Kathie Costos
December 28, 2014
When the subject of suicides tied to military service comes up it feels more like the impossible dream of changing the outcome. Most of what is going on with military suicides has been going on for so long it is hard to hold onto hope they will finally understand what is behind it, especially when veteran suicides are factored in. The numbers are staggering leaving far too many questions leaders never get asked to account for.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed"
They derived their powers because men and women in this country stepped up for decades putting their lives on the line to obtain freedom and retain it. Congress failed all of them for decades. The wounds are not new. PTSD has been reported under different titles but the lingering effects of war have been carried to the grave. Instead of learning from the past, taking what was proven to provide healing so they can live better lives, failed research projects were passed off as the best thing going no matter what came next.
For starters, Congress should have been demanding answers as to why billions of dollars and a long list of hearings produced such deplorable results. After more was being done, people made money, got promoted, members of Congress got their name attached to bills but never noticed they will forever be connected to massive failures.
There has been a massive deception pulled off by the majority of the members of the press and they didn't even know it. How could they know when they simply reported what they were told, when they were told it to make the news cycle? They didn't think investigating was worth the time to report the truth?
It is a great PR piece but nothing more. Even the author didn't catch what was obviously part of the problem. When you read this part make sure you haven't just taken a sip of coffee. I squirted mine out and have to clean my keyboard.
"So Chiarelli set out to learn everything he could about PTSD and TBI. The task took on even greater urgency a month later, when the Army tallied that 115 soldiers had committed suicide in 2007. That was the most since the Army began counting in 1980 and nearly twice the national suicide rate. Chiarelli’s boss, General George Casey Jr., asked him to figure out why so many soldiers were taking their own lives."
Exactly what happened before and after that is very telling on what Chiarelli learned.
This is from Senator Joe Donnelly's site on military suicides.
Using an updated method of tracking suicides, DoD also announced in the new military suicide report that 475 servicemembers took their lives in 2013.
This total is slightly lower than the 479 total DoD had previously reported.
While the total number of servicemembers who took their lives declined from 522 in 2012 to 475 in 2013, there was an increase in the number of National Guard and Reserve Members who committed suicide last year. The 134 National Guard Members who took their own lives is a record high, up from 130 in 2012. Last year, 86 Reserve Members committed suicide compared to 72 in 2012.
Like most, Chiarelli had good intentions however he failed to figure out what was going on with the "task" he was given. The number of enlisted went down due to sequestration along with the number of deployed with troops pulled out of Iraq. The flip side was more suicides than combat fatalities. In the Veterans' Community, the numbers went up as well.
General Chiarelli’s Brain Crusade
How one Army officer raised the nation’s consciousness about head injuries
Politico
By HOWARD SCHULTZ and RAJIV CHANDRASEKARAN
December 27, 2014
Soon after Peter Chiarelli became vice chief of staff of the Army in 2008, a subordinate showed him a bar graph depicting the number of soldiers determined by the Department of Veterans Affairs to be at least 30 percent disabled. The tallest column was on the far left.
Those are amputations, Chiarelli thought. Or burns.
Then he examined the graph more carefully. Burns were off to the right, accounting for just 2 percent of disabled soldiers. Amputations were in the middle, at 10 percent. The big column, which represented 36 percent of seriously injured soldiers, was labeled “PTSD or TBI.”
Chiarelli was dumbfounded. PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder, is the catchall term to explain the anxiety, anger, and disorientation people can experience after exposure to physical harm or the threat of it. An insurgent attack would qualify, as would the threat of one, which most troops in Iraq faced every day. TBI, or traumatic brain injury, can happen when a soldier suffers a concussion from the blast of a roadside bomb. While some soldiers appeared to recover from concussions quickly, for others the effects lingered for months, or even indefinitely.
What stunned Chiarelli was not just the high percentage but the long-term persistence of PTSD and the aftereffects of concussions. He had been the operational commander of all American ground forces in Iraq. Before that, he’d led an Army division that was responsible for Baghdad. And yet the prevalence of debilitating post-traumatic stress and serious brain injuries was news to him. He had assumed that the stress of a near-miss would dissipate. So, too, would the effects of a concussion. He figured they were no big deal.
“If I had a platoon that lost folks, I had combat-stress teams, and I made sure they were flown to whatever base they needed to go to,” he said. “I knew what my football coach told me about traumatic brain injury: ‘Shake it off and get back in the game.’”
The graph sobered him. As vice-chief, his job wasn’t to focus on war strategy. He was responsible for “the force”—for training and equipping soldiers, modernizing weapons and overseeing the budget, and ensuring the well-being of the half-million men and women in the Army, the second-largest U.S. employer after Walmart. But it also was personal: he had put many of these soldiers in harm’s way in Iraq, and he believed he had a duty to those who returned harmed.
read more here
It will all continue to be a bad dream until the leaders stop being asleep on the job and open their eyes. Otherwise nothing will ever change. Had the reporters dared to delve into the decades of data, they would have not just been asking the right questions but demanding the right answers.
The reports of soldiers coming out of Warrior Transition Units have been around for years but it took a six month investigation, a real investigation, by reporters from the Dallas Morning News and NBC out of Texas to show the entire country how wrong the leaders continued to be.
Once you read this whole article on General Chiarelli, I suggest you read what the attitude was in the Army along with how the PTSD soldiers were actually treated. INJURED HEROES, BROKEN PROMISES
After the news broke this was the result.
Army orders new training for Warrior Transition Units
Texas Congressman Frustrated by WTU Complaints Highlighted in NBC 5 Investigation
This is what reporters should have been asking about.
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