Another Friend is Gone

June 2, 2006

Namaste All,

My schoolmate and fellow Vrndavan Gurukul Alumni member, Ananda McClure has killed himself. He was a veteran from the 1st Gulf war and the Current Iraq War. He was always very nice and friendly back in our times together as kids in India. I didnt keep in touch with him much as adults but we were always friends. I however was not close enough in social circles or geographically to know that he was going thru such a crisis that would cause him to commit suicide. I pray that Krishna is taking care of him. He remained dedicated to his Vedic upbringing despite much trauma from our Gurukul teachers. In fact the last time I spent time with him was at the Rukmini Dwarkadish mandir in Los Angelos. I ask all to wish him the best he can get in such circumstances. Below is a report from someone who got to know him recently.

Vrndavan

"Ananda was a complex person and in many ways not your typical soldier. Those who knew him realized this. Although an American, he spent his formative years growing up in a monastery in India; his name is Sanskrit for "The love/happiness of McClure." He was a vegetarian and in his younger life he was a boxer and to hear him tell it, he beat the New Delhi boxing champ when he was 14 years old and narrowly escaped with his health when the people who had bet so much money on the champ lost their shirts and tried to take it out on him and his corner partners! Ananda was an amazingly intelligent and generous man and his presence will be missed by everyone who knew him."

Ananda das McClure

BY: ERIC PASSCHIER

May 30, SANTA MONICA, CALIFORNIA — May 15th 2006.

I received a call today from the wife of my friend, Sgt. Ananda das McClure, a Santa Monica resident. She informed me that Ananda took his own life this weekend after what can only be described as a tough battle with war, pain, loss, excessive doctors' prescriptions and the struggle to maintain his humanity throughout it all.

Ananda was a long-serving member of the U.S. army and veteran of tours of duty in both the first Gulf War, operation Desert Storm as well as two additional tours in the current conflict in Iraq. He was an ordinance disposal specialist and worked doing the most dangerous of jobs, clearing mines and disarming roadside bombs to make it safe for other soldiers and leading his column through Iraq during the invasion in 2003. He returned home to Los Angeles after being wounded by small-arms fire during the first of his two most recent tours of Iraq. It was at this time that I met him, where he worked as a bouncer at Renee's, our local Santa Monica bar. Always ready with a joke and a firm handshake and a smile, Ananda was a fixture there even after he stopped working there.

After some time off to recuperate from his wounds, he was re-deployed for his third tour of Iraq. As the violence in Iraq spiraled out of control and our soldiers were increasingly viewed as occupiers instead of liberators, Ananda's Humvee was attacked in what is increasingly glossed over in our newspapers and television media as "another IED attack," killing most if not all of the occupants of his vehicle and leaving him with severe back injuries. He was returned back to Los Angeles without many of his closest friends who had perished in that attack, to face a daunting rehabilitation regime and back surgery to try to correct his injuries.

During his time home, he was prescribed all kinds of medicines by doctors who apparently give them out like candy, seemingly unaware or uncaring of any cross-contaminatory effects between the medicines. Vicodin, Prozac, etcetcanti-inflammatories, anti-psychosis drugs. I visited him in his hospital bed after his surgery and was proud of his strength to go through a surgery which was very painful and the aftermath of which was sure to be years of physical therapy and after which even if successful, he would never be able to run again and would only able to walk short distances with the aid of a cane. Standing for long periods of time and even simple movements were painful and even if entirely successful, he never would ever get all of the feeling back in his foot.

I was amazed when I visited him at home and saw the sprawl of prescription medicines all over his room. Seemingly overflowing out of every corner of his bedroom were bottles of pills, the same bedroom where he would eventually take his life. I remember him pointing out to me that one of the bottles contained a warning in the instructions that the medicine, "had been known to cause suicidal behavior in laboratory tests." This medicine was prescribed and dispensed to my friend, Ananda by his doctors who according to their Hippocratic Oath should first do no harm.

