The Broken Grunt

An ex-Special Forces soldier/medic named Robert Coffman lay down in his bed sometime around 11:30 pm, March 7th. He placed a .38 revolver to his temple and fired. His body was discovered by police in his dingy apartment the next day. His employers had been unable to reach him. Coffman's behavior, his very persona, had made it clear he was wounded long before the final shot.

I worked with Robert Coffman for eleven years at Central Rappanhannock Library in Fredericksburg VA. I won't pretend to have been friends with Robert, but eleven years is eleven years. Coffman was an aging man, within weeks of turning fifty years old. His years were complicated by a distinct loneliness of being. He had no family that he claimed, yet spoke of abuse and neglect and injustice as if they'd happened yesterday. He had no wife or girlfriend, yet remembered fondly a slender, shiny-eyed Panamanian girl he'd known during his service in the 1980s.

Coffman was a courier, his tasks involving the menial labor of transferring library materials of all kinds, placed in large transport bins, from one branch of the system to the others. The job is of core importance to the function of a healthy library system, menial or not. Coffman had a degree from Mary Washington College, obtained after his military service. He had a keen mind, if a humorless one. He had no definitive endeavors, yet longed to use his degree, his learning, as a professional of some kind. He perceived himself as intelligent and unwavering in his individuality. He considered the social rites and tribal manipulations of his fellow white Anglo-Saxons to be trite and deceptive, and yet he'd go out of his way to offer a good-morning greeting.

Despite his nostalgic memories of his military life, he eschewed discipline. He wore sweat pants at all times, with boots, and baggy over-long shirts designed to obscure a swelled middle-aged paunch. He feared growing old, his medical background conspiring against him as his mind preyed on the pains of age. Prostate issues and alienation mocked him with pointing, twisted fingers. He perceived an end to his life, an end lacking nobility, and self-respect.

Without loved ones, who adored him or were adored by him, he could never escape the insistent tug of mortality. We are buoyed by our relationships. We live for others. Robert distrusted women on a personal level, but he was comforted by their offerings of a hand-knit scarf. His views of women were probably informed by his mother, who by Coffman's account had been a doting, invisible woman full of platitudes. Tortured by his relationship with his father, Coffman seemed to gravitate to men with violence in their pasts, especially other veterans. He had no forum with which to discuss his own experiences, and yet the most periphery discussion of his life made him glow with satisfaction. He had been of use once, in Panama, and his life had deteriorated since. He had allowed himself to falter, had ceased to be relevant, had instead chosen momentary comforts--a good 12-year old Scotch, for instance--to get him through the night.

Robert Coffman struggled with life like a man without hands trying to build a kite. Devoid of the basic tools of any natural life, he could only sift the tangled debris that amounted to a wreckage. Eventually this wreckage ceased looking like a kite to him. The wreckage was just pieces of things, and he had long lost any idea why he possessed it.

If all goes well, Coffman will be buried at Arlington National Cemetery. I don't know if he qualifies for the distinction. The remnants of his life, movies about war and books with photographs of life in the 1950s, are packed and piled into his tiny apartment. A keen mind seeking meaning, Robert collected unrelatable bits and pieces, seemingly useless to anyone else, disgorging from his filing cabinets, clamoring on shelves, impermeably static within a gun safe. Somewhere in the wreckage were probably his most prized possessions. This includes, I hope, his medal for heroism, campaigned by another ex-military man who believed Coffman deserved the distinction decades after the act.

I didn't treat Robert Coffman with the kind of respect he probably deserved. He was an acidic, frustratingly monotonous man, yet also affectionate and loyal. His contrasts were like the sun shining on one side of a massive, seabourne iceberg, and on the other a vast, glassy shadow from a primordial past. Our lives are full of damp moments of regret, but I can only say Robert and I had many times mocked death, and talk of suicide was our way of whistling past the graveyard. We shared a bond of loneliness, the kind of loneliness that seperates an adjusted, silent majority and a gruff, disappointed man with a broken heart. Coffman had let himself down, and had never forgiven himself for it.

As far as I know, Coffman was a decent man who had never intentionally hurt anyone. His strange phobia of germs gave him an expression of wary disgust, and people seemed to be giant amoebas created by children with construction paper. He wasn't sure whether to believe people would infect him, but he was certain that they were infectious. He had no one to turn to, he was too intelligent to be fooled by warmth and generosity, and he had no desire to crave what did not exist.

Robert Coffman was alone two days ago. He was fully dressed, perhaps just preparing to stand up and get ready for bed. Instead he ended his life. I can only imagine his final moments. I feel a cold terror of Coffman's struggle. Or is it merely a realization that we are all bound for a moment, a struggle, in which we are alone one last time?

Go with God, Sgt. Coffman. If such would please you.