Texas symphony silences vet speakers

AUSTIN, Texas (KXAN) - A clash of ideas leading up to last week’s Austin Fourth of July concert and fireworks show, led Austin Symphony officials to cancel plans for veterans to speak at the event.

Symphony executive director Anthony Carroa had already approved a proposal calling for the Homecoming Project -- a veterans’ advocacy group, to display a photo montage on giant screens during the performance.

Carroa had also given conditional approval for two veterans and a therapist who works with the veteran community to deliver short verbal monologues, pending a review of their scripts.

The director didn’t receive the first drafts, though, until just five days before the event and in the usual last minute chaos leading up to such complex events, he and Homecoming Project director Erin Trieb ran out of time to agree on the language.

So, with only one day remaining before the show, Corroa pulled the plug on the speakers.

The director

“I thought some of the material in the monologues,” he said, “were concerning information that was a real downer, in my opinion, talking about taking one's own life. And I know what their mission is all about, but I wasn't expecting (it) to be quite that graphic.”

In particular, Corroa worried about the emphasis in the text on suicides by active-duty troops and veterans.

“It's not that I didn't understand or know what their mission was,” he said, “and I knew that they wanted a forum in order to present this, but it never occurred to me that it would be such a depressing presentation.

“I just couldn't feel comfortable with the text; I just didn't think it was appropriate for young children and people who might possibly be protecting their kids from thinking about these issues.

“We do need to discuss them but there's got to be a different forum and it can't be through the Austin symphony.”

The conflict, though, didn’t end there. With Corroa’s blessing, Trieb and vet speaker Andrew Wade Nunn went to work revising the wording in the script, but the executive director remained unmoved.

“After reading and rereading the edits,” he said, “there was no way that they could make them soft enough to satisfy my concerns about putting this in front of 100,000 people in our audience.”

The advocate

For her part, Erin Trieb, was stunned. She is a freelance photographer with multiple deployments to Afghanistan under her belt, photographing American soldiers and Marines in action.

Not only that, but she also followed some of them home and shot pictures of them trying, and often failing to find their way back into civilian life. When those efforts do fail, the result is often deadly.

“Suicide among the veteran population today is an epidemic,” she said, “and it's at an all-time high. I think a lot of that can be attributed to a decade of war and multiple deployments for many of these service members.

“There have been more active-duty service members who have taken their own lives than there have been those killed in action in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.”

Indeed, Trieb points to often-cited reports in the veteran community that an average of 18 military suicides occur every day.

“To me, those numbers are staggering,” she said,” and the Homecoming Project's mission ties in completely with bringing these issues to light and illuminating veteran and military suicide and talking about it, making it okay to talk about it.

“This situation is a reflection of the stigma that exists in society. You know, ‘Don’t say suicide; it's too depressing.’ It’s like people don't want to hear about that on a holiday.

“So while we celebrate our nation's holiday on one hand, I think that it's completely appropriate to talk about the costs that are involved.”

But Trieb was unable to turn Carroa around, so in the end, she had to accept his decision.

“It was difficult,” she said, “to come back and tell these vets, 'Hey, sorry but your stories are too sad to talk about.”

The veteran

For his part, Nunn admits to being mad when he first heard the news. But the former Army combat medic is dealing with his own post traumatic stress disorder by going to bat for suffering veterans.

Nunn is a photographer and filmmaker who is working on, “The Zeus Project,” a film trilogy chronicling troops on the ground in the war zones, their struggles to work their way back into American society after discharge and the progress they make over time. He is accustomed, in his work, to obstacles.

“It's the same thing over and over again,” he said, “but it takes a lot to disappoint me at this point. I'm so used to it by now.

“If we have 18 service members who are killing themselves every single day, you know, what does that say about us? If they feel so completely unsupported; if they feel their only option left in life is to end their own lives, what does that say about us as a nation?”

As a young soldier on the first of his three deployments to Iraq, Nunn was forced to use his combat medical training quickly.

“Within the first month that I was there,”