HUFFINGTON
09.22.13
INVISIBLE CASUALTIES
couch in someone’s house.
“I thought, ‘We gotta get the
Navy to release him.’ That’s what
I’d been praying for since I found
out what he was doing there. It
just kept getting pushed back, the
medical board. He’d say, ‘Dad,
they take forever,’ and I’d say,
‘Josh, it’s gonna happen, we will
get you home.’”
“When I looked him in
his eyes that morning,” Don
said, “I thought, we have to get
him home.”
On Feb. 26, Joshua was taken
by ambulance to the Sentara Bayside Hospital emergency room
in Virginia Beach, complaining
of panic attacks and chest pain.
In the hospital’s record of that
visit, the section on “drug use”
is marked “no.” He was given a
prescription anti-anxiety drug,
Ativan, and sent home with a
handout advising him to “use the
Ativan as needed for anxiety ...
avoid caffeine, benadryl and other over the counter medications.
Avoid alcohol.”
Ativan is a benzodiazepine,
a common antidepressant to
which Joshua had become addicted, according to Navy medi-
cal records. Its effects are magnified by alcohol.
Two weeks later, in early
March, Joshua came home for a
quick visit. He admitted to Emily that he was doing heroin. She
was furious, reminding him that
when their mom was doing heroin he said he’d never do it. They
had a big fight; Joshua smashed
the car windshield.
When Emily told her dad that
Joshua was doing heroin, he was
horrified. “I thought, the Navy
isn’t helping us,” Don said. “How
could he be passing his drug
tests?” But he knew he had to
do something. On the morning
of March 15, he called a friend,
a drug abuse counselor. He said
he didn’t want to make things
worse between Joshua and Emily; could the counselor talk to
Joshua without mentioning the
heroin? She agreed.
Hours later, Leslie called with
her frantic warning, setting in motion the flurry of final calls.
‘DROP THE SHAME’
Joshua’s former commanding officer, Cmdr. Gary Leigh, came to the
military funeral in Wilmington,
where Joshua lay in an open casket. Leigh bent over and tenderly