120
War Vets Commit Suicide
Each Week
By
Penny Coleman
27 November,
2007
AlterNet
Earlier
this year, using the clout that only major broadcast networks seem capable
of mustering, CBS News contacted the governments of all 50 states requesting
their official records of death by suicide going back 12 years. They
heard back from 45 of the 50. From the mountains of gathered information,
they sifted out the suicides of those Americans who had served in the
armed forces. What they discovered is that in 2005 alone -- and remember,
this is just in 45 states -- there were at least 6,256 veteran suicides,
120 every week for a year and an average of 17 every day.
As the widow
of a Vietnam vet who killed himself after coming home, and as the author
of a book for which I interviewed dozens of other women who had also
lost husbands (or sons or fathers) to PTSD and suicide in the aftermath
of the war in Vietnam, I am deeply grateful to CBS for undertaking this
long overdue investigation. I am also heartbroken that the numbers are
so astonishingly high and tentatively optimistic that perhaps now that
there are hard numbers to attest to the magnitude of the problem, it
will finally be taken seriously. I say tentatively because this is an
administration that melts hard numbers on their tongues like communion
wafers.
Since these
new wars began, and in spite of a continuous flood of alarming reports,
the Department of Defense has managed to keep what has clearly become
an epidemic of death beneath the radar of public awareness by systematically
concealing statistics about soldier suicides. They have done everything
from burying them on official casualty lists in a category they call
"accidental noncombat deaths" to outright lying to the parents
of dead soldiers. And the Department of Veterans Affairs has rubber-stamped
their disinformation, continuing to insist that their studies indicate
that soldiers are killing themselves, not because of their combat experiences,
but because they have "personal problems."
Active-duty
soldiers, however, are only part of the story. One of the well-known
characteristics of post-traumatic stress injuries is that the onset
of symptoms is often delayed, sometimes for decades. Veterans of World
War II, Korea and Vietnam are still taking their own lives because new
PTSD symptoms have been triggered, or old ones retriggered, by stories
and images from these new wars. Their deaths, like the deaths of more
recent veterans, are written up in hometown newspapers; they are locally
mourned, but officially ignored. The VA doesn't track or count them.
It never has. Both the VA and the Pentagon deny that the problem exists
and sanctimoniously point to a lack of evidence they have refused to
gather.
They have
managed this smoke and mirrors trick for decades in large part because
suicide makes people so uncomfortable. It has often been called "that
most secret death" because no one wants to talk about it. Over
time, in different parts of the world, attitudes have fluctuated between
the belief that the act is a sin, a right, a crime, a romantic gesture,
an act of consummate bravery or a symptom of mental illness. It has
never, however, been an emotionally neutral issue. In the United States,
the rationalism of our legal system has acknowledged for 300 years that
the act is almost always symptomatic of a mental illness. For those
same 300 years, organized religions have stubbornly maintained that
it's a sin. In fact, the very worst sin. The one that is never forgiven
because it's too late to say you're sorry.
The contradiction
between religious doctrine and secular law has left suicide in some
kind of nether space in which the fundamentals of our systems of justice
and belief are disrupted. A terrible crime has been committed, a murder,
and yet there can be no restitution, no punishment. As sin or as mental
illness, the origins of suicide live in the mind, illusive, invisible,
associated with the mysterious, the secretive and the undisciplined,
a kind of omnipresent Orange Alert. Beware the abnormal. Beware the
Other.
For years
now, this administration has been blasting us with high-decibel, righteous
posturing about suicide bombers, those subhuman dastards who do the
unthinkable, using their own bodies as lethal weapons. "Those people,
they aren't like us; they don't value life the way we do," runs
the familiar xenophobic subtext: And sometimes the text isn't even sub-:
"Many terrorists who kill innocent men, women, and children on
the streets of Baghdad are followers of the same murderous ideology
that took the lives of our citizens in New York, in Washington and Pennsylvania,"
proclaimed W, glibly conflating Sept. 11, the invasion of Iraq, Islam,
fanatic fundamentalism and human bombs.
Bush has
also expressed the opinion that suicide bombers are motivated by despair,
neglect and poverty. The demographic statistics on suicide bombers suggest
that this isn't the necessarily the case. Most of the Sept. 11 terrorists
came from comfortable middle- to upper-middle-class families and were
well-educated. Ironically, despair, neglect and poverty may be far more
significant factors in the deaths of American soldiers and veterans
who are taking their own lives.
Consider
the 25 percent of enlistees and the 50 percent of reservists who have
come back from the war with serious mental health issues. Despair seems
an entirely appropriate response to the realization that the nightmares
and flashbacks may never go away, that your ability to function in society
and to manage relationships, work schedules or crowds will never be
reliable. How not to despair if your prognosis is: Suck it up, soldier.
This may never stop!
Neglect?
The VA's current backlog is 800,000 cases. Aside from the appalling
conditions in many VA hospitals, in 2004, the last year for which statistics
are available, almost 6 million veterans and their families were without
any healthcare at all. Most of them are working people -- too poor to
afford private coverage, but not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid
or means-tested VA care. Soldiers and veterans need help now, the help
isn't there, and the conversations about what needs to be done are only
just now beginning.
Poverty?
The symptoms of post-traumatic stress injuries or traumatic brain injuries
often make getting and keeping a job an insurmountable challenge. The
New York Times reported last week that though veterans make up only
11 percent of the adult population, they make up 26 percent of the homeless.
If that doesn't translate into despair, neglect and poverty, well, I'm
not sure the distinction is one worth quibbling about.
There is
a particularly terrible irony in the relationship between suicide bombers
and the suicides of American soldiers and veterans. With the possible
exception of some few sadists and psychopaths, Americans don't enlist
in the military because they want to kill civilians. And they don't
sign up with the expectation of killing themselves. How incredibly sad
that so many end up dying of remorse for having performed acts that
so disturb their sense of moral selfhood that they sentence themselves
to death.
There is
something so smugly superior in the way we talk about suicide bombers
and the cultures that produce them. But here is an unsettling thought.
In 2005, 6,256 American veterans took their own lives. That same year,
there were about 130 documented deaths of suicide bombers in Iraq.*
Do the math. That's a ratio of 50-to-1. So who is it that is most effectively
creating a culture of suicide and martyrdom? If George Bush is right,
that it is despair, neglect and poverty that drive people to such acts,
then isn't it worth pointing out that we are doing a far better job?
*I say "about"
because in the aftermath of a suicide bombing, it is often very difficult
for observers to determine how many individual bodies have been blown
to pieces.
Penny
Coleman is the widow of a Vietnam veteran who took his own
life after coming home. Her latest book, Flashback:
Post traumatic Stress Disorder, Suicide and the Lessons of War,
was released on Memorial Day, 2006. Her blog is Flashback.
© 2007
Independent Media Institute
Leave
A Comment
&
Share Your Insights
Comment
Policy
Digg
it! And spread the word!
Here is a unique chance to help this article to be read by thousands
of people more. You just Digg it, and it will appear in the home page
of Digg.com and thousands more will read it. Digg is nothing but an
vote, the article with most votes will go to the top of the page. So,
as you read just give a digg and help thousands more to read this article.