Suicide Claims Life of ‘Cocky’ Wounded Veteran Featured in HBO’s ‘Alive Day Memories’

‘We Knew He Had Demons,’ War Veteran’s Mom Says

by Kate Wiltrout
The Virginian-Pilot, April 20, 2012

Jonathan Bartlett, shown above exercising inside a hospital rehab facility, has died. His family confirmed his death on April 17, 2012 was a suicide. (Vicki Cronis-Nohe, The Virginian-Pilot)

Jonathan Bartlett, an Iraq war veteran and double amputee who was featured in numerous Virginian-Pilot stories as he recovered from his injuries, died Tuesday at his home in Chesapeake. He was 27.

Family members said he killed himself.

On Sept. 25, 2004, Bartlett was a 19-year-old Army infantryman at the wheel of a Humvee outside Fallujah when it hit a homemade bomb. He lost one leg in the blast; the other was amputated soon after.

He spent 13 months recovering at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, where he learned to walk on prosthetic legs and amused nurses, therapists and visitors with his salty language and black humor. He liked to wear T-shirts referencing the stumps of his legs. One read: “I was golfing. I found the alligator.” Another admonished: “Tell your children not to stare, or the bogeyman will take their legs, too.”

Jonathan Bartlett

A graduate of Maury High School, Bartlett returned to Norfolk in 2005 and enrolled at Old Dominion. He eventually moved into a wheelchair-accessible home in Deep Creek purchased with the aid of a veterans organization.

In 2007, Bartlett was one of 10 servicemembers featured in an HBO documentary called “Alive Day Memories: Home from Iraq.”

He graduated in 2011 and got a job with the federal government, working in human resources at Norfolk Naval Station.

Bartlett was outspoken and opinionated, with a flair for the dramatic; he’d regularly post manifestos about politics, religion and government on Facebook, and link to essays and articles that invariably made him mad.

His mother, Esther Bartlett of Norfolk, said she saw him a few times in the past week and Jon seemed his usual cocky self.

“We knew he had demons,” she said. “He brought probably more than a few of them back from Iraq with him. We thought he had at least made some kind of peace with them.”

A friend, Jumaria Copeland, said Bartlett helped her get through tough times, whether she was struggling emotionally or financially.

“I remember being so flat broke, and he would hand me a $20. He’d say, ‘I know it’s not much, but it will put gas in your tank.’ “

Read the rest of this story:

http://hamptonroads.com/2012/04/we-knew-he-had-demons-war-veterans-mom-says

Watch video of Jonathan Bartlett speak about life after being wounded:

4-STAR GENERAL: PTSD is a “Cruel Physiological Thing”

COMBAT GENERATION: BLOODLESS TRAUMA
Diagnosis: Battle wound

by Greg Jaffe
The Washington Post, July 18, 2010

The 300-pound bomb blasted Marine Staff Sgt. James Ownbey’s mine-resistant truck so high that it snapped power lines before it slammed to the dusty ground in western Iraq.

Ownbey, knocked briefly unconscious by the blast, awoke to suffocating black smoke and a swirling cloud of dirt. He felt for the vehicle’s door, then stumbled into the sunlight where he was joined by the rest of his woozy, three-man crew. Their bodies were sore, but they looked fine.

A Marine general visiting from Washington heard about the blast and came to see the survivors. As Gen. James F. Amos laid a hand on Ownbey’s neck, his aide snapped a picture, proof of the new vehicle’s efficacy against insurgent bombs.

"I have been asked . . . should you have figured this out sooner? Yeah, we should have. But we didn't. It has been evolutionary." - Marine Gen. James Amos(MCA)

“I kind of felt separated from myself,” Ownbey recalled of the aftermath of the 2007 blast. “It didn’t feel like anything was real.”
Two years after the explosion Amos and Ownbey met again, this time in a cramped room at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda.

Ownbey had been overtaken by terrifying panic attacks, puzzling memory loss and strange rib-snapping coughing fits that left him hospitalized for weeks at a time. Doctors diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and traumatic brain injury, caused by battlefield concussions.

For Amos, seeing Ownbey’s condition was the moment that the bloodless trauma of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars became tangible. “I thought we can’t do this anymore,” said Amos, referring to the military’s slow response to treating PTSD and traumatic brain injury.
Ownbey’s descent from dazed survivor to bed-ridden Marine exemplifies the debilitating passage of troops afflicted with PTSD and traumatic brain injury. His story also traces the military’s awakening.

Staff Sgt. James Ownbey, Marine combat engineer bedridden inside a Navy hospital two years after taking a direct hit from an 300-pound IED while driving a mine-resistant vehicle. In addition to multiple neuropsychiatic injuries, including severe PTSD, the blast damaged his pituitary glad function causing his weight to balloon from 165 to over 240 pounds.

Senior commanders have reached a turning point. After nine years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, they are beginning to recognize age-old legacies of the battlefield – once known as shellshock or battle fatigue – as combat wounds, not signs of weakness. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, Amos’s Army counterpart, has been especially outspoken. “PTSD is not a figment of someone’s imagination,” Chiarelli lectured an auditorium of skeptical sergeants last fall. “It is a cruel physiological thing.”

The challenge facing Amos and Chiarelli has been convincing an undermanned force that PTSD and traumatic brain injury are real injuries that demand immediate care. The generals also have run up against an overburdened military medical system that is short on doctors and reluctant to take risks with new types of treatment.

“I have been asked . . . should you have figured this out sooner?” said Amos, who was recently tapped to be Marine Corps commandant.

“Yeah, we should have. But we didn’t. It has been evolutionary.”

Read the rest of this story and watch interviews with Staff Sgt. Ownbey and Gen Amos:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/nation/mental-wounds/TBI-1.html