News / Military
By Howard Altman / Tampa Bay Times / July 19, 2016
PHOTO: Gavin Long, 29, who served with the Marines in Iraq, killed three law enforcement officers and wounded three others in Baton Rouge, La. (YouTube via AP)
Local experts who deal with troubled veterans caution against drawing conclusions from the military service of the men who carried out the deadly ambushes of police in Dallas and Baton Rouge.
Still, one Tampa veteran said the killings should also spark a conversation on how service members reintegrate into the civilian world.
On July 7, Micah Xavier Johnson, 25, a former Army reservist who served in Afghanistan, killed five police officers and wounded six others in Dallas. Ten days later, Gavin Long, 29, who served with the Marines in Iraq, killed three law enforcement officers and wounded three others in Baton Rouge, La.
The deadly incidents speak as much about those who enter service as it does about what happens during service, in the view of those who work with veterans. Overemphasizing veteran status, they say, unfairly stigmatizes the overwhelming majority of those who served without committing criminal acts later.
“What the public needs to be careful of is, without all the facts, is quickly connecting the dots between a service-connected relationship to a horrendous act,” said retired Army Col. D.J. Reyes, who works with veterans struggling over the transition to civilian life.
Reyes works at establishing links between military service and criminal acts as a senior military mentor and advisor to Hillsborough County’s Veterans Treatment Court, which was set up to get veterans out of a cycle of crime and punishment.
Verifying a link to get a veteran into the program requires a thorough medical diagnosis and a court ruling that a crime was somehow connected to a disability, disorder or condition suffered or experienced while in military service, Reyes said.
At this point, Reyes said, it is unclear if there are connections in the cases of Johnson and Long.
Though both shooters had been deployed, neither was considered to have reached combat status, according to military records. Neither the Army nor Marines would release records of disciplinary actions against them.
Johnson served with the Army Reserve from March 2009 to April 2015. A private first class, he was a carpentry and masonry specialist and was deployed to Afghanistan from November 2013 to July 2014. Among his medals and commendations were the Afghanistan Campaign Medal with campaign star.
The Dallas Morning News has reported that Johnson returned from Afghanistan a changed man after he was accused of sexual harassment in an incident involving stolen underwear.
Long served with the Marines from August, 2005, to August, 2010, receiving an honorable discharge as a sergeant. He was a data network specialist who was deployed to Iraq from June 2008 to January 2009 and earned medals and ribbons including the Marine Corps Good Conduct Medal.
In a video he posted on YouTube a week before the deadly rampage, Long spoke about wanting “to help my people.”
“I love being the buffer between the bully and the victim,” he said in the video, which lasted more than four minutes. “At what point should the Native Americans, who are extinct, at what point should they have stood up?”
Long took to social media and his own website to make declarations under the name Cosmo Seteprena, a self-described “Freedom Strategist, Mental Game Coach, Nutritionist, Author and Spiritual Advisor.”
Reyes said the links he sees between the two shooters have far more to do with relations between police and the black community than service connections.
“Based on what I read, there appears to be a common thread of distrust that certain segments of the black communities expressed against the various police and law enforcement organizations,” Reyes said.
To Scott Neil, a retired master sergeant with the Army’s Green Berets, Johnson and Long represent a mistaken impression about veterans and the struggles they face.
“My frustration is about the narrative of veterans that we are hair-trigger and crazy,” said Neil, who helped create a course teaching law enforcement officers how to deal with veterans in crisis.
The recent police killings play into that narrative, which has been boosted by charities set up to help veterans but who portray them as “helpless, hopeless and broken,” Neil said.
“Even veterans fall into that trap,” he said.
While Johnson and Long are outliers, their actions raise issues that need to be addressed, Neil said.
“There is a big conversation that needs to be had, ” said Neil, who, among other jobs, served as a senior enlisted adviser to the Joint Interagency Task Force at U.S. Special Operations Command in Tampa.
“This is more about reintegration than transition,” he said. “Transition means leaving the military. Reintegration means it is time to become a citizen again.”
Veterans who fail to take that step are more susceptible to joining criminal gangs or seeking out extreme ideology and isolating from friends and family, Neil said.
For Carrie Elk, a Tampa therapist who treats troops and veterans nationwide, Johnson and Long serve as a reminder that military is a microcosm of society.
“The military is a sample of the general population,” said Elk, who runs the Elk Institute for Psychological Health & Performance. “Their service seems to be an extraneous variable in the equation.”
That’s a point echoed by Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook.
“I’m not aware of any information that their military service necessarily played any role in the tragic events that have played out in Baton Rouge and in Dallas,” Cook told reporters Monday. “And in fact you can look at the victims in those instances and they’re people who served in the U.S. military as well.”
When reporters pointed out that veterans were involved in other mass shootings, including the Beltway sniper attacks in 2002 and the 2013 Washington Navy Yard shootings, Cook replied that the military is like other groups.
“We are a very large organization, as you know, with literally millions of people who have served,” Cook said. “Big organizations have, on occasion, people who have done bad things. So we’re not unlike other institutions.”
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