by J.D. Isip
By the time my brother arrived in Alaska, there had already been two more deaths. He called me when he got there. “I already hate this place,” he said.
An Army chaplain, Joseph had been sent to wrestle with the suicide problem. The year he arrived, in 2021, seventeen soldiers had already taken their own lives in Alaska, a location with a paltry 11,000 or so on the bases. Many were new to a gun and new to wherever the United States government had placed them, and new to solitude.
Joseph took the assignment because the money was good, and because he thought he could do some good. He wasn’t fond of Alaska; he hated the cold, like me. After his first time stationed there, he said he finally understood why I was so miserable when I was stationed in South Korea, how the cold and the constant grey skies get a person too much in his head.
Just before these orders, he was doing chaplain work at UCLA Medical Center. Driving past the homeless encampments, he’d call me for a distraction, “I haven’t had any sleep,” he told me one day. “Last night I got called in because one of the kids on my floor wasn’t going to make it.” He worked in the pediatric hospice area, a place where kids go to die. “When I got there, the nurse on duty walked me in, everyone was crying obviously, but they all just stopped and looked at me. They do this crap all the time.”
He meant the nurses or the doctors, the hospital. They walk these spiritual advisors into the room, and be it out of hope or spite, they almost push them forward, as if to say: “Fix it!”
“What did they say?”
I meant the family, those suffering. Maybe they, too, were thinking, “Can you? Can you fix it?”
“Nothing. Absolutely nothing. They just kept staring at me,” he said, and he laughed a little. “I told them I would be in the hallway if they need to talk or pray. It was awkward.”
“I can’t even imagine,” I said. But of course I could. There was a lot I could imagine. And I could absolutely imagine what all of those soldiers in Alaska were thinking. I had the same thoughts in South Korea.
The highest rates of suicide in the United States are those over 75,and those between 25 and 34, the age of most of those soldiers. Both groups see everyone they know dying.
Now that he was back in Alaska, Joseph still called me for distraction.
“You said your friend in Vegas, the sergeant, he did it with a gun, right?” Joseph isn’t sentimental like me. He doesn’t bring up the past all the time. But he didn’t really forget things either. I had only mentioned Sarge once or twice.
“Yeah,” I said. “Brian was the one who found him.” Brian couldn’t give you even the most basic details without choking up. Even now, some thirty years later.
“One of my guys,” Joseph said, “He keeps talking about his weapon.”
“And you can’t tell anyone?”
He laughed. “Of course, I can! And I did! This is the US Army; I get paid to tell someone.” The soldier would go through a counselling regimen. In a few months, maybe weeks, he’d get a clean bill of health. And he’d get his weapon back.
It’s hard to recruit and harder to retain these days. Two whole generations have watched uncles and brothers come back completely broken, and nobody seemed to know who or what or why they were fighting,.
“Four more soldiers,” Joseph said. I was watching an episode of The Great British Baking Championship when he called, and they were hugging the old guy being sent home. “Three of them were here,’ he said, “Right on my base.”
My brother is not dramatic. He wasn’t trying to shock me, just sharing.
I said, “Are you okay?”
“What? Oh, yeah. You get used to,” he said, and stopped himself. “I don’t mean you get used to it. I mean… I mean I’m fine.”
Magen and the kids went out to visit him for this trip. If you were going to be in Alaska, you should go when it’s not cold—which is a pretty short window. They did it up, went everywhere with a dot on the map. He sent me pictures of Sarah feeding reindeer and Joshua smiling outside of a fence, an oblivious bear far in the background.
A selfie showed him and Magen and some beautiful lake behind them. They were smiling, but my brother looked so old. My twin looked so much older than me.
“How much longer do you have?” I asked. It was nearly November. In another week or so, the division leaders would finally send an open letter to acknowledge the suicides were not slowing down.
“One week. Thank God,” he said. The Army was throwing everything and nothing at the problem. Chaplains,, counselors, civilian consultants who charged them top dollar because it’s the US military and a guaranteed check.
My brother, a good soldier, would never say what I would. “They are going to FUBAR this like everything else,” I told him.
But he could agree. “You’re not wrong.”
My brother likes to go for long runs, like me, and he told me about running in Alaska. “You get used to the deer,” he said, “but you see elk or a bear, and you remember everything out there is trying to kill you.”
I laughed and said I would never run out there. “That’s what treadmills are for! I’m not fucking with an elk or a goddamn bear!”
“Sure you would,” he said, not missing a beat. “You remember Korea, you did so many crazy things there. Why?”
I’ve spent thirty years trying to forget Korea, and the military. Trying to forget the cold between the ages of 25 and 34. The teeth and the claws.
“Because I didn’t care,” I said.
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J.D. Isip’s full-length poetry collections include Kissing the Wound (Moon Tide Press, 2023) and Pocketing Feathers (Sadie Girl Press, 2015). His third collection, tentatively titled I Wasn’t Finished, will be released by Moon Tide Press at the end of 2024 or early 2025. J.D. teaches at Collin College in Plano, Texas, where he lives with his dogs, Ivy and Bucky.
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