HW 30-Illness & Dying-Culminating Experimental Project

  One dominant social practice that engulfs our people of this world is suicide. Every forty seconds on this earth someone commits suicide. In American every 18 minutes someone commits suicide. This act is an illness and can most certainly be categorized as an topic dominant social practice's of illness & dying. What I chose to explore was my own families experiences with the topic of Illness & Dying. First I interviewed my father about his experiences with death and I specifically asked him about his own experiences in Vietnam. He told me many stories about marines contracting rare strain's of syphilis and dying, "ingenious" jungle traps, and some of his own personal journeys that were surrounded with death. One of the first things he told me was that through out his entire time in Vietnam he lost each and every member of his original platoon of 13 men including himself. That was just the first tale that shook me to my core. I never realized just how lucky he was to make it out of there alive. Another story he told me was when he was asked by a group of men dressed in black to accompany them for a ride to transport Vietnam POW's on a chopper. He continued to tell me that once they were in the chopper these men began to interrogate these prisoners in Vietnamese and one by one as they were in interrogating these POW's the men in black would throw each man out until there were none of them left. My father just sat there and watched while this was occurring and thought to himself afterwords that these men must have not gotten the information that they wanted from the prisoners. Later on in our conversation he told me that the men dressed in black were members of the CIA. My fathers experiences in this story made me think, how do some people get to the point of bringing death upon another so easily? Why do we as humans constantly struggle for dominance over each other, I constantly ask myself why is war in our blood? I guess its just part of being human.

  The second person I interviewed was my 29 year old brother. I asked him about his experiences with Illness & Dying and he began to remind me about his old friend Tommy Hayes who died of a drug overdose as a result of PTSD from serving in the Army in Iraq. My brother told me he couldn't deal with what he saw and took part in while he was over there fighting, so he turned to drugs to get away from it all and it took him away from this earth. Being reminded of Tommy made me a little emotional at the time, but as well created me to think to myself. The act of committing suicide, why would someone do this to themselves? I can comprehend the aspect of using drugs to get away from what your thinking about but you should seek help if you have a hard time dealing with the things you have seen or that bother you. It strikes me as absurd that the amount of people in this world that don't reach out to other's for help and take their own problems into their own hands. I've come to the conclusion that when man is faced with a problem that they see no solution and can't destroy he will destroy himself. Why do some of us work like this and others don't? There are so many questions that will never be answered about human kind, maybe one day we will figure them out.

  The third part of my project I decided to do a little research of my own online. I read an article about a soldier who classified by another soldier who was a medic as having mental problems after fighting in iraq and the soldier was not admitted to a psychiatric evaluation. Now because of this soldier not being evaluated as a result he killed one of his Army buddies by stabbing him 32 times and burning his body. Now this soldier had a severe case of PTSD just like my family friend Tommy Hayes. After reading the entire article I understood and came to the conclusion that our leaders in the US military have a serious problem in controlling and  finding solutions of soldiers developing PTSD from serving on the front lines. What I discovered was that large amounts of soldiers are going through these problems and the cases of mental illness's and dying is only progressing as the years go on. What I've come to think of after taking all of this in is that we have a serious problem on are hands with our Military and the care of our men and women who serve our country with their lives. We need to find a better way of figuring out a solution to all of this. It saddens me that people join the military not knowing of these issues at hand and then get caught up in all of this.

  What I learned from all of this is that there are many unanswered questions about the human race that will remain unanswered for who know how long. As well what I've learned is that the military promotes an atmosphere of illness and dying. If you don't know how your going to be able to handle this type of environment then you shouldn't even think of putting yourself in a place where all of these horrible things have the possibility of getting to you. Dealing with illness all around you, witnessing death in the masses, and living with your friends committing suicide are all aspects of illness & dying that are dominant social practices in our culture as humans. For centuries we have all gone through this, every where through out this earth. These things show although we have been doing these things like rituals for centuries we are an ever changing people that will one day find explanations for these problems and ways to create solutions to make them happen less than more often as in todays earth. These things matter because these practices are the results of our interactions with one another and until the day we can figure out a resolution to act civilized to each other things such as these will only continue to occur and more of our people will continue to die for nothing.

PS: I had a insight that I thought was relevant to this project: Suicide can be defined as a permanent solution to a temporary situation.

Citations:
- http://www.gsfso.org/PTSD.html
- http://www.gsfso.org/Suicide.html