COMING HOME
‘Swallowed by Pain’
Jeffrey Lucey joined the Reserves to help pay for college;
he wasn’t prepared for what happened next
BELCHERTOWN, Mass. | This is the paraphernalia of Jeffrey Lucey’s life. On one wall of his bedroom: a large, framed photograph of him and his Marine Reserves unit.
On the opposite wall, a much smaller group photo of his Chestnut Hill Community Class of 1995 hangs just a little askew.
On his bookshelf, at the top of two neat stacks, are the books Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions and Living Sober. Bottles of cologne are arranged in a small semi-circle on top of his dresser — Abercrombie and Fitch, Baryshnikov, Nautica, Acqua di Gio, Obsession.
| “It is our 53rd day of activation and we’ve been incountry four weeks to the day.” — Jeffrey Lucey’s journal |
And here, in front of the dust-covered TV, the faint light from the shuttered windows reveals more of the paraphernalia of Jeffrey Lucey’s life. Brown spots stain the unwashed carpet.
It is the color of dried blood.
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Going to Iraq was never in Lucey’s plans. He wanted to be a cop. He wanted to marry his high-school girlfriend. He wanted what most want in this town of 2,300 people.
He went to Holyoke Community College, trying to rack up enough credits for a degree. Too small for football, too slow for track, Lucey spent most of his time with friends, driving 4-wheelers on the paths near his house. He got into some trouble, his mother remembers, but no more than most kids his age.
He wasn’t sure he wanted to join the Marine Reserves. But some of his friends were joining, and there was a chance he could get some money to pay for college. He talked about it with his parents. Back then, before Sept. 11, 2001, there wasn’t a war to worry about, so he signed up.
In the next two years, everything changed. The country was at war, and young men like Lucey were being sent to fight an enemy halfway across the world. His unit was activated on Jan. 11, 2003.
Many in America’s armed forces are like Lucey: young, impressionable with a slight wild streak. Inexperienced in the world and unsure of themselves at home. He was a good soldier. But something else was going on inside Lucey and the war would only make it worse.
“I should have realized all our lives were about to change,” Lucey wrote in his journal.
Lucey’s unit was sent to Camp Pendleton, south of Los Angeles, where they spent the days moving equipment from the motor pool, getting weapons training and taking hand-to-hand combat courses — all preparations for their deployment in Iraq.
At night, they partied.
“When each day came to an end, it was like our barracks were suddenly changed into a college dorm,” Lucey wrote. “Alcohol and drinks flooded the area. You could smell steaks, hot dogs and burgers cooking outside on our makeshift barbecues. Everyone enjoying what we knew would be our last hurrah.”
In the relatively safe confines of the camp, Lucey saw the first of his buddies die. He wrote about seeing a Marine killed in a car crash. Three others were injured. The day after this accident, some of the Marines from his battalion went down to Tijuana. “On their way back, their vehicle somehow flipped, paralyzing one of the Marines from the neck down,” Lucey wrote.
After a month in California, Lucey’s unit left on a 22-hour flight to Kuwait, stopping once in Maine and again in Germany.
“Our first stop was in Bangor, which was difficult, knowing my home, my family and my girl Julie, who I love and cherish more than anything in the world, was only a couple of hours drive away,” he wrote.
In Kuwait, Lucey was stationed at Camp Shuiba, where he helped maintain the trucks, humvees and trailers that would be used in Operation Iraqi Freedom.
It was tough in the desert. The heat. The toilets with water filled all the way to the top. The boredom. The food that was never hot enough, the water that was never cool enough. The sandstorms. The nights spent awake.
“Three days would go by,” Lucey wrote, “and your total sleep would be under 6 hours. This made the days seem like weeks.”
On March 18, Marine Reservist Lucey celebrated his 21st birthday. He was 5,000 miles from Belchertown, his family, his girlfriend —and although he may not have known it, the war was about to begin.
The day after his birthday, American forces launched a “decapitation strike” in hopes of taking out Saddam Hussein. Two days later, the famous “shock and awe” campaign began with three Tomahawk cruise missiles from the USS Donald Cooke. In the next two days, more than 800 missiles were launched on targets across Iraq, softening up the Iraqi defense for the ground assault.
