Sergeant, John DuPont of Quincy, Illinois, was one of the best. John, or “Top”, as all first sergeants in the Army are called, had two and a half decades leading troops. He was born too late for Viet Nam. He enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1975. He served on active duty until 1979 and then two more years in the Marine Corps reserve.
John was from a long line of veterans. His mother served as a nurse in World War II. His older brother, a Marine in Viet Nam. His dad and his father-in-law veterans too.
Like many Guardsmen, he found he missed the military life. He joined the Illinois Army National Guard in 1987, six years after leaving the reserves. John served in the Illinois and Michigan Army National Guard. He spent two tours in the Middle-east. He deployed to Iraq from August 2005 to November 2006 and again to Kuwait from June 2007 to July 2008.
John was scheduled to take yet another combat tour when he died August 8, 2011. John didn’t have to take that tour. He had nearly thirty years in. He could have retired. He had two Middle-east deployments under his belt. He was fifty-seven-years-old. No one would have thought him shirking his duty had he asked not to go. But he was the first sergeant. They were his soldiers. He carried that weight on his shoulders. He would go.
John and his family were moving into a new, to them, house, that summer. John didn’t come back from moving some items from the old house. Christian, his then sixteen-year-old son, went to the house looking for John.
He found him. He found him slumped over in a chair. He found him with the Colt Model 1911, forty-five caliber pistol by his side. The US Army pistol that had belonged to John’s grandfather. The pistol that US soldiers have carried in every war from World War I through and past Viet Nam. The pistol that every soldier loved for its reliability.
John relied on that pistol when he couldn’t carry the burden any longer.
The death of a beautiful young girl in Kuwait weighed on John’s mind. Like every great leader, John took the responsibility of leadership to heart. He believed that the lives of every one of his soldiers rested in his hands. Those who send soldiers to war should know and understand that responsibility. It should weigh heavily on their souls.
We, as a nation, sent John to war a whole man. He returned wounded and broken. We, as a nation, failed to bind up his wounds. We fail to honor his sacrifice. We fail his family.
I took command of the Illinois National Guard on September 7, 2007. Ashley Sietsema died two months later. She died during my command. She was the first of nineteen soldiers to die in overseas operations during my five years of command. I signed the orders sending them there.
Hers was the first coffin-draped flag I was to hand to a weeping mother, grieving spouse or ashen faced child. It would not be the last. If I never utter “On behalf of a grateful nation…” while on bended knee, again it will not be too soon.
Four years after Ashley’s funeral, I attended her first sergeant’s funeral. In that four-year interim, I attended funerals across the length and breadth of Illinois. Sometimes the family would ask me to speak. Sometimes the family would ask the governor to speak. But each time the route from the funeral, whether held in church, funeral home or high school gymnasium would be lined with flag bearing citizens. The funeral cortege escorted by the Patriot Guard. The big motorcycles quiet, no revving of pipes. The mostly gray headed riders, mostly veterans, or sons of veterans, honoring one of our own.
John’s funeral wasn’t the first to die by suicide that I went to. It won’t be the last that I go to. There are some people who won’t go to the funeral of a soldier who dies that way. Maybe they believe that to die that way is a religious sin. Or it is an act of cowardice. Or that it is dishonorable. It is none of those things. It is the laying down of a burden too heavy to bear.
I go to those funerals. I signed their orders. They did as we ordered. They came home wounded. They are my brothers and sisters. I will not abandon them now or ever.
Rest easy First Sergeant, your burden is lifted.
Epilogue: Christian, like his father, like his grandfathers, grandmother and uncle, is a soldier. A Staff Sergeant in the US Army, he serves as a mortarman at Fort Riley, Kansas.
(c) William L. Enyart 2020