Tragedy at Fort Lauderdale Airport
Estaban Santiago went into the restrooms at the Fort Lauderdale Airport and loaded the
gun he had retrieved from baggage claim. He later told authorities that he aimed for the heads of his victims. After exhausting his ammunition, he surrendered.
Some of those killed in the airport (and identified by friends and relatives) included Olga Woltering: A Georgia resident in her 80s. Terry Andres: A 63-year-old from Virginia Beach. Michael Oehme: Age 57, from Iowa. Shirley Timmons: Age 70, from Senecaville, Ohio.
Given the despicable pandering of U.S. new agencies, a few salacious types of crepuscular, feverish headlines might have emerged: Trump Supporters Call for Immigration Crackdown After Slaughter by Mexican Immigrant or Was Santiago a Terrorist Convert to Islam? or Open Carry Advocates Say Tragedy Might Have Been Averted if Passengers in Fort Lauderdale Airport Had Been Armed!
But Santiago is an American citizen born in New Jersey and he was working as a security guard in Alaska at the time of the attack. In November he reportedly went to an FBI office in Alaska and complained that the government had placed Isis videos on his computer in an attempt to control his mind. By giving this information freely to the Bureau it is clear that he is a deeply troubled man, not a terrorist. BBC World News reported,
Mr Santiago is a former member of the Puerto Rico and Alaska National Guard, according to the Pentagon. He served in Iraq from April 2010 to February 2011, and ended his service in August 2016.
The 26 year old veteran was, in the words of his aunt, a different person, when he returned from Iraq. He received a general discharge from the Alaska National Guard last year for unsatisfactory performance. His brother says he was receiving mental health care but of what type from whom is unclear at the present.
Stardust and Nightmares
In December I read the story of another veteran who nearly lost his career after war-time service. Jimmy Stewart, former squadron commander of the 703rd, came back to Hollywood after four and one half years in the service and fifteen months of combat flying. He was grounded at the end of February, 1945 due to issues resulting from PTSD.
“The guys that flew with him, who told me about the fact that he went flak-happy on a couple of occasions — which means shell shock, battle fatigue, what we now know as PTSD.” Says Robert Matzen, author of a new book about Stewart. “ He wasn’t afraid of bombs or bullets. He was afraid of making a mistake and causing someone to die. That was his endless stress, and that’s what ended up grounding him.”
Stewart was a study in wariness and fatigue by the time he came back to Hollywood, having been unable to keep anything in his stomach other than peanut butter and ice cream. He took a room at Henry Fonda’s house and his only job offer came from Frank Capra. Capra was also a vet who had been away from movies for five years. For both of the men It’s A Wonderful Life was a long shot at getting back into the game. Still, he had to be convinced to play the suicidal George Bailey. He had wanted his first role after the war to be a comedy but the offers weren’t coming. On the set of the movie he fretted openly about the frippery and shallowness of the movie business and acting itself. Matzen credits Lionel Barrymore with setting Stewart straight, reportedly telling him,
“So, are you saying it’s more worthwhile to drop bombs on people than to entertain them?”
Jimmy Stewart went on to give a performance in It’s A Wonderful Life that (from my viewpoint) bordered on terrifying. George Bailey is by turns baffled, haunted and filled with rage. I cannot watch the film to this day without trembling. And though the film was only moderately well-received in its day, it revived his career. He went on to work with Otto Preminger and Alfred Hitchcock to create a body of work that lifted him from footnote to chapter heading in cinematic history.
Chance and the opportunity to heal are not equally parceled out among veterans of war. Clearly it was not a wonderful life for the actor and PTSD (shellshock or battle fatigue) was neither particularly well understood nor uniformly treated with understanding. But Stewart was supported and encouraged by influential and faithful friends. He was in a place in his profession which few had achieved before leaving to fight in the Second World War.
Fit for Duty
The highs in Wonder Valley that June regularly topped 111 degrees Farenheit. I put in my 
miles through the north hills and dunes in early morning or at dusk. I found his gear around six a.m. that day. First came the boots which ran down and empty away from the top of the low hill three miles north of my cabin. I bent to inspect them and looked off to the south. From where I stood the rough dirt road could be traced back to the distant broken asphalt.