At Camp Shuiba, Lucey felt the ground shake.
“At 10:30 p.m. a scud landed in our vicinity,” Lucey wrote. “We were just falling asleep when a shock wave rattled through our tent. The noise was just short of blowing out your ear drums. Everyone’s heart truly skipped a beat and the reality of where we are and what’s truly happening hit home.
“It’s now 11:30 and we still have no word of casualties, but from the power encompassed in that blast the fear of the worst for many is very real. We are now trying to go to sleep for at least a couple of hours but anxiety is high and sleep seems close to impossible.”
And then, Lucey added three more lines: “We now just had a gas alert and it is past midnight. We will not sleep. Nerves are on edge.”
“Hazel, who is in the rack beside me, was looking at his 3 month old baby boy when the scud hit... he picked up the picture off the floor and gave me a look that seem to say that I hope I will hold him again.”
Sometime around March 21, Lucey’s company, the 2nd Platoon, Section A, 6th Motor Transportation Battallion rolled into Iraq, slowly inching north toward Nasiriyah.
He wrote infrequently during his six months away from home. His family took to watching CNN in hopes of catching a glimpse of him.
Later, sitting on his back porch in Belchertown, Lucey told his mother and his sister stories about his time in Iraq.
There was the story about the flag.
On a short assignment in Nasiriyah, when he volunteered to go along with a convoy of Humvees, Lucey saw a dead child on the side of the road. The boy clutched to his chest an American flag stained with his blood. Lucey helped drag the body off the street into an alleyway, and as he left to join his convoy, he kept the flag for himself.
And then there’s the story about the old couple.
Lucey told his mother about his nightmares where faceless old people would run toward him asking for help, like the old couple in Nasiriyah he says he watched get shot in the back as they ran toward the shelter of their home. The nightmare came often, keeping Lucey up until three or four in the morning, until the last bottle of EKU-28 beer had run out, and he would finally fall asleep.
And then there is the story. The story Lucey kept bottled up inside him until last Christmas, when he finally let it out.
”Don’t you understand?” he shouted at his sister, Debra. “Your brother is a murderer.”
That’s when Debra Lucey first saw the dog tags. The ones Lucey said he took off the necks of the two Iraqi soldiers he was forced to shoot, one in the eye, the other in the back of the neck. The dog tags were simple, with faint letters scratched into their cheap metal, Debra remembers thinking. Lucey never took the dog tags out, and this was the first time he had shown them to the family.
The Marines have disputed some of these stories. They intially told local papers in Massachusetts that as a Reservist in the 6th Motor Transport Battalion, Lucey would most likely never have come close to Iraqi prisoners. Later, the Marine Corps admitted that in the confusion of Iraq, it was not only possible, but likely that Lucey volunteered to help in transporting the prisoners. A photograph that his parents developed from Lucey’s camera shows a bare-backed Iraqi sitting on the ground in front of a truck with a black bag over his head.
Two soldiers are standing guard over the Iraqi.
“Uncertainty can drive any man crazy, the uncertainty about what’s going to change in your life upon your arrival home. Will all your loved ones still be there. Was your significant other loving only you while you were 8,000 miles away? Will your friends and loved ones be the same people or will they have evolved into people you know longer know. Most importantly, will we be the same when we get back or will we have changed ourselves.”
It takes about five minutes to walk from Lucey’s house to a maple tree he used to sit by for hours. The tree has a rope — a long, ragged one with seven knots on it. As a child, Lucey would swing out on the rope and jump into the brook that runs past the house. Earlier this year, as he walked with his mother to the brook, he took the headphones from his CD player off his head and made her listen to a song about a soldier returning from war.
| ”Don’t you understand?” he shouted at his sister, Debra. “Your brother is a murderer.” |
“I am listening to the words, and I am thinking, ’This is my son, and he wants me to listen to this,’ ” Joyce Lucey recalled as she walked down the path to the tree. “And he goes, ’No no no, I am not going to do anything. Looking down the barrel of a .45 to me represents looking down a long dark tunnel.’ ”
After he returned from Iraq, Lucey’s drinking got worse. His private therapist recommended he seek professional help from the VA. His nightmares were more frequent, and Lucey had started hallucinating. He would go to bed with a flashlight because he felt spiders were crawling all over him.
