Veteran Suicide Rates Highlight Heroes' Tough Battle at Home

Veteran Suicide Rates Highlight Heroes' Tough Battle at Home

Lee Hill Kavanaugh


The Kansas City Star

Jul 01, 2008

June 29, 2008 - Cara Davis knew her husband was still at war.

In the night, he would yell out his name — Dwayne D. Davis! — followed by his rank and serial number. He'd shout that he would never be taken hostage. Four times he tried to choke her because, in his nightmares, she was al-Qaida.

She knew what she had to do.

As gently as she could, she told him: I think maybe you have that disease, that post-traumatic stress thing. I think maybe you need some help.

"We talked about it," she recalled. He had never told his buddies. "He said he was afraid if he did, the other soldiers would call him a coward."

Finally, the pain was too much.

In December, a year after he got out of the Army, he asked for help. He spent 30 minutes talking with a psychology intern at a Veterans Affairs hospital. He told how he felt edgy and had trouble sleeping. He told about his rage and depression, his fatigue, his difficulty with crowds. He told about keeping a gun under his pillow and carrying a blade everywhere he went.

He had cleared the first hurdle, taken the first step.

But he never took a second.

Instead, two days after his 30th birthday, the Raytown native and Army veteran of four tours of war — two in Iraq, one in Afghanistan, one in Kosovo — became part of a grim litany of veteran suicide statistics.

Each day, 18 veterans kill themselves, according to the latest estimate from the Department of Veterans Affairs. No firm numbers are available, such as breakdowns of veterans' suicides by the decade in which they served. There's no unified nationwide system to track veterans' deaths.

But 18 suicides each day translate to more than 6,500 deaths a year — and 21 percent of all U.S. suicides. Veterans make up about 8 percent of the U.S. population.

Now, with the fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq lasting longer than World War II, the number of troops returning home with some form of mental illnesses is increasing.

On April 22, Sgt. Davis came home after an 80-hour week in an Oklahoma oil field. He'd had car trouble. In a rage, he grabbed a rifle and shot out the windshield of his wife's car outside their Elk City, Okla., home. Then he asked where his handgun was. She had hidden it earlier.

When she looked into her husband's normally crystal-blue eyes, she shuddered. They "just looked black," she said. She ran outside and hid in the backyard bushes. Before police arrived, she heard one shot.

And knew.

Her husband had killed himself.
go here for more
http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/ArticleID/10547