Suicide is the specter of war, haunting soldiers to the grave.
In Henry IV, Part I, Lady Percy asks:
O, my good lord, why are you thus alone? …
Tell me, sweet lord, what is’t that takes from thee
Thy stomach, pleasure and thy golden sleep?
Why dost thou bend thine eyes upon the earth,
And start so often when thou sit’st alone?
…In thy faint slumbers I by thee have watch’d,
And heard thee murmur tales of iron wars;
…And thou hast talk’d
Of prisoners’ ransom and of soldiers slain,
And all the currents of a heady fight.
Thy spirit within thee hath been so at war
.
And thus hath so bestirr’d thee in thy sleep,
That beads of sweat have stood upon thy brow
Like bubbles in a late-disturbed stream;
And in thy face strange motions have appear’d,
Such as we see when men restrain their breath
On some great sudden hest.
O, what portents are these? [1]
Colonel Gregory Lande begins with a statistic. Between 2005 and 2009, in the midst of two wars, 1,100 American service members committed suicide, 1 every 36 hours. This fact and phenomenon is troubling. Thus, he returns to the Civil War to discern its change or continuity.
Felo de se is a Medieval legal and moral term meaning “felon of himself.” If a suicide is determined to be felo de se, he was both sane and guilty, subject to punishment after death.
Lande’s study, titled, “In Felo de Se: Soldier’s Suicides in America’s Civil War,” points to the tension. Following the war, suicide became an epidemic and a social concern. Some viewed it as a moral crime. The other focused on etiology: environment, circumstances, and the inner condition.
Lande reports that during the war, however, soldier suicide, especially in relation to war itself, was not viewed with concern. Between 1861 and 1865, Union doctors reported on suicides, providing a small window into the phenomenon. The data, for white soldiers only, report an average of 5.25 suicides per month.
Suicides followed an annual cycle, peaking in winter and receding again in the spring. The second year saw the greatest number (90), then the fourth (75), the third (59), and the first (41).
Alongside the annual figures, Lande plots a narrative of the individual and the conflagration: the early enthusiasm and patriotism, the war that dragged on, and a soldier’s eroding experiences of extreme violence and boredom, fear and nostalgia, hope and hopelessness.
Yet the connection between war and suicide did not seem to be recognized, or it simply was not acknowledged. Suicides were seldom reported in newspapers unless they were unusual in their specifics or involved an officer, preferably a general.
After the war, suicides increased to epidemic proportions, sparking the controversy and debate. Lande reports, however, that obituaries of former soldiers always note their military service but never draw a connection between “service and suicide.”
They instead “chalked the death up to alcohol use, depression, financial misfortune, or romantic disappointments.” Never to the experience of war itself.
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[1] Jonathan Shay draws a connection between this passage and PTSD in Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character.
[2] R. Gregory Lande, “Felo De Se: Soldier Suicides in America’s Civil War,” Military Medicine 176, no. 5 (2011).
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Some will retort that a bracket makes no sound. A bracket sounds like [ or like ], and bracketing merely doubles the sound to [this]. They will retort that to bracket as the act of bracketing — doing brackets so bracketing is done — is a matter of knowledge — the state of knowing or not knowing, or knowing not knowing — and not of human being being bracketed — the state of being or not being, or being not being or not being being. Being human cannot be bracket or be bracketed as human being, they say.