Truth must be told about Diggers who served and suffered

Returned Australian soldier Jesse Bird, who took his own life.

Imagine being so frantically worried about your son’s mental health that you are moved to write to the Senate about him.

Then, just a few months after pressing the send button on your desperate letter — to which, for the record, you never even received a response — imagine hearing that your son had, in fact, taken his life. And only now can parliament hear you.

That is the situation facing Karen and John Bird, of the Gold Coast. Their son, Jesse Bird, was raised in Queensland, and if there is such a thing as a true-blue Queenslander, he was it: young, fit and booming with charisma. Jesse’s friends called him Big Bird because of the size of him. You could see the dazzling nature of his personality in his smile.

Jesse joined the army in 2007. He was proud to be a member of the Australian Defence Force and believed in the mateship aspect of service. In June 2009 he deployed to Afghanistan, where he witnessed unspeakable horrors, at one point trying to physically hold together the body of another Australian soldier after it exploded all over the road.

Jesse returned to his family in February 2010, but as mum Karen’s letter to the Senate inquiry into veteran suicides said: “The confident young man who went away did not return the same person.”

Jesse was suffering nightmares. He would scream in his sleep, or else he would wake in the midnight hours, get in his car and propel himself down the freeway as he tried to escape the demons.

He could not hold down a job. He had no money. He had started self-medicating with alcohol and cigarettes.

Jesse was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and, according to his mum at the time of writing her letter, he had been trying for 18 months to get assistance from the federal department set up precisely to assist him: the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Karen Bird says the process was like hacking through a “jungle of paperwork”.

“They would put all these obstacles in place, and it seemed to Jesse that the process was deliberately obstructionist,” she tells Inquirer this week. “To us it seemed like they wanted people to give up and go away.”

Jesse filled out one form after another, but the “lack of follow-up and non-existent support” was wearing him down.

Soldier Jesse Bird with friend Carly Lynn.

“It has contributed to Jesse’s mental health,” Karen told the Senate in her letter.

“Jesse has not received any money whatsoever from the department or Centrelink to help him survive. Without our financial or emotional help he would be on the street, or worse.”

The letter was logged by the Senate’s computer. Jesse’s stepfather, John Bird, says they received “one of those emails that acknowledges your submission, but nothing else”.

Jesse’s mental health deteriorated further. Another application for assistance was refused.

By June this year Jesse had just $5 in the bank. The way his mum sees it, he was trying very hard to tell the department he was beaten down and suicidal. It did not accept that. And so he proved it.

On June 27, he took his own life.

With the benefit of hindsight, his mum’s letter to the Senate inquiry looks to be exactly what it was: a cry from the heart of two desperate Australian parents — small-business owners who for 25 years have been employers and taxpayers on the Gold Coast or, as they put it, “lifters not leaners, as Joe Hockey said” — and it fell on deaf ears.

But what good is hindsight? Change is what is necessary.

The Birds lobbied Veterans Affairs Minister Dan Tehan for an inquiry into their son’s death, with recommendations that might actually be implemented.

They describe the minister as “a good man, with a good heart. He met with us three times, including once for three hours.”

But they are concerned that a review into Jesse’s death is being conducted with officials from the department that bungled his case.

“We were after something completely independent because how does the department investigate itself?” says John Bird. “We hope this doesn’t mean that they think we will accept whatever they say. We are not going away.”

The inquiry has produced a draft report, a summary of which has been leaked but not released. The findings are troubling.

It says the department took 192 days to determine Jesse’s claim before finding that his mental health condition, while serious, was perhaps not serious enough.

He told the department he was suicidal, and it did not send a face-to-face team to see him, which it is required to do.

He had been part of a counselling program, but when the first two counsellors quit, he did, too, and nobody followed up.

He lost his claim for permanent impairment despite the department accepting initial liability. He was in severe financial stress, and it would not give him any financial support, despite him being able to demonstrate that he was on his bones. The process made him feel alone, when our veterans should not ever feel alone.

The Birds are very keen for the report, when finalised, to be made public. They don’t want any more secrecy. They have had enough ­silence.

But more than that, they also want to believe what we’re all asked to believe, especially this Remembrance Day: that when our politicians kneel to lay their expensive wreaths and say “Lest we forget” and “we honour the sacrifice of our soldiers”, they are more than just words.