War, vets and moral injury

War, vets and moral injury
Robert Koehler
Tribune Media Services
October 5, 2012

It's not just suicide. It's also drug overdose, car crash -- quasi- or secret suicide, carried out in fearful isolation.

Young Iraq and Afghanistan vets are dying in increasing numbers by their own hands in "a largely unseen pattern of early deaths that federal authorities are failing to adequately track and have been slow to respond to," according to a recent story in the Austin American-Statesman based on a six-month investigation of the causes of death of 266 Texas veterans, out of the 345 known to the Veterans Administration to have died since their return from duty. At least 142 of those deaths were self-inflicted in one way or another.

These are the forgotten dead. Their autopsy reports, the American-Statesman story tells us, "paint a mosaic of pain, desperation and hopelessness among a significant number of Texas veterans." And of course it goes beyond Texas. Similar numbers, similar stories, similar wreckage, can be found in every state.
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