HUFFINGTON
09.01-08.13
COURTESY OF MIKE MCMICHAEL
INVISIBLE CASUALTIES
of the Deep River, a short drive
from Durham, is filled with photos of Mike in happier times.
“The old me,” Mike said. “I could
see it in my face, a happiness
and some sparkle. Strong innocence. And seeing Jackie’s face,
so happy and innocent of how
bad a man can get after you marry him. And I wanted so bad to
have that innocence again for me
to provide that to her.”
“But I wasn’t the same guy, and
I didn’t understand it,” Mike said.
One day he learned in a phone
call that three of his former soldiers, men he’d been with in battle, had died: one by heart attack,
one in a car accident. The third,
Mike said, died of a drug overdose.
“It broke me,” Mike recalled.”I
was kind of drowning.” Suicide
“was the only thing that was going to make things right. I felt so
worthless, it just seemed like the
right answer,” he said. The plan
was to drown himself in the Deep
River, so swift it once powered
textile mills. He kept fiddling with
the mechanics of it; he’d have to
wait until the river flooded after a
heavy rain and figure out how to
knock himself unconscious.
Mike with
his son on
the day he
left for Iraq
in December
2003.