A father’s suicide, two wars and a son’s reckoning

Beginning in 2004, Redmon, now an editor for USA Today living in Woodstock, embedded with U.S. troops three times to cover the Iraq War, barely escaping death in the war’s single deadliest attack on a military installation. Moments like that were when he felt closest to his father, who flew on 300 combat missions in North Vietnam.

Credit: University of South Carolina Press

Credit: University of South Carolina Press

In the process he came to recognize the physical, psychological and emotional toll war must have taken on his father, as well as the importance of practicing self-preservation while bearing witness to trauma.

Redmond spoke to the AJC about his memoir in a phone conversation last week. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

After his death, you destroyed your father’s suicide note, which ended with the sentence, “Tell the kids I love them.” How do you feel about that action now?

At the time I was grappling with really difficult emotions and was just devastated by what happened. So, I was feeling a mixture of anger, rejection, deep pain and confusion as a 14-year-old. I didn’t know how to respond. We don’t have the capacity at that age to understand how to react in those situations. Burning the letter was part of that. I was acting out of anger and frustration. … I try to give myself grace … I don’t know if I regret it. I wish I did have it to look back at because I’d be able to fill in some more gaps, perhaps, if I had the full letter.

On your first trip to the combat zone in Iraq, you were in a mess tent in Mosul when a suicide bomb detonated within 50 paces from you, killing 20 people and injuring 70 others. What do you recall from that moment?

It was so jarring. It either knocked the tray out of my hands or I dropped the tray out of fear. I felt it radiate through me. … I turned around and see this fireball burning the top of the tent. At the time I didn’t know what it was. And these soldiers are running toward me and out an exit behind me. I snapped out of it and just followed my instincts. I ran the heck out of that tent, and we took shelter under these concrete blast shelters outside the tent. I felt kind of foolish because I couldn’t fit in, there were so many people inside, I was kind of half way in and half way out. And I decided I needed to go back in and do my job and report on what had happened there.

Credit: Jeremy Redmon

Credit: Jeremy Redmon

It wasn’t your only brush with death. You write, “Nearly being killed somehow made me feel more alive.” Can you elaborate on that?

In some of the close strikes that I had, I was filled with adrenaline afterward. Colors were sharper, sounds were more intense, all my senses were elevated. I felt in some ways like I could keep working for days. And I didn’t sleep after some of these events like the suicide bombing for some time. I was just driven by this dose of adrenaline I was getting.

That is kind of an alluring experience, but I also recognized how really dangerous that is to become enamored by that experience and wanting to come back to it. And it made me wonder about it with my father, these close calls that he had over North Vietnam. … Did he feel more alive? Did he become, in some ways like I did, enamored with the adrenaline of nearly being killed and surviving it? I wondered about that.

You write that those close calls made you feel closer to your father, but you also recognized that by returning to Iraq and continuing to endanger yourself, you were repeating family history.

By the end of the third time I was done. I was just exhausted. And I felt really that my luck was probably going to run out. I was so fortunate at that point. I had a 5-month-old daughter when I left for the first time and I regretted being away from her and from my wife. I just felt in retrospect how dumb or selfish it would be if I were seriously hurt or killed doing this and what that would do to my family and how would they carry on.

Credit: Bita Honarvar

Credit: Bita Honarvar

In your quest to understand your father, how has your opinion of him changed?

I have admiration for him and respect and more understanding and empathy for why he did what he did. And I’ve often thought, what would I do in his shoes? … In many ways I understand why he … took his own life — it was to not cause any more pain to a family that would have to care for him. He was deeply debilitated. His career in the Air Force was over. He was in extraordinary pain. Early on my view was that it was a selfish act, but what I’ve come around to is it was a selfless act, a brave act on his part.

IF YOU GO

A Cappella Books presents Jeremy Redmon in conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Hank Klibanoff — “Tell the Kids I Love Them”


7 p.m., Sept. 15. Free. Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, 441 John Lewis Freedom Parkway, NE, Atlanta, Georgia 30307. acappellabooks.com.

Suzanne Van Atten is a columnist for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She may be reached at Suzanne.VanAtten@ajc.com.