Guest Blog
Do Not Go Gentle into
That Good Night: The Tragic Death of Brian Arredondo
Linda Pershing, with
Lara Bell
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| Brian with Fr. Carlos at memorial for Ales, shortly before Brian's death |
Brian Arredondo never really recovered from his brother’s death
in the Iraq War. When they were kids, Brian adored his older brother Alexander
and tagged along with him whenever he could. They were often seen playing
together in parks and schoolyards in communities surrounding Boston,
Massachusetts, and Bangor, Maine, where they grew up. As teens the two
boys were perfect targets for military recruiters: first-generation Americans on
their father’s side (he emigrated from Costa Rica), working-class youth (Alex attended
a technical high school where much of the curriculum focuses on job training), living
with their mother after their parents divorced when they were young. Promises
of career training, male camaraderie and “becoming a man,” appeals to
patriotism, a $10,000 signing bonus, and funding for college enticed Alex
Arredondo to join the marines, just a month before September 11, 2011.
Brian was distraught and seemed to lose his focus and
motivation when Alex enlisted. Shortly thereafter, he dropped out of high
school at the beginning of tenth grade. On August 25, 2004, a sniper’s bullet to the head
killed Alex during his second deployment to Iraq. Brian’s world fell apart. On the
day Alex was killed, military officials came to his mother’s house in Bangor to
notify the family. Brian, 17 years old at the time, was home alone. He guessed
why they were there, but they wouldn’t tell him the news until his mother,
Victoria Foley, arrived. As they waited around the corner in the government
van, Brian got an emotional call from his father, Carlos Arredondo, who was
living in Florida at the time and had also just been notified about Alex’s
death. Brian became desperate, punching holes in the walls as he paced the
floor, waiting for his mother to get home. After she arrived, Brian tried to
call his father to talk with him again. His distraught stepmother, Mélida
Arredondo, answered the phone and told Brian to turn on the television: news coverage
of a burning van outside his father’s home. Reporters announced that Carlos
Arredondo had set fire to the van and been caught in the blaze. In disbelief Brian
saw his father on fire, rolling on the ground, trying to extinguish the flames.
Carlos lay unconscious in a hospital intensive care, burn unit for two days and
nearly died from the incident. Nine days later, accompanied by two medics, he attended
Alex’s wake, funeral mass, and burial on a stretcher, wrapped in bandages and
with a morphine drip to numb the pain. The story made international news.
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| Arredondo Brothers by Gina Johnson |
The gross inequality between the rich and the poor in our
country define this story. Try to imagine an alternate reality: what if Jenna
Bush, the daughter of George W. and Laura Bush, enlisted in the marines and were
killed by a sniper’s bullet in Iraq?
Imagine her twin sister Barbara struggling with debilitating depression
and taking her own life seven years later. Would Bush and his cronies have been
so willing to invade Iraq and launch a war if their own kids were going to pay
the price? It’s unthinkable, of course, because the Bush twins had so many
other options: Barbara attended Yale, and Jenna was offered a job as a
correspondent on “The Today Show” after she graduated from college. Military recruiters
target rural and lower income youth and first-generation Americans who have more
restricted access to college and careers.
When soldiers die in battle, we tend to focus on the grief of
parents and spouses. Siblings often fall through the cracks. Looking back at
the years since Alex’s death, Mélida Arredondo commented that Brian’s life had
been a “downward spiral” of anguish, depression, and self-destruction. Family
members repeatedly reached out to Brian and tried to get him professional help
for his depression, drug use, and trouble with the law. He accepted his
family’s legal, monetary, and employment assistance but declined counseling.
Instead, Brian put on a good front, smiling broadly and assuring the family
that he was doing fine, or that he had made a new start and would do better in
the future.
In retrospect, it’s clear that Brian was in distress. After
Alex’s deployment to Iraq and subsequent death, Brian started self-medicating
with drugs, which he often hid from his family. With time, his drug usage
became more serious. He pleaded with parents and friends to loan him money,
which they later learned he used to support his drug habit. He began using
marijuana, and then cocaine. After one violent confrontation with the police, Brian
was admitted to Bridgewater State Hospital for psychiatric evaluation in April
2011. The clinical evaluation report noted that Brian admitted to using Percocet
and heroin at least once a day; hospital intake workers discovered injection
track marks all over his arms.
After he was arrested for having an open alcohol container
in his car, reckless driving, and several accidents, the state of Maine took
away Brian’s driver’s license. He became dependent on parents and friends to
transport him, which made working a job very difficult. On occasion he worked
with his father and was employed at a pizza restaurant and as a janitor, but he
never worked for more than a few months at a time. For most of the past seven
years he was unemployed, which only exacerbated his feelings of helplessness
and dependence on others.
This wasn’t the first time Brian tried to kill himself. While
military officials were at his mother’s home, informing her about Alex’s death,
Brian slipped away and ran into the street, looking for oncoming traffic. Later
he told his parents that he wanted to be hit by a car. Still reeling from
Alex’s death, in 2006 he tried to hang himself with an electric cord but failed
when the cord broke. And in 2011, when police tried to arrest Brian on outstanding
warrants, breaking in to the backyard shed while he was sleeping, he raised a
machete and dared them to them to shoot him.
