About USMC SSgt. Travis N. Twiggs' recent apparent suicide in Arizona with his brother, Will Twiggs, so little is known that really only questions remain. Don't look to the way-less-than-mediocre coverage of his death by the national news media, it's essentially not even there. If you find anything at all, it'll be the same basic, scant details of a very small story, repeated endlessly by one outfit after another, adding nothing new, shedding no actual light on the subject. In situations like this, you don't even have to be a Taoist to realize, sometimes the questions that are left are more profound or thought-provoking than the actual facts that we know. And since he apparently didn't leave a note, this is all we have to go on.
Here's what we do know, and it's admittedly not enough -- then, later, the questions. (I may have to update this throughout the day, b/c it's just taking too long to write. I feel like I'm writing his damn obituary, after all -- in case no one else ever does. Or at least one that reads a little bit between the lines, and gives perhaps a fuller picture of who he was.)
His full name was Travis Nathaniel Twiggs. He was 36 years old, which makes him born in 1972, give or take a few months. He was recently an active duty Marine, at Quantico, although it's possible, according to delayed news, that he may have been AWOL from Quantico since May 5th. He served five tours(!) that we now know about, one in Afghanistan (OEF), four in Iraq (OIF), most recently in Fallujah. By February, 2006, he was back in the U.S., because he was doing a little PR on his own time, delivering a flag that had flown in Fallujah to the Thor-Lo sock company in Statesville, NC.
His background with the Marines was this: SSgt Twiggs enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1993 and went through recruit training at Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island. He served as an 0311, infantry rifleman, and deployed to Afghanistan for Operation ENDURING FREEDOM in 2002 and three times in support of Operation IRAQI FREEDOM between 2003 and 2006. In one of his most recent deployments, to Fallujah, he was part of 2nd Battalion, 6th Marines, Company G, part of 2nd Marine Division, II Marine Expeditionary Force, based at Camp Lejeune, N.C.. In October of 2005, he lost two guys in his battalion -- Robert Eckfield, Jr., and Jared Kremm -- a loss that would painfully stay with him always, perhaps along with others. Back in Quantico, VA, he served as Infantry Weapons chief at the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory. At one point, he was a course instructor for the Marine Corps Martial Arts Program or "MCMAP" Instructors' Course, and taught it to a group of Marine Corps reservists in New Orleans, LA. (That's the group pictured, above, with Twiggs on the far right.)
On the personal side, we know this. Twiggs was married -- his wife, Kellee, very unfortunately says she only learned of his death through an Arizona tv news report; it sounds like she thought he and his brother, Wills, were on a roadtrip to visit relatives in Louisiana, and had been out of contact for some days. They have two daughters -- Ireland, 8, and America, 4. (If you know anything about PTSD, you know it isn't easy to be involved with someone who has it. They can be -- not saying Travis Twiggs was -- unpredictable, explosive, and generally draining to be around.) He had at least one sibling, Will Twiggs, full name Willard Jay Twiggs, the man who died with him in the apparent murder-suicide (which they now suspect was Travis killing his older brother, and then turning the gun on himself.) It sounds like his brother Will may have been along for the ride, so to speak, trying to take care of his brother and watch out for him in his struggles. But we don't know. Twiggs' father understandably refused to speak with reporters about his sons' deaths. His wife said that he was a "wonderful husband, and a great Marine" (you can almost hear the emphasis in that sentence); and that he "bled green" for the Marine Corps.
If you don't count Afghanistan and Fallujah, plus other places in Iraq, we know that Travis Twiggs lived in at least the following places: Florida (Sunny Isles Beach, Lake Worth and Lantana); Louisiana (Metairie and Ama); North Carolina (Jacksonville and Midway Park), South Carolina (Beaufort) and Virginia (Stafford); and probably most recently, Stafford, Virginia. He died in Arizona. It's unclear where he was born, or what local paper will eventually publish his obituary.
