When will the military take responsibility for suicides?

When will the military take responsibility for suicides?

Wounded Times

Kathie Costos

September 6, 2013

My husband spent 17 years as a civilian, 4 years as a soldier with one of them deployed into combat.  The rest of his life has been living in a civilian world with the same hopes, dreams and problems as the rest of the population but unlike the rest, he is a veteran and among only 7% of the population.

He came home with mild PTSD but as time went by, it got stronger and our relationship was pushed to the breaking point more times than I can remember.  I didn’t have a clue what to do in the beginning but I learned from experts writing in clinical books and I learned from mistakes I made.

Families like mine were Americas’ secret.  No one cared. My husband got better but will be on medication and in therapy for the rest of his life.  We lost his nephew to suicide in 2000.  They were not veterans of Iraq or Afghanistan or the Gulf War.  They fought in Vietnam.

Forty years ago when Vietnam veterans came home with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, there were plenty of excuses to not pay attention.  After all, these were Vietnam veterans and just not worthy of our attention.  The only time there were news reports about them was when one of them was arrested.

The truth is, what we are seeing today among the Iraq and Afghanistan veterans was all happening back then.  The fact there is so much available for the new generation and their families is in fact do to the efforts of Vietnam veterans.  They pushed for all the research being done way back before the Internet, Tweets, Facebook and support groups.

Between 150,000 and 200,000 Vietnam veterans took their own lives.  As a matter of fact, they are still losing hope and are the greatest majority of the suicides tied to the military.  They are the majority of the VA claims as well as the backlog.

The ugly, overlooked fact in all of this is things are just as bad now even though the OEF and OIF veterans are getting so much attention.  Veterans’ charities have turned into a billion dollar a year industry.  The Pentagon spent $4 billion from 2007 to 2012 but that is just a portion of the spending done on “prevention” by other departments.  So why did we end up with the deadliest suicide rate on record in the military and higher veterans suicides? Why are there so many attempted suicides if any of what was being done was working and who is paying the price for this miserable outcome?

A study done by Curtin University in Australia took a look at “resilience” building and found “Implications of the review show PTSD prevention techniques are plausible; however, the researchers admit an immediate path to PTSD prevention is a long while away.”  The truth is, RAND Corp found the same thing when they took at look at the over 900 prevention programs, finding two key factors.  The first is, no one can be taught “resilience” and the second was that this training does not fit with military culture. 

So if you really want to know how all of this got so bad and still is, start reading what has been done and then know that no one has been held accountable for any of this so families, well, we blame ourselves. We've been together since 1982 and in those years I have seen far too many suffering while hearing far too many claims and promises the military is addressing it.  So far, no one in the military has managed to explain what the last 6 years have been all about when it is as bad as it was after Vietnam.