Turning north I sighted three duffels down in a dry wash. When I got to them I saw that each had a different name hand-blocked on the canvass in black ink. They were unzipped and both camo and dress bluers were visible making the bags look like gut-zipped fresh kill. I stood to scan the hills around me, wondering what to make of the find. Three marines gone AWOL? Two of the names were followed by PFC and the other was a lance corporal. I called out into the still air, Marine, sound off!
Well, idiot, I told myself, If they’ve jumped fence they’re not going to call back. I started off at a slow jog, thinking to make a grid pattern through the rocky hills. On the opposite side of the hill from where I found the boots lay an empty tacpack. Next to the pack was a journal with pages torn out. Scanning the hill I saw pages here and there, some snagged in the cholla, others rolling lazily in the soft breeze as if in surf on a quiet shore. I began gathering the pages up. As I collected them I was feeling dissonance. I stopped and looked at the journal in my hands. These boys hadn’t gone over the fence but I wasn’t sure something nastier hadn’t happened. I opened the journal, I am the hardest fucking lance corporal in the goddamned unit! I skipped ahead a few days to read, I should just dust myself right now. I fucking can’t sleep, can’t eat. The headaches won’t go away. I looked up from the page. His name was on the cover of the journal and now I called it out, Son, if you can hear me, I’m going to make a grid pattern through these hills. If you can respond, do so now.
For the better part of an hour I ran the hills, working the grid out from where I first found the boots and duffels. I returned to the bags low on water and worried about the lance corporal. In one of the bags I found an aluminum clipboard with discharge papers and personal information. I set them aside and searched the other bags. It became clear that he had borrowed or bought the other duffels and that all the gear was his. I took the clipboard and paperwork with me and ran to my cabin.
Back at the cabin I thought about the journal. I turned on my PC. While it was firing up I opened the medical report. During his first tour in Iraq, the carrier he rode in hit an IED. He was thrown from the vehicle and sustained a head injury and fractures to the skull and arm. After the incident he suffered episodes of depression with suicidal ideation. All of this was noted by the attending physician with the recommendation that he was fit for duty. He had done another tour and was honorably discharged several months before I found his gear.
Once online I found his name on Facebook and sent him a message asking him to respond so that I could be sure he was safe. I told him that I was going to take my four-wheel into the hills to retrieve his gear and that I wanted to know what he would like me to do with that gear. I held back on contacting the Marines or the cops for a complex of reasons not the least of which was my own distrust of authority. But I guess, really, I wanted to give the kid a chance to be alive; to tell me it was just a weird mixup and not to worry; maybe to say he left all of it in the desert to be forgotten along with his time in another desert. I threw on a pair of jeans and drove into the hills.
Over There and Right Here
It’s that feeling that all of this day to day chipping away at life is a sham. To wake up in those cold, black hours before daybreak with an implacable oblivion sitting heavy in your gut; to breathe careful, shallow breaths because breathing deep might somehow loose a scream impossible to explain to your sleeping wife and children- a scream at the ineffable knowledge that life is a meaningless terror.
You are good in a pinch. A broken water pipe. Stepping in to get your sister out of a tight spot with an abusive boyfriend. Crisis of any kind seem to calm you, to slow time. So you find yourself hoping for something to happen. Because this day to day thing makes no fucking sense at all. Some days you want to take the car and drive without any target, city to city or state to state. And that’s better than the days your feet feel like they’re strapped to the fucking bed, a bed that seems to be sunk a couple stories down in a pit of mud.
This isn’t something I want to write about. I am an above average intelligence white male with no obvious disabilities. I am from a working class family. To say that I have had symptoms of something like PTSD embarrasses the hell out of me. Because my WWII vet father who did hard time with 28 years of nightmares from war crimes forbid me ever putting on a uniform. He turned me into a lifelong crank against military intervention of any kind. My old man, who crawled across the bedroom floor like he was back in the Ardennes, who threw my mother across the room when she tried to wake him, who cursed her in German….that guy had a fucking black carnation bouquet of PTSD with ribbons and crepe paper. But me? What does that have to do with me burning every bridge, driving away every friend, subjecting my family to bouts of rage and drunkenness and despair?