The Statesville, NC newspaper, the Statesville Record & Landmark, which previously published an article by reporter Chyna Broadnax about Twiggs' visit to Thor-Lo on the paper's website, and has since inexplicably removed this article from its archives, is featuring the hard-hitting article "Showers Likely, Thunderstorms Possible" as today's top story, but making no mention of Twiggs or his death. If you manage to find an archived copy of that earlier article, you'll learn that Loren Simpson, Thor-Lo's director of sales, spent three weeks with Twiggs in Baghdad a few years ago while he was deployed, apparently getting up close and personal with active duty troops to figure out how to make a sock that better suited their specific needs. (In case you weren't aware, comfortable combat boot socks are a big deal to servicemembers, and Thor-Lo clearly went the extra mile to customize their product.) Then Thor-Lo generously donated socks to outfit his battalion. When Twiggs returned stateside, he presented Thor-Lo's president, Jim Throneburg, with a flag flown over the American Combat HQ in Fallujah as a gesture of appreciation, in a celebration it sounds like the whole company turned out for.
Later that year, in October, Twiggs was yakking it up in the Marine Corps' Quantico Sentry, in an article by Lance Corporal Justin P. Lago, about just how much he loved on-base spinning classes -- to the point of taking two a day. Hmmn. That's a little extra-intense, for anyone's purposes, even a Marine: although it is known that exercising large muscle groups, like the legs, helps to burns off strong, aggressive emotions like anger better than other exercises do. (I got that little factoid from a great British book on mental wellness, Free Yourself from Harmful Stress, by Trevor Powell -- linked here.) Two spinning classes a day suggests he may have felt he had a whole lot of stuff needing to be burned off, since I highly doubt he was a male anorexic. (Later on, he was equally vocal in his enthusiasm for martial arts training, and the "help" it gave him in dealing with his PTSD.)
What makes him signficant to us is that Twiggs was the first Marine we knew of who courageously and openly published an account of his struggles with PTSD in the Marine Corps Gazette, in January of 2008. (The Marine Corps Gazette archives unfortunately seem to be limited to just subscribers, but you can find that article in at least two places on the Web, in full: here and here.) Marines aren't typically known for their radical openness about weakness and struggles, for any number of reasons. It's part of the mystique, the brand, and what makes them "cool" -- and Marines seriously ARE cool -- but, it's also pretty much of an occupational handicap. If you want to read more about this topic, read Kathy Dobie's great piece in the Nation, from a few months ago. It's called "Denial in the Corps," and I blogged about it here. (That also includes a link to the actual story.)
Even though I found Twiggs' own story a little too prematurely rah-rah about his recovery from PTSD -- PTSD is notoriously difficult to "kick," and many old vets out there wish they could say they're free from it, despite years of struggle -- I knew he was breaking truly important ground by talkin
g about his struggles so openly. What he did could help many others, who needed to hear that message from someone else who served. If you know anybody in the military who's struggled with combat trauma, you know how much they prefer hearing the truth from someone else who knows it -- someone who's been where they've been. Twiggs was providing that hugely important resource to others. If you read between the lines of his essay, you can tell he's still pretty tortured -- by the memories of the guys he lost, by the questions that wracked him, about whether he had done enough (seriously, not a good question to obsess over, since it's never going to resolve positively, except to forgive yourself for whatever happened.) He dedicates his essay, almost as an afterthought, to the memory of Lance Corporals Robert F. Eckfield, Jr., and Corporal Jared J. Kremm, two guys who were obviously still very much on his mind.
Both Lance Cpl. Robert F. Eckfield, Jr., 23, from Cleveland, Ohio, and Lance Cpl. Jared J. Kremm, 24, of Hauppauge, N.Y., died on October 27, 2005 from an "indirect fire explosion'' in Saqlawiyah, Iraq, according to the military. Kremm died at the scene of the explosion, and Eckfield died of injuries later at a battlefield medical center where he was evacuated.
If you're wanting to get really heartbroken about stuff, you can read on the Web, I won't say where, notes that Twiggs wrote earlier to these guys, in their memory:
"Jared -- I want you to know that not one day has passed since "I" lost you and Robert. I know that you are safe now and in a better place, but at the same time, I want more than anything for you to be back here with your family. Kellee and I pray daily that your family has found some sense of peace. I miss you brother." -- Twiggs Family of Quantico, Va.
