[A continuing series by guest author Ross Caputi]
I remember the many nights at the barracks where we all drank ourselves into a stupor, but one night in particular stands out in my memory. My friend Chris Bradley stumbled out of his room.
“Rosco!” he shouted, and began stammering to me about what at first appeared to be nonsense, but I soon realized that he was trying to tell me about the most traumatic incident of his life.
“My dad is real good friends with this psychologist guy.” He put one hand on my shoulder and with the other hand he clutched his beer bottle by the neck.
“He says I’m pretty messed up. I told Sergeant Williams and he goes to me ‘Is it because of the old man you shot?’ and I said ‘Yeah.’ Sergeant Williams, he’s the toughest guy in the world, man, but the guy’s got a big heart too.”
For the rest of that night Bradley drank until he could no longer utter a coherent sentence, then passed out. The next morning everyone made fun of him for not being able to handle his alcohol.
I also remember when our command told us that Eddie Barker drank himself to death, about a year after we got back from Iraq. This happened just a couple weeks after our company had to take a surprise drug test and police dogs searched our barracks.
It took awhile for our command to catch on to the snowballing use of drugs and alcohol that had begun almost as soon as we got back from Iraq. But when they did, they showed no mercy. Most of the Marines who went to Iraq were caught for one thing or another and were faced with either time in the brig or a discharge.
Ross Caputi, former Marine, founder of the Justice for Fallujah Project, and former president of the Boston University Anti-War Coalition