Swords to Plowshares

This disquieting article is about Staff Sergeant Travis Twiggs, a decorated and outstanding Marine who loved this country and who after multiple combat tours suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The article tells the story of his and his family’s constant struggle to deal with the effects of PTSD and the all to common narrative of military/veterans’ suicide. Every American should know his story.

The New Yorker: The Last Tour, A decorated marine’s war within.

When the Twiggs brothers got to the Grand Canyon, on May 12th, Willard called his girlfriend, a married woman in Louisiana, on Travis’s cell phone. She had to see the canyon someday, he said. “It will make the hair on your arms stand up. It’s that beautiful.” A few minutes later, driving east along the South Rim past a spot called Twin Overlooks, Travis made a hard left and drove his car, a Toyota Corolla with Virginia plates, straight toward the edge of the canyon. There is no guardrail at Twin Overlooks, and the canyon at that point is nearly five thousand feet deep. The Corolla jumped the curb, but it did not take the plunge. It got hung up in a small fir tree, clinging to the Kaibab limestone just below the rim.

“I don’t think there was much field research done,” Ken Phillips, a National Park Service ranger, told me. He showed me a spot two miles west of Twin Overlooks where a man and a woman had driven into the gorge successfully. There was a longer straightaway for gaining speed, and a clearer path to the big drop. Double suicides are rare, and it isn’t always possible to tell if both parties were willing participants. In the case of the couple, Phillips said, witnesses got a good look at their faces as they swerved, and said that both looked determined. It turned out that they were on the run from serious criminal charges.

Travis and Willard Twiggs were not in trouble with the law. Willard, thirty-eight, was a former maritime-logistics specialist in New Orleans. He had been working construction, intermittently, since Hurricane Katrina. Travis, thirty-six, was a Marine Corps staff sergeant stationed in Quantico, Virginia. He was a decorated combat veteran with one tour of duty in Afghanistan and four tours in Iraq. In January, 2008, he had created a minor stir by writing, in the Marine Corps Gazette, an article about his struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder. Publicly acknowledging emotional problems has never been a smart career move in the military, particularly in the Marine Corps. But Twiggs, who was known for his grit and his charm, gave his piece, titled “PTSD: The War Within,” an upbeat ending, emphasizing his recovery, and he soon found himself working with a new unit, the Wounded Warrior Regiment, spreading the word about the treatment and prevention of P.T.S.D. In late April, in that capacity, he met President Bush at the White House. Rather than simply shake the President’s hand, Twiggs bear-hugged him, proclaiming, “Sir, I’ve served over there many times—and I would serve for you anytime.”

Three weeks later, he tried to drive into the Grand Canyon. Witnesses said that the brothers behaved oddly after the crash. They tried to reverse the Toyota out of the tree branches where it was wedged but could gain no traction. They did not want anyone to call for help. One seemed interested only in finding his cigarettes. They put on backpacks, said they were going to continue with their plans, and set off on foot before park rangers arrived. The witnesses said they assumed that by “plans” the two men meant hiking into the canyon, but Ken Phillips believes that the Twiggs brothers just went across the road and waited in the scrubby piñon-juniper forest there while the rangers cleared the wreck.

Beyond the tow truck and the rangers directing traffic, they would have seen the afternoon’s shadows crawling across the canyon’s far walls, picking out the huge, hallucinatory, floridly named formations—Vishnu Temple, Wotans Throne, Ottoman Amphitheatre. It is a landscape suited to an apocalyptic frame of mind. An hour after the last rangers left, while dusk was falling, the Twiggs brothers approached two tourists, who had stopped their rental car to admire the view. A .38 revolver was displayed. The Twiggs brothers got into the car and drove away. Now they were in trouble with the law. Read on…