"Robert -- I just finished writing a letter to Jared and it applies to both of
you as does this one. I know you are at peace where you are, but I wish you were here with your family and your lady. I wish that I could erase that horrible day from my memory...but I can't. I feel responsible and always will for not bringing you both home. Kellee and I pray daily that your family can find peace. I miss you brother." -- Twiggs Family of Quantico, Va.
Tom Ricks, well-known military correspondent and author of various books including Making the Corps, wrote a brief article in the Washington Post on January 6, 2008, mentioning Travis Twiggs' essay on PTSD that had just been published in the Marine Corps Gazette. Ricks introduced it by saying, "People sometimes talk about the sacrifices made by U.S. troops without grasping just what that means." He hoped that by sharing some of Twiggs' pain, torment, and yes, also moments of victory with his readers, that more people would be able to do that.
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What happened in the months leading up to Travis Twiggs' death? I'm not sure we as the larger public will ever be privy to that. It sounds like Travis was in and out of psychiatric facilities in April, and had possibly gone AWOL on May 5th. At the beginning of March was when I tried contacting him several times at various email addresses, and also the Marine Corps Gazette, to see about reprinting his essay in full, in case it could help more people. I never heard anything back, from any of my attempts, and even though I had his cell phone number, which came through in one of the auto-replies to my emails, I didn't think to call it because I didn't want to intrude. But my guess was the no contact back from him or the Gazette meant he wasn't doing too well and didn't want to talk about it, which is understandable.
By the end of today (Thursday, May 15) a Phoenix television reporter had reached Kellee Twiggs by phone at the Twiggs home in Stafford, Virginia. She sounded both aggrieved and ticked off as she said about Travis, "He was sick, mentally, with PTSD. and this is the result of it. He now leaves me, and two beautiful daughters, because NOBODY in the Marine Corps, here at Quantico, wanted to take the time..." and there the sound clip ended. In another interview, this one in print, which may have been part of the same conversation, she elaborated, "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."
For someone like Travis Twiggs who intimately knew the ravages of PTSD, and had tried to warn his fellow veterans about them (see his writing on the subject, and a particularly good quote about it, linked here), it's very much a tragedy that it ultimately took his life, or at least ground him down to the point where that's what he saw as a solution. As we learn more about what Travis Twiggs went through in combat, what we may find is that the human being, no matter who he is, is just not that durable or resilient to endure or bounce back from repeated assaults on their psyche, especially when they happen back to back. People may just reach a breaking point, no matter what their training or their level of resolve. It may turn out that people can handle some combat trauma, but not back to back deployments filled with heavy amounts of it, as the type of warfare veterans have experienced has been changing. It may just be too grueling for many people to handle without something inside them snapping, after which they sadly really never are the same.
If you read between the lines of Travis Twiggs' own story about PTSD, it sounds like things just got harder and harder for him, and the light that he saw at the end of the tunnel, queue the old joke, wasn't quite illuminating the exit, but was from the oncoming train (continuing PTSD). Think of how little the average person is going to know about Travis Twiggs' "before" picture -- including people in Arizona who are only learning about him through the carjacking and his violent death. There's so much more to his life, his family, his sacrifice -- things people will never know, outside of his friends and family and people who served with him. But not to talk about the broader picture, just to capsulize him in the shorthand of wire service news reports as just some whacked-out guy, perishing in a shootout off the highway, after leading police on a 130-mile chase -- does him and any other combat veteran who has seen and done too much -- a real disservice. Want to "support the troops?" Then learn more about what they actually go through, and the toll that it takes on them and their families. And if all you learn about them is the two second newsbyte about them on their way out the door, realize there's much more of a previous history than you're likely to learn, and some of it is very important to know. Of all the things I've learned about Travis Twiggs, the one that's going to stay with me is not how he died, but his literal anguish over the death of two of his men, which seems to have broken something deep within him. Whatever comes of this whole episode, let's just not compress the impact of his life into the last few days or even weeks of it. It has to have been so much more than that.
In the immortal words of the wonderful poet, e.e. cummings, "...for life's not a paragraph, and death i think is no parenthesis." The impact that Travis Twiggs was starting to have about healing combat trauma -- "I pray that no Marine or sailor, or any servicemember for that matter, ever has to go through what I went through -- needs to keep on going, despite his own personal exit. RIP, Travis N. Twiggs.
