Tackabery Chronicle

This Ain’t Hollywood

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U.S. Marine Corps Staff Sergeant T-Bo Twiggs was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder related to combat, entered into a treatment of therapy and medications, and was sent back into combat.

That’s what we do with Marines - we patch them up and send them back.

T-Bo went back four more times, doing a total of four tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan, earning a combat action ribbon and a trip to the White House.

He never adjusted to a course of treatment, however, taking up to twelve different medications, which he mixed with alcohol. The Marine Corps did not teach T-Bo how to live with his PTSD. The only time he felt free of his symptoms was when he went back to combat.

Where his stress reactions were actually helping him stay alive. God, we’ll never learn.

Yesterday in Grand Canyon National Park, T-Bo, 36, and his older brother, Will, 38, faced down a cadre of Tohono O’odham tribal police and U.S. Border agents after they ran through a canyon checkpoint with a stolen car. T-Bo had wrecked his own car trying to drive it into the canyon, a la Thelma and Louise. But this ain’t Hollywood.

According to Arthur H. Rotstein of the Washington Post:

As tribal police and Border Patrol agents closed in, Twiggs, 36, apparently fatally shot his 38-year-old brother, Willard J. “Will” Twiggs, then killed himself.

Pinal County Sheriff’s spokesman Mike Minter said no motive has been established. But Kellee Twiggs said the decorated Marine would still be alive if the military had given him enough help.

“All this violent behavior, him killing his brother, that was not my husband. If the PTSD would have been handled in a correct manner, none of this would have happened,” she said in a telephone interview from Stafford, Va.

No motive has been established. I bet T-Bo had an answer for that. Too late to hear it now.

Grand Canyon photo by Bill Silvermintz via Stock.xchng

tags: war veterans, Iraq war, ptsd, war wounded, suicide, grand canyon

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