[News] 120 War Vets Commit Suicide Each Week
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Mon Nov 26 16:54:46 EST 2007
120 War Vets Commit Suicide Each Week
By Penny Coleman, AlterNet
Posted on November 26, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/68713/
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: Posttraumatic Stress
Disorder, Suicide and the Lessons of War, was
released on Memorial Day, 2006. Her blog is Flashback.
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/68713/
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