The only reason he is alive, says Mike Yurchison, is his girlfriend, Leigh Anna Landsberger. She sits with him through endless waits at Veterans Affairs, whispering that he’s smarter than she is even if his brain is damaged. She helps him through his seizures, and she nags him to overcome drug addiction.
Leigh Anna gave Mike, 34, something to live for after his brother, an Iraq veteran confronting similar torment, died of a drug overdose, an apparent suicide. She talked him through his grief after the suicide of another Army buddy, Jake, the one who persuaded them to move to Dallas from their native Ohio.
“If it wasn’t for her, I’d be dead right now,” Mike told me. “It was her that got me to start feeling human.”
Yet the shadow of war is difficult to escape, and a U.S. veteran still kills himself (or, sometimes, herself) almost once each hour. A few weeks ago, Leigh Anna returned the ring Mike had given to her and called off their engagement. She says she still loves Mike, but she is 26 and full of dreams, and he’s a veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder and a brain injury that, for all his intelligence, leaves him speaking slowly and sometimes sounding punch drunk. He muddles his age, forgets his address, struggles to hold a job, and he isn’t getting much help from Veterans Affairs.
“I want a family, and I want a lot of things girls want,” Leigh Anna told me, crying softly. “There are things I’m giving up.”
Iraq is but a fading memory for most Americans, and Afghanistan may soon recede as well. But for countless others like Mike and Leigh Anna, the war continues and will for decades to come.
The Department of Veterans Affairs says that it has made progress in reducing its backlog in processing disability compensation claims, but critics say that is because of the way it defines the backlog - and many hundreds of thousands of veterans are still awaiting decisions. Likewise, the VA has improved suicide prevention work, but, by all accounts, it’s not enough, so that veterans are dying unnecessarily.
Mike signed up to join the Army a month after the 9/11 attacks in 2001 as an act of patriotism. I first wrote about him two years ago in a column about the apparent suicide of his younger brother, Ryan Yurchison, who had looked up to Mike and signed up for the Army after he did.
Mike periodically visits VA doctors but finds them unhelpful, and he gave up on an addiction program because of a long waiting list. An outside doctor prescribes him medicine to help wean him off opiates (and his family says he is making progress), but he has to pay for the doctor and medicine himself. As for his mental health, he’s not hopeful. “In a lot of ways, it’s getting worse,” he said.
Mike agreed to share his story, despite embarrassment and innate reluctance, in hopes that the attention might help other veterans in need of assistance.
There are no simple answers, of course, but we as a country can do so much more for these veterans and their loved ones. If we have the wherewithal to repair armored vehicles, we can at least try to repair the people like Pvt. Mike Yurchison who served in them.
“My heart is breaking not just for a second son I could lose,” said Mike’s mother Cheryl DeBow, “but for all those we will lose as well due to government apathy.”