The Luceys did what they could. They hid the knives in the house. They secreted away his Marine Corps-issued knives to his sister’s house. They took turns sleeping so they could keep an eye on him.
Drunk, confused and abusive, Lucey was brought by his father and sister to the VA medical center in Northampton, Mass., on May 28, 2004.
The same night that Lucey was involuntarily admitted, medical records show that a doctor decided that he was “a clear and present danger to self and others from PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), depression with psychotic features and suicidal ideation, acute alcohol intoxication.”
For the next four days, Lucey was kept under observation, and the medical records that his father now pores over night after night show that the medical center had a pretty good idea of what he was going through.
“When we left him at the VA, I think it gave us a sense of false security,” said his father, Kevin Lucey. “I felt as if the professionals had things under control — things were out of my hands now.”
On two separate occasions, different health care professionals answered “yes” to questions about Lucey’s suicidal tendencies. In one chilling note, after checking yes to whether the patient planned to kill himself, a further note described how Lucey “plan ed (sic) to OD, hang himself or suffod=cate (sic) himself.”
On June 1, the VA medical center discharged Lucey. They diagnosed him with alcohol intoxication, alcohol dependence and mood disorder secondary to alcohol intoxication.
“Jeff knew that he was drinking too much,” said Dr. Mark Nickerson, a private therapist that Lucey had been seeing at the same time. “But it was the trauma that was really eating into him. As inappropriate a crutch as it (the alcohol) was, it’s about all he really had. To me, it would make sense to try and treat both the problems together, instead of focusing on the drinking.”
Less than four days later, Lucey was back at the VA medical center. His sister had come home after her college graduation ceremonies to find him drinking at the house and talking about hanging himself. She called the VA.
VA medical center rules say that for an involuntary admission to take place, the patient must be on the premises, or be committed by his family. Lucey refused to walk into the building, and VA staff spoke to him outside. There wasn’t much the staff could do: Records state that the patient “showed no grounds to seek a commitment or placement under protective custody by the VA police.” The Luceys had to bring him home.
Off and on, Lucey would ask for help when he was sober. Twice, he asked his father if he could curl up in his lap. Even though he thought his son’s request odd, Kevin Lucey thought of those times as progress. Just one week before Father’s Day, he sat for a half-hour in the family room, his 23-year-old son in his lap, and told himself “we were crossing some kind of hurdle.”
“It’s funny how alcohol affects people and makes things more interesting in a way.”
Jeffrey Lucey’s father came home from work June 22 to find the TV on, his son’s Iraqi dog tags on the bed and the cellar door open. He walked the 10 steps down to the cellar, and saw a small semi-circle of picture frames on the ground — photographs of Lucey and his Marine unit flanked by pictures of his girlfriend and his family. The glass in one of the frames was broken, and his mother later found the shards on the floor of her son’s room next to the blood stains.
Kevin Lucey took another step and saw his son’s feet hanging two inches above the ground. He doesn’t remember if he screamed — he wanted to act quickly. He lifted his 165-pound son, took the noose off his neck, and made a small pillow out of the rug on the floor.
“He was in my lap again,” said Kevin. “He looked so peaceful, and I just held him, and tried to warm him up.”
Lucey probably stood on a crumpled white cardboard box to get his neck inside the noose. Had he wanted to save himself, all he had to do was stretch his toes the two inches to the ground, take the noose off his neck, go back up the cellar stairs into his room and wait for his father to come home.
Instead, he left a note.
“Dear Dad, Don’t look. Just call the cops.”
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written by Mehul Srivastava
10/11/2004
© DAYTON DAILY NEWS
http://www.duckdaotsu.org/Jeffrey_Lucey.html© DAYTON DAILY NEWS
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