The True Cost of Blind Patriotism: Despair and Veteran Suicide

Team Rubicon veterans are heroes showing up after disasters to help survivors. They also lost two members to suicide.

Marine Clay Hunt another after combat casualty
April 2011
Marine Clay Hunt became another after combat casualty when he took his own life. By all accounts, Hunt did everything experts say he needed to do. He went to the VA and got help. He talked about having PTSD openly, meaning the stigma induced silence was not a factor. Hunt went even beyond that and got involved trying to save the lives of others with PTSD. Even with all of this including an informed, supportive family, Hunt lost his battle after battle.

And Neil Landsberg.

From Facebook
May 2013
Team Rubicon mourns the loss of a veteran, volunteer, and brother. Neil Landsberg, a former Combat Controller in the United States Air Force, was an active Region 3 team member. As an Air Force Special Operator, Neil completed multiple overseas combat deployments. When he took off the uniform he volunteered at Walter Reed and served as a role model for many TR volunteers around the Washington, DC area. Neil is remembered by his teammates and fellow volunteers as a “total stud”.

This is why it makes it all the more difficult to announce that Neil took his own life last week. He leaves behind many friends at Team Rubicon who will carry on his name and spirit through service.

One of the founding members of Team Rubicon wrote an article in the Huffington Post that caused me to leave this comment.

"No amount of counseling can dispel the gnawing sense that one sacrificed for a bogus cause." but that is not why they are willing to risk their lives. In the end, they all do it for each other. Most wars were started for "bogus" reasons but the government risking lives is not the same as the young men and women risking their lives for someone else.

The worst thing the military did was push the CSF training causing most of the damage.

Suicides went up after they started to "address" suicides and PTSD. The results are more military suicides-less troops and more veterans doing the same.

The military breaks them physically and emotionally so they can do what they have to do but then fail at putting them back together to live better lives afterwards. The reasons why wars are started are one thing but the reasons they serve are another.

The True Cost of Blind Patriotism: Despair and Veteran Suicide
Huffington Post
William McNulty
Co-founder Team Rubicon
January 13, 2014

Why does a veteran take his life every 65 minutes?

Some veterans have always suffered post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), though it has not always had that name. Today, PTSD is better understood and treated than it has ever been. Why, then, is suicide so much more prevalent in young men and women who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan when compared with the general population?

One of the most characteristic and debilitating symptoms of PTSD is depression. But there is a qualitative difference between traumatic-stress-induced depression and existential despair. Despair is the fundamental lack of hope and complete inability to see meaning in life. I believe depression is not the distinguishing characteristic of those vets who kill themselves -- there are many depressed people who are not suicidal -- it is despair.

Why are those who have served in America's last two wars so afflicted with this crippling malady?

Veterans of many previous wars suffered the lasting after effects of being embroiled in bloody, terrifying combat. But too many of the veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan are mired in a despair that is rooted in the amorphous nature of these conflicts. A fog has clouded everything about these wars; from their start to their inconclusive endings.

Much effort used to be expended trying to explain that fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan would ensure the freedom of future generations of Americans. That was a tenuous proposition when it was first advanced. It seems so utterly implausible now that no one is even trying to defend it. Where does that leave the young man who went through hell in Iraq in the name of liberty for future Americans? What does that say to the young woman who believed her sacrifice in Afghanistan would have an enduring legacy?

No amount of counseling can dispel the gnawing sense that one sacrificed for a bogus cause. From this stems despair -- from a sense that so much of one's life was given for so little purpose. Today's vets do not see themselves as saviors, they cannot identify whom they defeated, they are not certain that they truly liberated anyone, and they fought, at best, a holding action against an ill-defined threat. Progress has been absent.
read more here

UPDATE
Joe Klein of TIME Swampland wrote this

"And he is pissed off, because none of it needed to happen. The rest of us should keep this in the very front of our brains as assorted ‘patriots’–who aren’t really patriots, just ill-informed military zealots–would have us go back into Iraq, or into Syria, or would try to replace the promising nuclear talks with Iran with an unprovoked act of aggression. The rest of us should make it our number one priority as citizens: to stop those who would needlessly shove us toward war."