For me to talk about this shit with any kind of seriousness is to walk barefoot into a darkened room strewn with broken glass: any step can be a misstep. Because I’m saying (however badly and with no certainty at all) that maybe PTSD is generational. Or it can be. In an interview about his book on Stewart, Robert Matzen says (regarding Stewart’s performance in It’s A Wonderful Life),
There’s a scene in the movie where he questions his sanity and he’s got this wild look about him. That’s one scene that really struck me, watching it on the big screen. And the other scene that always made me uncomfortable, but now means so much more to me, is when he’s in his living room and he’s throwing things and screaming at his kids — and his wife and children look at him like, “Who is this man? Who is this monster?” And that is so reflective of what millions of families faced, looking at these strangers who came back from the war with this rage.
It’s pretty well known that a hell of a lot of those men from WWII never got help. Son, they knew your father was shell-shocked. They put him on a ship and sent him home. When he got off that ship he was expected to step right back into everyday life as if nothing ever happened. My mother wouldn’t let him keep his service .45 or the Luger he brought back from Germany. She was afraid he’d kill himself or one of us. But he never did one hour with a mental health professional in the States. There was a massive amount of shame attached to admitting that kind of need, a stigma. Then too, there was the dissonance of being hailed as heroes. The internal conflict was excruciating. And it ground away at the nerves of everyone who had to live with these untreated symptoms.
My brother once commented on our childhood, it was as if we were each in our own foxhole. In those little post-war suburban houses, or cold water walk-up flats throughout America. In every state and most cities, men thrashed in their beds or sat up hollow-eyed and sleepless or fumigating their infested minds with booze. They howled and battered and lived in an endless hellish fugue of war. And so did their families. No, not every one of them and not every family but enough seeds were rammed into receptive ground so that broken, rootless men like me creeped into the harvest to cause who knows how much damage. Damage to ourselves and to our own children.
So What?
In 2005 I was flying back to California because my mother had a massive heart attack. Somehow I got bumped up to first class. I was seated next to a high-ranking Veterans Administration man from West Virginia. We got to talking and after a couple of scotches he leaned over and said bitterly, Don’t let your kids join up. No matter what the recruiter says they’ll give them – benefits, G.I. bill – it’s a lie. Bush is doing nothing for veterans.
It’s hard to see that anything has changed. How many vets commit suicide now, is it 20 daily? And what of those with PTSD who wait months or years for treatment? What of their families? More funding will go to rebuilding our nuclear arsenal. More to upgrade existing conventional and drone weapons systems. Certainly more parasitic amoral organizations will find ways to live off veterans benefits like the for-profit educational industry has done. But when will we understand that we’re only seeing the first fruits of a cruel harvest?
In the end it was a sad story of petty theft. The lance corporal had gotten certified with a truck driving school that worked with discharged marines. On the night of his graduation he had left all of his gear, including a laptop and cell phone, piled in the back of his pickup truck. All of it disappeared into the hills. The laptop and cell phone weren’t recovered. He thanked me and asked if I could return the duffels to the school which would then forward it to him where he lived with his mother in Idaho.
I wanted to ask him about the headaches. I wanted to find out how he was dealing with the sleeplessness and the thoughts of ending himself. But I couldn’t tell him what I’d seen in his journal. The journal itself I had tucked back neatly into one of the duffels along with the pages the thieves had callously torn out and spread in the hills. I only wished him luck and thanked him for his service.
It remains to be seen whether or not Estaban Santiago suffers from symptoms of PTSD. The reports of his family indicate that his tour of duty adversely affected his mental health. I should have been obvious to the FBI (who initially confiscated his firearm) that he was in need of help. In any event we ought to ask how much was known to those who discharged Santiago prior to his service becoming ‘unsatisfactory.’
And we would do well as a nation to ask what price we have paid and will pay by not providing adequate care for those who have served.
M 