At about 11 PM one night, I was working my shift at the SPS hotline
desk. A call came in from the switchboard supervisor at the city's
telephone company. The supervisor said she had a man on-line and he
was in a fury. She couldn't handle him. Would I take him? I told her to
let me have him, and he was on.
It took a while to get him down to where he could speak coherently. He
was an enlisted man in from Viet Nam, making his way to the East
Coast. His problem wasn't suicide, it was homicide. He was in a
barroom, he said, drinking and minding his own business. Shortly
before his call, another patron had ridiculed his uniform and his Service.
He had a weapon in his bag and had an almost overwhelming urge to use
it.
A stranger in town, passing through, he felt he'd better divert and talk to
someone. Searching for some means to vent his rage other than assault,
he had, on impulse, picked up the barroom phone and dialed the
operator. He must have come down real heavy on her and her
supervisor; he found himself of a sudden switched to a hotline worker at
the local SPS.
We talked for more than three hours. At the outset he was openly
hostile, demanded to know who I was, and how the hell I had been
loaded on to him. When I told him, he said he didn't know what 'suicide
prevention' was about and wanted no part of it. But he didn't hang up,
and we never hung up on anyone.
In our give-and-take, when he realized he was talking to someone who
had more than a passing knowledge of the military, who could respond
in his jargon and relate to his lifestyle and to his feelings, his hostility
eased off. Other feelings began to surface.
He admitted that he had been deeply shaken and enraged by his
experiences during border crossings into Cambodia, and he still carried
the same, almost overwhelming, anger. Without my bringing it up, he
confided that he'd had intense thoughts about self-injury, even suicide,
and that the feelings had been strongest before taking off on missions.
The rage, and the thoughts of suicide, were still with him and, looking
back at them in calmer moments, he said that he was alarmed by their
intensity. After a while, he admitted, reluctantly, that he might need help.
He said he would think about seeking it out when he got to his
permanent station.
At the close, he was much calmer. He phoned back a few hours later and
told the hotline worker on duty that he was at the bus depot, and would
soon leave for the east. He said to pass the word to me that he was OK.