I believe he was as shocked about the instructions with this medicine as I was to hear about it and said that he refused to take those medicines. However, there were so many other medicines that he was prescribed that he told me that he had a fear that had he taken them all, he probably would have gone crazy and done something drastic. Apparently it wasn't even necessary to take all of them for that to happen. Is it really prudent for someone to be prescribed 20 or 30 different medicines at a time? Did any of his doctors take the time out to read up on any cross-contaminatory effects of his existing prescriptions and pause for a moment before determining if another prescription might just push him off the cliff? Apparently not, or not closely enough.

To lay the blame squarely with his physicians is patently unfair. Ananda was a complex person and in many ways not your typical soldier. Those who knew him realized this. Although an American, he spent his formative years growing up in a monastery in India; his name is Sanskrit for "The love/happiness of McClure." He was a vegetarian and in his younger life he was a boxer and to hear him tell it, he beat the New Delhi boxing champ when he was 14 years old and narrowly escaped with his health when the people who had bet so much money on the champ lost their shirts and tried to take it out on him and his corner partners! Ananda was an amazingly intelligent and generous man and his presence will be missed by everyone who knew him.

His stories of what he witnessed in Iraq were harrowing and unlike many vets' steel reserve, he did not seem to hold anything back in his descriptions of what he had witnessed to me. When I asked him if he thought our presence there would change anything, he was ambivalent. The seemingly random death and destruction he saw every day would be difficult to look past to find meaning in a war whose beginnings are so suspect and whose execution and continuance is so brutal.

There are many questions why Ananda took his own life. Was he tortured by what he had seen and done in Iraq? Was he overcome with feelings of guilt for surviving when so many of his friends did not? Did he blame himself for this? Was he in too much physical pain caused by his irreversible injuries sustained in combat? Were his medicines a contributory factor?

We will never know and never have any answers because he did not leave us a note. He did not tell us why. PTSD or post-traumatic stress disorder is such a clean-sounding acronym, but it does not and cannot possibly detail the horror that these men and women returning from hell must face for the remainder of their lives. A good third or even half by some estimates of the returning veterans face what Ananda faced. Santa Monica has already had four suicides by soldiers returning from Iraq and will have more.

How many more of my friends will I have to lose? My young cousin spent a year in Baghdad after getting called out of the reserves while a student. He has been back in the States for about a year, but faces the prospect of going back at any time for any length of time, and for what? So we can say that we've, "stayed the course," even if that path was the wrong one to begin with? So that we can continue to refuse to admit that our policy there is wrong, a mistake that needs to be corrected?

This war must end. We must withdraw our troops. We're never going to motivate the Iraqis to take the reins of their country if we keep giving them unlimited, open-ended military support. At some point, we have to say, "Enough is enough," and give them control. Our withdrawal should remove at least some of the support that certain factions of the rebels there enjoy that are prolonging this conflict, although I understand that there are many factions bent on making sure the Iraqi government fails. One thing that's becoming apparent is that the longer we stay there accidentally killing civilians, the less likely the emerging government is to have the support of the Iraqi people if it is seen to be a puppet regime of the US and UK. The bravery of our soldiers is not suspect, but rather the policy fails that is guiding them.

To date, we've lost nearly 2,500 killed and another 20,000 wounded so terribly that they are unable to return to active duty with the prospect of another five or ten years of this? That's to say nothing of those who return with the deep psychological scars of seeing the senselessness of seeing people blown apart in war and participating in the killing and in many cases spending the rest of their lives coming to terms with their own role in the slaughter. How many more of our friends and family have to serve three, four or more tours and how many do we have to lose before this ends? 50,000? 100,000?

His service will be at 1:00 pm on Saturday May 20th at the corner of 20th and Arizona with a wake at Renee's on Wilshire to follow.

I love and miss my friend, Ananda das McClure. May he rest in Peace. May no one else have to go through this.

Eric Passchier

Santa Monica

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