Monument Mountain, Massachusetts
That’s how bad the mental wreckage of war apparently got for former Marine Sergeant Edward S. Passetto.
On May 12, authorities said the Pittsfield, Mass. man’s body they found halfway down Monument Mountain in western Massachusetts was his.
James Taylor sang these mountains, amid winter’s snow, “seemed dreamlike on account of that frosting.”
But there were no dreams post-Afghanistan for Sergeant Passetto.
The Berkshire Eagle informed us of his passing:
PITTSFIELD — In Afghanistan, U.S. Marine Corps Sgt. Edward S. Passetto saved the lives of two men in a helicopter crash that killed 16 civilians at Kandahar Airfield in 2009. Risking his life, Passetto ran toward the fiery wreck and pulled the injured men — two of only five who survived — to safety.
After coming home to Pittsfield in 2011 after a medical discharge, Passetto was now a veteran battling post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and depression, according to a fellow Marine and Passetto’s own letters and statements.
Passetto spent the last two years “in limbo,” struggling with Veterans Affairs over his disabilities claim, he wrote. He had gone into debt, lost jobs, fallen behind on bills, relied on the GI Bill “to survive,” and “lost my wife and son over my issues both financially and medically,” he wrote…
On Sunday, authorities confirmed that the 28-year-old Pittsfield man’s body they found halfway down Monument Mountain in Great Barrington on Saturday morning was Passetto’s. His death, apparently, was a suicide.
Marine Sergeant Edward S. Passetto
He said that he had waited 730 days for disability help from the VA. He was laid to rest last Friday.
In a bizarre twist of fate, Passetto had written a letter to the Eagle that was published unknowingly by the paper after he died. The paper reported:
“I am a proud veteran who has served in both Iraq and Afghanistan and was medically discharged from active duty in 2011,” Passetto wrote. “I returned home, and no one noticed. So I went on with my life, filed my papers with the Veterans Administration [sic] and started the waiting game. The same waiting game hundreds of Berkshire County veterans are struggling through along with millions of vets across America.”
Passetto called on the county to “come together and write our congressmen, our senators, to push for the change needed to help every veteran who comes home and the families of those who do not. I feel ashamed at times to be an American who has given seven years of my life to a country that cannot even give five minutes of theirs.”
There are few reader comments posted to the flurry of articles surrounding this Marine’s death in the northeastern corner of a nation at war for more than a decade. His Legacy.com page has dozens.
On Monday, local attorney Rinaldo Del Gallo III published an op-ed column in the Eagle about Passetto, and his mother, Patty, an old friend. It delves into local Indian lore – Sergeant Passetto came from Native American stock — before cutting to the chase:
Patty tells me it was not a fearful leap, but a quiet step. Patty insists, “He did not leap. He just stepped into the darkness. He did not see where he was landing.” She feels it and just knows as a mother would.
You can read Edward’s open letter to President Obama on Patty Passetto’s Facebook page. It is the story of a war hero who was getting the run-around from the VA for more than two years with no end in sight. He was told he could not have his claim expedited because he was not homeless.
Patty was quite upset about the handling of her son’s death. The Great Barrington police did not let her see the body. She told me on the phone, and wrote on her Facebook page, “As his mother, I watched as he came into the world and as his mother I should have seen him after his exit.”
The Eagle’s editorial page — for whom the late Roger B. Linscott won a Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for, among other things, an editorial that decried the “lunatic pursuit” of the war in Vietnam — weighed in on Sergeant Passetto’s passing:
The flag-waving and speech-making that erupt when America goes to war evaporate as the war drags on and fades into the background of life in the United States. Similarly, the soldiers who fight those wars — particularly the recent wars that don’t end with victory parades — fade into the background as well upon their return home. The government that is so quick to send them to war is far less responsive when it comes to providing them the help they need to adjust to civilian society. Some returning veterans find that they can no longer keep suffering and waiting.
And so at least one jumps, off a mountain, to his death. So sorry we let you down, Sergeant Passetto.
h/t Candis McDonough