His troubled relationships with young women and problems
with anger management signaled another facet of his distress. Almost
immediately after his brother’s death, Brian became involved with a young woman—perhaps
to replace his close relationship with his brother. Her father didn’t approve,
had a violent confrontation with Brian, and got a restraining order to prevent
him from coming to their home. Their relationship was rocky and punctuated by
abusive and destructive behavior. A second young woman also pursued Brian. There
was jealousy and abuse on all sides. There were multiple incidents involving
interpersonal violence and destruction of property. Girlfriends and parents
called the police, who arrested Brian several times. By 2011, Brian faced a
number of misdemeanor and felony charges, which had escalated in the past
several years. He was scheduled to go to court on December 21, 2011, two days
after he died. His mother recalled that Brian told her that he expected to be
sentenced to a minimum of two years in prison, which probably wasn’t a
realistic assessment. Francis J. DiMento, Jr., his attorney, told us in an
interview that he thought it unlikely that Brian would do jail time for these
offences (Interview, June 7, 2012).
In response to Alex’s death, Mélida and Carlos Arredondo began
to speak out about their experiences. They became peace activists and advocates
for support services for military personnel and their families. Carlos creates
memorials designed to raise awareness about the significance of Alex’s life and
sacrifice, using his military boots and uniform, medals, large photos of Alex
and Brian, and numerous other mementos with personal meaning.[2]
Sometimes he also displays a full-size coffin, calling on viewers to visualize the
real cost of war in terms of individual human lives. Mélida and Carlos are well
known for their activism in the Boston area, where they have lived for many
years. They make it a point to meet with public officials at community events,
sharing with them the stories of their sons’ deaths and advocating for support
services for military personnel and their families. In retrospect, since
Brian’s death they have worried that they didn’t pay enough attention to him, wrapped
up, instead, in their grieving for Alex and their dedication to activism. His
mother, Victoria Foley, sorrowfully recounted that he seemed depressed and
remote in the days before his suicide, and her attempts to get Brian into counseling
were unsuccessful. The boys’ deaths have taken an enormous toll on their
families. The loss has redefined their lives forever, leaving them to deal with
the deep despair of losing two children to the Iraq War.
This tragic series of events is a brutal reminder of the
devastation that war brings: two young sons dead, with parents and family
members left to wade through the unbearable grief, self-blame, devastated lives,
and the narrative of youth dashed to pieces by death and sorrow. Brian never really
accepted his brother’s enlistment in the military or his death in Iraq. In
response, his life became a succession of dangerous actions and disastrous
decisions, sending him down a path to self-destruction. It’s certainly possible
to interpret Brian’s suicide as an expression of hopelessness. It’s also
possible to consider that Brian ended his life as an act of resistance, reminiscent
of Dylan Thomas’ epic admonition to “rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
Perhaps—compounded by substance abuse, problems with
interpersonal relationships, dropping out of school, and troubles with the law—it
was a refusal or inability to accept that the U.S. invasion and occupation of
Iraq made sense. Many Americans willingly accepted, or remained silent, when Bush
and his advisors launched these foolish wars, and as Obama continues them,
increasing drone strikes in the region and ramping up U.S. involvement in
Afghanistan while withdrawing troops from Iraq. Many stood on the sidelines
watching as other people’s sons and daughters—usually the poorest and those
with the fewest options—were swept up in the patriotic fervor, recruited by the
military, and sent off to fight. Now we pay the price of public apathy and
complicity. The deaths of Brian and Alexander Arredondo diminish us all.
[1]
See reports that the U.S. is planning to “replace its direct occupation
both with an army of State Department contractors inside Iraq and a massive
deployment of combat troops in Kuwait” (Ditz, Jason. “US Abandons Largest Iraq
Base: 20 Left.” Antiwar.com. Retrieved June 16, 2012, http://news.antiwar.com/2011/11/07/us-abandons-largest-iraq-base-20-left/). Journalist
Tom Bowman reported that the U.S. continues to supply 15,000 diplomats to Iraq,
“making it the largest U.S. diplomatic operation abroad. Those diplomats will
be protected by a private army consisting of as many as 5,000 security
contractors who will carry assault weapons and fly armed helicopters” (Bowman,
Tom. “No U.S. Troops, But An Army Of Contractors
In Iraq.” NPR. Retrieved June 16, 2011,
[1]
See reports that the U.S. is planning to “replace its direct occupation
both with an army of State Department contractors inside Iraq and a massive
deployment of combat troops in Kuwait” (Ditz, Jason. “US Abandons Largest Iraq
Base: 20 Left.” Antiwar.com. Retrieved June 16, 2012, http://news.antiwar.com/2011/11/07/us-abandons-largest-iraq-base-20-left/). Journalist
Tom Bowman reported that the U.S. continues to supply 15,000 diplomats to Iraq,
“making it the largest U.S. diplomatic operation abroad. Those diplomats will
be protected by a private army consisting of as many as 5,000 security
contractors who will carry assault weapons and fly armed helicopters” (Bowman,
Tom. “No U.S. Troops, But An Army Of Contractors
In Iraq.” NPR. Retrieved June 16, 2011,
http://www.npr.org/2011/12/27/144198497/no-u-s-troops-but-an-army-of-contractors-in-iraq).
In October 2011 White House aides told reporters that
4,000-5,000 defense contractors will
remain in Iraq, and that “a few US military personnel will be based in Iraq
temporarily from time to time, just as they are in
other countries with links to the US
such as Egypt and Jordan, White House aides said. These would primarily be
trainers helping out with new equipment bought from the US, such as F-16
fighters Iraq purchased last month” (MacAskill, Ewen. “Iraq Rejects US Request
to Maintain Bases After Troop Withdrawal.” The
Guardian. Retrieved June 16, 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/oct/21/iraq-rejects-us-plea-bases).
[1] See
Pershing, Linda, with Nishelle Y. Bellinger. “From Sorrow to Activism: A
Father’s Memorial to His Son Alexander Arredondo, Killed in the U.S. Occupation
of Iraq.” Journal of American Folklore
123(488):179–217.
Linda Pershing, Professor, Department of Women’s Studies, California State University San Marcos, Lpershing@csusm.edu
