Suicide claims more than your own life

Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
August 13, 2014

Last night I turned on CNN Soledad O'Brien The war comes home just as the group from Save A Warrior was talking about their program.

One of the veterans with PTSD leading the group talked about his own battle to stay alive. He told the story of how he took his glock, made sure it was loaded, put it to his head, then thought about his kids. He put the gun down. With it still within reach, he called the VA Suicide Prevention Hotline and was on hold for 45 minutes. He kept looking at the gun waiting for someone to talk to. He gave up.

He opted for suicide by cop instead.

His story ended with a young police officer asking him to not fight and he didn't. He was taken to a hospital specializing in PTSD.

There are more stories out there just like his and the program on CNN was necessary since we've seen the number of suicides to up faster than after the Vietnam War. The truth is, most of the suicides are still being done by Vietnam veterans. They are also the bulk of the attempted suicides, homeless veterans, divorces, VA claims and the backlog. On the flip side, they are also the ones taking the lead on helping other veterans heal. After all, they are not just an example of what happens when veterans are wounded by this type of PTSD, they show life does not have to end. It isn't hopeless.

I have a lot of issues with the program. For example focusing on the pre-military lives of veterans does a disservice to them. Everyone has baggage from their youth but those interviewed were resilient enough to not just make it into the military, but through combat deployments as well. Evidently they did not have PTSD caused by their past before the military or they would not have wanted to join or been able to.

One of the speakers said that PTSD is not in his head but in his heart. Again, not a great thing to say since the heart pumps blood but the brain feeds everything. Emotions are centered in the brain causing the entire system to react to what PTSD does. They cannot understand flashbacks and nightmares, anxiety or jumping nerves if they do not understand where it is all coming from.

If they do not heal right, do not get the help they need by calling the Suicide Prevention Hotline, do not end up with Police Officers understanding the veteran needs help, then we will continue to lose more than anyone is prepared for.

But it isn't just the veterans suffering. Suicide claims more than just the life of veterans. It claims the lives of those who loved them and those who served with them.

Lives cut short by suicide cut down the futures of everyone else. Everyone blames themselves for what they did or did not do. They play the "what if" game in their own heads running every conversation they had searching for what signs they may have missed. They spend the rest of their lives with the image of the coffin believing they should have done something else.

When veterans opt for suicide by cop they claim the futures of police officers being forced to pull the trigger of their own guns. They have no clue in those seconds who they are facing off with and when they find out, it is devastating. The number one job veterans take in civilian life is law enforcement, so many of the officers are veterans as well. They have to live with taking the lives of their own brothers.

We can attempt to calculated the number of suicides but we don't add in suicides by cop, accidents, drug overdoses or any of the others where a veteran has vanished and their bodies are not found.

We can attempt to uncover the true cost of war, but as we've seen with Vietnam Veterans, that price does not come in a handy timeline. Far too often it is decades later when their stories end.

We will never really know the price of any war because the price paid by those we send and others in their lives never ends.